From Brazil to the NFL… and back? Santos dreaming of homecoming

Cairo Santos is a step closer towards a dream Sao Paulo homecoming

Cairo Santos finds he can often stroll into a Chicago shopping mall or airport without frenzied detection, such can be the veiled life of an NFL kicker. Step foot in a Brazilian shopping mall or airport, and it is a different story. A different world. 

On the sport-enthused shores of Latin America, he is the Sao Paulo rockstar and football’s Samba-entrenched beacon of green, yellow and blue at which the NFL’s third-largest market bows down.

Santos entered the league as the first Brazilian-born player in history in 2014; nearly a decade on, ‘frenzied detection’ threatens to become an understatement in the event of a homecoming that just increased in likelihood with the NFL’s announcement they will play a game in Brazil in 2024.

“I think it would be like a dream coming true,” Santos tells Sky Sports NFL. “You dream of Brazilians seeing and experiencing it in person, it is the ultimate reward for all their love and passion for the game.

“I don’t get recognised that often here. But when I come back to Brazil they recognise me a lot more, which is shocking to me because they only see me on TV when I’m wearing a helmet most of the time – how do they recognise me?

“But because Brazilians love to get to know their players and athletes they are always following me. Just their passion for the sport but also the desire to, like I said, want to get close to this experience in any type of way. I just really hope it is the Bears who can play over there, I would love to be part of history.”

Santos embraces the Brazilian sporting stereotypes with pride as the soccer-aspiring free-kick maestro who would later stumble across a natural home on a *different* football field.

Childhood in Brazil had entailed him and friends setting up Coca Cola cans roughly three feet apart to form goals in the street, between which they would imitate the stars of the Brazilian soccer team.

“You played until the car comes but even the cars would go around us just to let us keep playing,” Santos laughs. “We would use chalk to draw a goal on the sides of walls of houses, somebody would play in goal and we would just take shots with an old ball and in bare feet or flip flops.

“That was what the majority of Brazil was like, the lifestyle of kids involves playing on the street and kicking a ball in whatever the capacity. As they say, we are born to play soccer.”

Santos was afforded an early exposure to American culture long before the NFL came calling, his late father’s job as a pilot seeing him travel back-and-forth between the United States almost every year from the age of five to 15 following the family’s relocation to Brasilia.

Even then, American Football was yet to make its impression on him. It was soccer, always.

“We were fortunate to have a small grass soccer field in our house, I would line up chairs on the field like it was a wall and just try to bend free kicks right and left,” he recalls. “I remember watching Juninho take free-kicks and obviously Cristiano Ronaldo at the time was using the knuckle ball.

“I just tried to rip the balls in my backyard. And I think that started to develop a powerful shot. I remember going to soccer practices and the coaches would stop shooting drills and say to the team ‘watch this kid’ and my shot would just be like a missile.

“My mum would give me a hard time because I would constantly launch balls over the walls of our house and have to knock at the neighbours – that’s why I became a kicker, because I was always shooting over the crossbar!”

Santos cites the 1998 World Cup as his first real memory of soccer, while explaining how his father would show him VHS videos of Brazil’s victorious 1994 campaign.

“Ronaldo was kind of around my time, the country would stop everything to watch him, or Kaka, or Adriano, or Roberto Carlos,” he explains. “As I got older Neymar and I are similar age so I’ve been able to follow his career, and I remember going back to Brazil to watch Flamengo play and it was his last match for Santos.

“My favourite player ever is actually Frank Lampard, I loved that he would score goals from midfield. I’ve got a signed jersey from him in my office back home!”

Santos, who continues to follow Chelsea from afar, moved to St. Augustine, Florida as a foreign exchange student at the age of 15 with a view to improving his English. He had only intended to stay for a year, only for America to become home.

His first memory of gridiron had arrived only a year earlier when he came across Super Bowl XL between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks while flicking through the channels on TV, at which point he had not even realised there was a kicker on the field.

Soccer remained the dream upon arrival. Friday night high school football would swiftly deviate the course.

“I knew football was the No 1 sport, but I never thought about playing it, obviously I’d always had a small frame as well,” he says. “I would go to watch games with friends from the soccer team and it’s like a big tradition, so I remember going every Friday and started to understand the cultural impact of football.

“I eventually noticed there was a guy that kicked the ball, and friends explained that there was somebody who just runs on, kicks the ball, doesn’t get touched the majority of the time and scores points, and said I should try it.”

The next day Santos took his soccer boots to school and stayed behind for practice – ‘three steps back, two to the side, swing and see how you can do,’ being the instructions.

He was nailing 50-yard field goals with ease. At which point he heard one of the coaches ask another “who is this kid?”.

“He’s our new kicker,” was the reply.

“We just kept kicking, kicking and moving further back,” he says. “The coach explained to me how I had the talent to go and play at college and get a scholarship if I kept developing, which lit up a bulb in my head. It sparked an interest in me and I’m glad I stuck with it!”

Perhaps the trickiest part of the transition was the job of explaining to a Brazilian family he was trading in free kicks for field goals.

“My mum said ‘absolutely not!’ and I had to show her videos of the sport,” Santos laughs. “She says ‘no, you are not going to break your leg’ and I had to explain that the kicker just kicks and doesn’t get touched.

“She was hesitant but her and my dad were very supportive. My dad was very into sports and was so excited about it, they booked a flight to come from Brazil and watch a game, and after that my mum was a little more calm after seeing it.”

Santos is in the middle of his 10th season in the NFL, across which he has spent time with five different teams after signing with the Kansas City Chiefs as an undrafted agent. He is currently four seasons into his second spell with the Bears having established himself as starter after managing just 20 games across three campaigns between 2017 and 2019, a fluctuation somewhat representative of a kicker’s notorious ups and downs.

St. Joseph Academy, where Santos had attended, was modest in size. It called on a tireless campaign to garner college attention, the lengths to which he went in order to put himself on the map setting the tone for the no-quit career that has ensued.

“I would film unedited videos of me just kicking like 15 or 20 field goals and emailing schools non-stop,” he says. “Every day I would get a response to say ‘very impressive, but we aren’t interested’.

“You kind of realise the importance of taking opportunities and executing. I then played in a high school game and kicked 51 and 55-yard field goals for school records, and sent the video to a college.”

He got a call from a coach, who wanted to know if the kicks had been off the ground or, like a lot of high school kickers, off a tee. Santos had always favoured kicking off the ground; maybe that was the Brazilian in him.

Interest came in from Georgia Tech, Jacksonville and Miami (OH) before he eventually committed to Tulane, where by the end of 2012 he had won the Lou Groza award for most outstanding placekicker in the nation after converting 21 of 21 field goals.

“It put me on the NFL map, so it’s really important to create opportunities like that for yourself for yourself,” he continues. “When they come, you have to be ready to capitalise, and that’s how big things can happen.”

Could Santos get his Brazilian homecoming?

Big things are in the process of happening at home, where a Santos-friendly fanbase are primed to amplify the league’s global presence with a true Brazilian spectacle come next season.

Sao Paulo will serve as the host for one of five international games in 2024, alongside three London games and one in Munich, Germany. Now for the anxious wait to see if Santos and his Bears will be those playing at the Arena Corinthians.

“My excitement really extends from the excitement of the Brazilian fans, the fans of NFL and ever since my name has started to grow from when I was in college,” said Santos. “I notice people cheering and following me as the first Brazilian in the NFL and I love it.

“We are very passionate fans in Brazil, and it doesn’t matter what team I’m on, I get messages from fans in the stadiums with opposition jerseys on saying ‘we love you, Cairo’.

“They have been begging for this experience, and now the NFL gets to experience Brazil. It’s the dream of so many millions of Brazilians.

“I expect the crowd to be singing songs and to be loud for every play. It’s going to be epic.”