Culture
Dani Alves – from 43 trophies to four years in prison
Dani Alves, who was this morning sentenced to four and a half years in prison in Spain after being found guilty of sexual assault, was, until very recently, one of global football’s golden boys.
An exuberant, technical right-back, he was a major part of the Barcelona team that set new standards in the European game between 2008 and 2016. He played 126 times for Brazil and won 43 titles across his 22-year playing career — an astonishing number that makes him the second-most decorated footballer in history. Only Lionel Messi, his former team-mate at the Camp Nou, has more trophies to his name.
That success, coupled with a relentlessly upbeat public persona, made Alves a hugely — almost universally — popular figure. It goes some way to explaining why his hearing, which took place over three days in a Barcelona courtroom earlier this month, was labelled “the trial of the year” in certain sections of the Spanish press. Despite its voyeuristic undertones, that epithet did capture just how spectacular Alves’ fall from grace has been.
On December 9, 2022, Alves — 39 at the time — was on the bench as Brazil played Croatia at the World Cup in Qatar. Exactly six weeks later, he was arrested by Catalan police, accused of raping a 23-year-old woman in a private bathroom at a Barcelona nightclub on December 30, 2022.
Those accusations have now been upheld by Catalonia’s High Court of Justice. “The court has no doubt that the vaginal penetration of the complainant took place using violence,” read a statement released by the court after this morning’s hearing.
Alves has spent the last 13 months in a detention facility some 25km northwest of Barcelona; requests for provisional release were denied because he was considered a flight risk and there is no extradition arrangement between Brazil and Spain. After his prison sentence he will be on supervised probation for five additional years. He was also ordered to pay the victim €150,000 (£128,500; $162,700) in compensation, plus legal costs.
Alves began his senior career at Bahia, one of the biggest clubs in Brazil’s north east. He moved to Spain at 19, joining Sevilla — initially on loan and then on a permanent deal after winning the 2003 FIFA World Youth Championship with Brazil’s under-20 side.
At the start, some questioned whether Alves had the physical strength to compete in La Liga. His interpretation of his position, though, made the doubters reconsider. Alves was technically a defender but defending was not his speciality. He was a free spirit, a de facto winger in the mould of his boyhood idol, Cafu.
Sevilla quickly worked out that they had to harness that energy rather than curb it. Alves was encouraged to get forward, to make use of his speed and skill in the final third. He helped the Andalusians to their first European trophy in 2006, setting up the opening goal in the UEFA Cup final against Middlesborough, and was similarly influential as they retained that title in 2007. A year later, he became a Barcelona player.
His initial eight-season spell at the Camp Nou — he later made a short, largely forgettable return during the 2021-22 season — turned Alves into a superstar. He won six Spanish league titles, three Champions Leagues and 14 other trophies during that time, rarely missing a match. You would struggle to name another full-back who came anywhere near matching his influence and consistency over the same period.
It helped that his arrival at Barcelona coincided with that of Pep Guardiola. The Catalan’s possession-centric approach suited Alves perfectly and revealed fresh nuances in his game. His combination play with Messi in particular was one of the trademark features of what many consider the best club side of the modern era.
Alves, right, won 23 trophies with Barcelona (Shaun Botterill – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
Even after leaving Barcelona in 2016, Alves remained a prominent figure. He reached another Champions League final with Juventus at the age of 34 — “an extra-terrestrial,” Juve defender Leonardo Bonucci called him — and won two French titles with Paris Saint-Germain. When he returned to Brazilian club football in 2019, signing for Sao Paulo FC, 45,000 fans turned up at the Morumbi stadium to welcome him.
That he never quite replicated his success at club level with his national team was probably to be expected. Alves played for Brazil during an extended period of flux and, bizarrely, only became a regular starter during the latter stages of his career. He would have captained the Selecao at the 2018 World Cup, only to be ruled out of the tournament due to injury. He did wear the armband the following summer, however, leading Brazil to a Copa America win on home soil.
Alves’ attitude — chirpy, cheeky, apparently carefree — arguably won him even more admirers than his ability. A little personality can go a long way in a sport as overwhelmingly self-serious as football, and the Brazilian always seemed determined to take his onto the pitch with him rather than leave it in the changing room.
Over time, Alves leaned into this persona, becoming a full-time cultivator of his own image. He dabbled in modelling, released a single and embraced social media. He seemed to a have tambourine or drum in his hand whenever he stepped off the Brazil team bus. He turned his description of his own character (“good crazy”) into a catchphrase. Whenever he signed an autograph, he drew a smiley face inside the capital D.
Alves played for PSG between 2017 and 2019 (Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images)
It has become a rite of passage for footballers to publish long first-person pieces on the Players’ Tribune website. Alves has contributed two of them: one about his modest upbringing and another reflecting upon the pain of missing out on the 2018 World Cup. “Dani Alves is not going to the World Cup,” read one emblematic line, “but he is still one happy motherf*cker.”
Later, when he moved to Sao Paulo, the same website produced a seven-part documentary about Alves’ life. In one episode he talks at length about his iconoclastic fashion sense, mugging at the camera in a series of designer jackets. In another, he discusses his relationship with music. Episode three is about Alves reconnecting with his two children from his first marriage. Its title is The Family Man.
That strand of Alves’ reputation now lies in tatters along with all the others.
Earlier in February, the High Court of Justice of Catalonia heard testimony relating to Alves’ “slimy attitude” from the victim’s friend, who had been present at the Sutton nightclub on the evening of the incident. While the victim’s statement was delivered in private, her testimony — previously reported by The Athletic based on evidence from earlier hearings — gave a detailed account of Alves holding her against her will in a toilet cubicle and penetrating her without her consent.
Alves was sentenced to four and a half years in prison (ALBERTO ESTEVEZ/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
This morning, the court upheld that version of events, concluding that Alves had “abruptly grabbed the the complainant, threw her to the floor and, preventing her from moving, penetrated her vaginally, despite the fact that the complainant said no, that she wanted to leave”.
In a statement, the court said that “injuries to the victim (made) it more than evident that there was violence to force the victim to have sexual relations”, and that “the accused subdued the will of the victim with the use of violence”.
The defence lawyers plan to appeal the decision.
The emphatic nature of the verdict, however, means that it will be hard to look at Alves in the same way ever again.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
-
New York5 minutes agoGunman Who Killed Baby in Brooklyn Was Targeting Her Father, Police Say
-
Detroit, MI35 minutes agoHow these Detroit farmers are fighting for neighborhood food security
-
San Francisco, CA47 minutes agoS.F. hospital stabbing analysis confirms Mission Local reporting on security lapses
-
Dallas, TX53 minutes agoIt’s a big week for restaurant openings and closings in Dallas
-
Miami, FL59 minutes agoCain, Kushner launch South Florida JV with plans for Edgewater rental tower
-
Boston, MA1 hour agoMBTA Green Line trains out from Kenmore to Boston College on B branch through April 30
-
Denver, CO1 hour agoNuggets vs. Timberwolves | 3 keys to a Denver win in Game 3
-
Seattle, WA1 hour agoThe Honorable Brandon Lee Gowton Picks for Seattle at #32 | Field Gulls