Athletico 100 years: Julião, the Skull

The editorial product I’ve been waiting my whole life for is an album of stickers from Organized Fanatics The Fanatics from the 1980s. Since I started going to the stadium, seeing the myriad of fantastic people in our fans was as cool as the game. For me, it was living with one of the gangs from the movie “Warriors”.

In this landscape of luminous beings stood out Julius Caesar Sobota, Julian. The layout guy. From the front line. Hairy blonde like the bands metal hairjeweled with skull necklaces hardepoxywith sinister tattoos on his arms, something rare even among “malaria” in those days.

He was the one who lit the fireworks on the lawn. He was in the images of goal celebrations in remote places. He was the one the opposing fans hated. The icon of our people.

I watched ecstatically as he took the little piglet into Couto Pereira, an image immortalized in graffiti at the TOF headquarters. I remember my astonishment when I saw him credited as “Devil, Atletico fan”, in a Globo article about our start in the 1991 championship. That was exactly his public image.

In the stands I saw him mature, lose his hair, become religious, call the fans to gogó and become the president of TOF. A complex and paradoxical figure who transcended his own destiny by being elected representative of the skull in the municipal parliament, an unprecedented platform in local politics.

A big step and a strong step in your life. It’s been ten years since Julião has set foot in Baixada, but I heard that he intends to return in 2024. We hope so. Contradictions aside, Julião da Caveira is an intangible athletic asset. For him, one of the fans’ slogans is valid: “F¬#*- @* who doesn’t like it”.