The national game merely reflects the mood in a divided nation which is going to the polls with very little faith in the power of democracy

Look, cards on the table: I don’t know for certain, and nor do you, whether Flávio Bolsonaro – the man widely tipped to become the next president of Brazil after Sunday night’s election – really did steal an island from Richarlison. There are lawyers involved, claims and counter-claims, and in any case, adjudicating land ownership disputes between right-wing strongmen and Tottenham reserve-team strikers lies very much beyond this column’s spectrum of expertise. It’s why, for example, this newspaper took no official position on the well-publicised battle between Rodrigo Duterte and Vincent Janssen over that Polynesian isthmus.

According to Richarlison, a few years ago he purchased an island off the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro, and has the documentation to prove it. Richarlison says Bolsonaro tried to buy it from him, and when he refused a lawyer named Willer Tomaz simply turned up and annexed it. “These guys took the island without spending a penny, as far as I know,” Richarlison claimed in an Instagram video that has been viewed more than 31 million times. Tomaz has accused Richarlison of lying, arguing that he has a public deed registered at the notary’s office. Bolsonaro, for his part, has denied any connection with the island in question and described Richarlison’s intervention as “politically motivated”.

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