By Zach Lowy
Long considered one of the top football commentators in Brazil, Bertozzi disappeared from social media and TV broadcasting from May 21 to July 10 in order to seek mental health treatment.
He’s back now with his family in São Paulo, demonstrating why he is one of the top voices in the game and building a footballing trajectory that has been percolating ever since 1986, when he watched people paint the streets yellow and red for the FIFA World Cup, and when he started attending Atlético-MG matches with his grandfather at five years of age.
“I’m from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, and 1986 was the year my grandfather (a season ticket holder) started taking me to the Mineirão stadium to watch several Atlético matches, and I fell in love with sports in a general way,” stated Bertozzi in an exclusive GBC interview.
“We had this huge opening of doors in the 1990s, which was the advent of the Internet, and which allowed us to communicate with people all over the world. It was a great opportunity for me to meet people who shared this passion with me, whether it was football or communication.
So that allowed me to start communicating with people from other parts of Brazil and the world, and we had the idea to create a newsletter about football. This newsletter became a website called Footbrasil, and that was my first place where I started writing about football.
I entered university in 1999, at eighteen years old, and at that time, I was already writing and editing for FutBrasil, so it was an important period of professional experience for me. At the same time, I was already involved with an Atlético fan site that covered games at the stadium.”
“I already had that day-to-day experience of going to the games and covering them. In 1999, Atlético reached the final of the Brazilian championship, so I covered practically the entire campaign that year, as well as the Copa Libertadores in 2000.
So I was already experiencing a bit of the day-to-day life of covering events at the stadium, and throughout my time at university, I was already working, in a way, with football. After I graduated, created my own website called Futebol Europeu com Br, which was only meant to cover European football.
This opened other doors for me and led to my first invitations to participate in television programs, initially as a guest, until I started participating in the first broadcasts of Copa Sudamericana matches. And in 2009, I received an invitation to commentate on games on ESPN, which is where I am to this day.”
After graduating from the Centro Universitário de Belo Horizonte in 1999 and eventually transitioning from Brazilian to European football, Bertozzi was able to earn regular broadcasting gigs with Canal FX and BandSports as well as an editorial job with Revista Trivela.
He finally got his big break in 2009 after joining ESPN Brasil, where he has worked a number of different competitions like the UEFA Champions League, Copa Libertadores, Copa do Brasil, and World Cup.
Similarly to the likes of Glenn Davis and Max Bretos, Bertozzi was able to make his mark for the worldwide leader in sports, and he’s remained an everpresent thanks not just to his commentary work, but his podcast Futebol no Mundo, which recently reached 500 episodes, as well as Mundo F, the Brazilian equivalent of ESPN FC, which airs every afternoon on ESPN International.
“Since I have a show at three in the afternoon, I wake up around 9 a.m. because I don’t go to bed that early, and we start chatting with the show’s production team via WhatsApp to understand what the day’s topics will be and which games we will cover today.
Since we don’t broadcast the Champions League, it might be difficult to get images if we’re covering it. We’re trying to figure out what’s most interesting for us to bring up for discussion over an hour and a half of the program, so a good part of the morning is already spent discussing within the program’s group, trying to figure out what the afternoon will be about?
Once you’ve figured out which game to watch, be that Arsenal or Manchester United or another team, you’ll watch the game again to perhaps pay more attention to certain things, to bring something into focus for the debate, and that’s what I usually do.”
Although he’s spent his entire life in Brazil, Bertozzi has travelled to Spain to commentate on a 2010 Champions League match at the Santiago Bernabéu between Real Madrid and Milan, whilst he also travelled to Morocco for the 2013 FIFA Club World Cup, where he watched his boyhood club compete against the biggest clubs on the planet in Morocco.
That same year, Bertozzi co-authored the book Nós Acreditamos: Campeão Libertadores with Mário Marra and Mauro Beting, which delved into Atlético’s successful 2013 Copa Libertadores conquest, their first and only title since the club’s founding in 1908. 2014, meanwhile, would see him cover both Italy and France during the FIFA World Cup, covering a total of six matches in Brazil.
Bertozzi has earned praise from the likes of Rod Underwood and Kevin Egan for his commanding presence in the broadcasting booth and his superb storytelling, and it’s why, even at nearly 50 years old, he’s still situated at the zenith of Brazilian football commentators. Bertozzi hasn’t just become one of the most beloved commentators in Brazilian television, but a constant source of knowledge for his 700,000 followers.
“Here in Brazil, you’ll have people who say ‘I don’t like international break because they take players away from my team and the Brazilian national team doesn’t excite me. Here, we have a relationship that is often very focused on the club.
I’m a guy who’s passionate about the World Cup from the beginning of the qualifiers until the last game…international football is another passion of mine. I’m the guy who gets close to the FIFA dates: I like to announce the squads, to follow the games, to pass on that information. I realize that there’s a segment of the audience that doesn’t want that, but I already know what my social media audience expects. When you already know, you start to understand and offer that to the audience.”
