The Murillo Experience

Brazilian jazzlad

Cross-posted from Substack.

For the uninitiated, Murillo is a young Brazilian center back currently playing at Nottingham Forest. He joined in August 2023 from Corinthians and has quickly become a lynchpin of Forest’s defensive line. Prior to this season, he played with a rotating cast of center back partners each acting out their own brand of passable normcore center back play. This season, though, Serbian defender Nikola Milenkovic - who plays exactly like what you’d imagine a Serbian defender named Nikola Milenkovic would play like - has provided a steady presence, constantly heading the ball like the steady thumping rhythm section backing Murillo’s meandering jazz lines.

When it comes to things a center back is supposed to do, Murillo is perfectly serviceable. He reads the game well, he tackles, he makes desperate goal line clearances where he ends up tangled in his own net. Proper center back shit.

It’s what center backs aren’t supposed to do that makes Murillo special. It’s the drag backs to beat the opposition press in his own half, it’s the line-splitting passes, but most of all, it’s the ridiculous attempts on goal.

From meandering dribbles through the opposition penalty area to 70 yard shots from his own half because he thinks, maybe, just maybe, he might have seen the other team’s goalie glance away from the ball for a split-second. The weird thing is, when you watch all these attempts, he’s actually been unlucky not to score one yet. But maybe that’s part of the charm and the intrigue. Like a chord sequence that never quite resolves itself.

For all of modern football’s carefully choreographed offensive movements - with players rotating around the field in meticulously controlled and sterile ways - seeing a 22-year-old try to bash one in from his own half is a welcome injection of the unexpected and joyous. 

You get the sense that this isn’t new for Murillo. It’s not something he decided to add to his repertoire once he arrived in the Premier League. This is just how he interprets the center back role. Maybe he tagged one in from 50 yards on a field in São Paolo when he was 9 and thought, “Yes, this is the way.”

You get the sense too that Murillo has consciously dialed back on these attempts this season. It’s as though some joy-destroying analytics boffin put together a tape over the summer, sat Murillo down, and explained to him that well actually shooting from your own half probably isn’t the best thing to do with the ball in that particular part of the field. So maybe, thanks to a bore with a spreadsheet, peak Murilloshots1 is over.

But you know some part of it is still there. A jazz musician doesn’t suddenly have a change of heart and start playing the boring chords for the rest of his life. One day he’s going to score one of these. And it’s going to be magnificent and fun and pure. And it will probably hasten the end.

Part of what’s great about watching Murillo at Forest is you know it’s going to be over soon. One of these summer transfer windows, some deep-pocketed megaclub, who like his defending but not so much the other stuff, is going to put in a bid that will solve Forest’s Financial Fair Play worries for the next year. And young Murillo will pack his bags, flash a peace sign at Forest’s social media manager, and start furiously Googling on his phone to figure out how the hell the Champions League group stage works now he has to play in it. And that will be that. And, in 10 years time, I’ll be sat in some murky jazz bar telling anyone who’ll listen that Murillo’s early stuff was his best stuff.