Jorginho: Set pieces are like homework - we can’t forget about game’s beauty

It’s ten months since Jorginho returned to Brazil, the country that he left when he was 15 to seek his football dream. “After 18 years in Europe, it was not in my plans,” he says. But when the opportunity arose, the appeal was simple: “I could be still at a high level, and be back at home.” He was the man whose role at the base of midfield was to settle some of Europe’s biggest teams, to give them calm and rhythm. Now he is settled, and enjoying those things in his own life. “The adaptation has been pretty easy for me,” the 34-year-old says. “Because I have the weather that I missed. My family is closer. My friends are closer.” He grew up in Imbituba, a small whaling town in the south, but he has “fallen in love with Rio de Janeiro”, he says, “and I’m just enjoying it.”

He’s part of a talented Flamengo squad which also includes his former Premier League rivals Emerson Royal, Lucas Paquetá and Danilo — they won the Brazilian title last season (with Jorginho playing a part, the Brazilian season finishing in December) and, under the management of the former Monaco head coach Leonardo Jardim, are second in the early running this season.

“It’s a very good level [in the Brazilian league],” he says. “I thought it would not be this hard, you know? [But] I think the thing I’m most enjoying is actually the vibe and the whole atmosphere that football moves in Brazil.”

Jorginho’s seven seasons in England were highly successful, winning the Champions League with Chelsea and never ending a league season outside the top four. But towards the end of his time in the Premier League, he says he felt “the passion inside myself was going a bit down. I thought, I need this fire to keep it alive inside me”. He makes it very clear that he loved his time at Arsenal, and everyone he worked with at the club. He even wishes he had been able to give more back to the fans who welcomed him so warmly.

But “for a football player”, he says, “when you have the hunger, you want to play.” Twenty-seven league starts in his two-and-a-half seasons at the club were not enough to make him feel fulfilled. “I knew that I needed to end the cycle and start again,” he says. He holds no grudge against Mikel Arteta, whom he says “helped me in many ways” but “I want to feel alive and important for the team. When a player is not on the pitch, it’s hard to keep motivated. I felt I needed to go somewhere where I was going to play with joy”.

It’s an interesting remark, especially at a moment where some observers feel Premier League football has become joyless, rote, by-the-numbers, with the emphasis on set pieces greater than ever. I ask Jorginho how he felt about that aspect of the game, a focus of particular diligence at Arsenal.

“It does feel like homework, that’s the reality,” he says. “But when you do your homework and then you have the test, you have a good result. I think people are realising now the importance of set pieces… Why is it a problem to focus and work more on it, when you get the results from that which make everybody happy? But the thing is, if you focus just on this, and then you forget about the football side, then of course, you’re not going to have beautiful football. So I think it’s all about balance.”

Is that balance in danger of being lost? “Maybe, because when you focus so much on results, and you hyper-focus on one thing, which is set pieces now, then maybe the other part, the football, is a bit forgotten, let’s say. But football is always in evolution.”

He still enjoys watching Premier League football, although he can’t get his head around the early kick-off being on at 8.30am in Brazil, when his team-mates are eating breakfast at the canteen in the Flamengo training centre. What does he make of Arsenal’s recent stutters? “I hope they forget about the last few years, because if they think about it, then they could put pressure on themselves,” he says. “I think they just should realise how strong they are and what a strong position they are in.”

Is it a psychological thing? “I think it could be. I don’t think it’s physical. But then you could ask me, what about the mentality can you change? It’s a really hard question. What’s the solution? Because if they knew, they would have done it, we would have done it. I include myself.”

Whatever Arsenal’s current uncertainties, they pale in comparison to the malaise at Chelsea. In the Champions League final in 2021, Jorginho, then 29, was part of a five-man central defensive core for Thomas Tuchel’s side which also included Thiago Silva, then 36; César Azpilicueta, 31; Antonio Rüdiger, 28; and N’Golo Kanté, 30. Now Marc Cucurella, 27, is the oldest regular outfield player in the team.

“It’s quite clear the whole project changed,” he says. “You can see from the contracts, the players they are bringing in, and they are all players with so much talent. But… I think you have two [possible] ways here. ‘I want to get these players [at a] young [age], I want to make them grow together, I want to make them win. And then, I’m going to sell them.’ Or ‘I want to take young players, grow them, make them good, and sell them.’ So what’s the actual project? We can’t guess… I just think time will be the answer.”

When Jorginho signed for Chelsea in 2018 and his mother Maria Tereza visited from Brazil for the first time, the club posted a video of mother and son visiting the Chelsea club shop at Stamford Bridge. It was a beautiful, touching scene: Maria Tereza reaches out to touch a Jorginho shirt hanging on the rack, and is clearly overcome with emotion.

“In that moment, when she saw the shirt, it was a moment of… almost of relief,” Jorginho says. “She was like, ‘Look where he is, what he’s doing.’ She says, ‘He made it’, but I don’t see it like that. For me, [it’s] ‘we made it’ because without her, without my sister, my dad, I wouldn’t have made it. That’s the reality. And seeing her like that… because my parents got divorced when I was really young, and she struggled a lot to raise me and my sister… the achievement is hers too, you know?”

The story of how he put himself on the path to becoming an elite footballer is remarkable. He left home at 13 and moved to Italy at 15 to join the youth team of Hellas Verona. Moving to Europe was hard, he says, but not as hard as the two years before that, which he spent in a youth football training project in Brazil, three and a half hours away from his home.

“Those two years were the hardest ones,” he says, “in terms of infrastructure, eating the same food for two, three days, cold water [in] winter, no lights sometimes. Struggling [with] daily stuff. It was 50 kids together, and two toilets, so it was pretty disgusting.” After that, he says, sharing a dormitory with five other boys in Italy didn’t seem so bad. “But it was hard, as well, because we were way far from family, so I stayed, like, 13 months without coming home.”

Having made his life in Italy, he chose to represent the Azzurri internationally, winning the last of his 57 caps in 2024. He says he felt a deep sense of sadness when he watched his former team-mates lose to Bosnia-Herzegovina in their World Cup play-off, meaning Italy will miss the tournament for the third time in a row.

The situation is all the more astonishing because, in the middle of that run, Italy won the European Championship in 2021, with their win against England in the final being their 34th game in an unbeaten streak which would extend to a world-record 37. How can form and confidence compound so powerfully, then desert you so suddenly?

Jorginho believes they got complacent. “It’s a thin line because you can also be overconfident. When you’re overconfident, you go the wrong way. I believe, in that year, after we won… before we won I feel we were more humble. That’s how I feel. And I [include] myself in that. We [used to] work hard, and run and run and run.” In the qualifying campaign for the 2022 World Cup, “in our head, we were doing everything right. We were controlling games,” he says. “But I think we were a bit overconfident.”

However, if he had his way, they wouldn’t have had to qualify at all. “One thing I don’t understand is how you win the Euro, and you don’t qualify straight to the World Cup. I don’t understand how you win the Copa America, and you don’t qualify straight to the World Cup. Because when you win the league, you go to the Champions League. You win the Champions League, you go to the World Club Cup… in my opinion, you win, and you [should] get through directly, the same as all the other competitions.”

That would help to streamline the fixture calendar, I point out. Is the number of games played by elite players unsustainable? “It’s impossible,” he says. “Here [in Brazil], it’s even worse, honestly. Flamengo plays, what, 70, 75 games per year? [In the calendar year 2025, Flamengo played 75 first-team games.] Plus [more for those] who go to the national team. Which is an amount of games which is absurd. There is no one player who can [play that number of games and] not get injured, it’s impossible.”

Are we guilty of treating players like robots? “Well, we have to be,” Jorginho says. “From the outside, they think we have to be, because they just think, we are well paid, and we need to go [and play]. And we go, because that’s what we are paid to do. But definitely, if there were less games in a season, the show would be better, the quality would go up. It would be just much better for everybody.”

Still, despite that justified gripe, Jorginho is living his best life. These days, Maria Tereza can come and watch him play every few weeks. “She loves football, and she comes to the game, and she tells me off,” he says. “We have discussions about football. She always says, ‘why didn’t you shoot on target? You could have shot that one,’ and I’m like, ‘I couldn’t!’ ” The man who keeps teams ticking is home at last, and it turns out the thing he had been missing most all along was a ticking off.

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