Robinho

As the shirts bearing his name began leaving the club shop and Robinho met his manager, Mark Hughes, for the first time, questions began to be asked about what sort of player Manchester City had got for their record transfer fee.

When he was illuminating Brazilian football with Pele’s old club, Santos, Robinho was considered too physically frail to make it in Europe. Wednesday, however, Pele suggested that the 24-year-old might pose other sorts of problems for Manchester City. “Chelsea are lucky,” said Pele. “This is a boy who needs serious counselling. In my view, he has been badly advised.”

When news reached Brazil of how Robinho had demanded to leave, with the Real Madrid president, Ramon Calderon, claiming that he was in a state of mental disintegration and in tears, the condemnation was swift. “One of the most disgraceful episodes in Brazilian football,” said the Santos president, Marcelo Teixeira.

The current Santos manager, Jose Fernando, said the club were “ashamed of having produced such a player”.

Robinho is a player who requires careful handling. Few people, let alone a 20-year-old footballer from one of Santos’ many dirt-poor suburbs, have had to endure the kidnapping of their mother, as he did in 2004. That, rather than the lucrative transfers to first Madrid and then Manchester, was perhaps the key event in his life.

Robinho is, however, not a team player. At Madrid he demanded near financial parity with Raul and Guti, irritating his then manager, Fabio Capello, by demanding to start games — a policy he also employed with the Brazil national team.

Carlos Alberto Parreira did not appreciate being told that Robinho should be leading the Brazilian attack with Adriano.

Speaking to the Spanish journalist, Guillem Balague, before his last-ditch transfer to Eastlands, the Real Madrid goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, commented that he could understand why Robinho, who had been offered to Manchester United as a makeweight in the proposed £68million transfer of Cristiano Ronaldo, should have craved stability.

“I understand why he is so unsettled,” Casillas said. “He is 24 years old and this summer there has been so much speculation about his future, with talk of him being swapped for Cristiano Ronaldo. You can understand how he felt.

No player wants to have their name constantly cropping up in the papers during the summer, being asked if you are going or if Cristiano is coming?”

Capello’s successor at the Bernabeu, Bernd Schuster, thought his goals worth the trouble. When, however, on the day Real Madrid opened the defence of their La Liga title, he was giving a press conference demanding that he be allowed to join Chelsea, the Arsenal midfielder, Cesc Fabregas, thought Robinho’s behaviour went beyond the pale.

“I would not have liked it if a team-mate of mine did that before an important game,” Fabregas said. “It was not the right thing to do, no matter how bad his situation was.”