Among the Sorios who appear in the chronicles of the twentieth century, there is one who carries the surname far from Italy and then, for two curious seasons, brings it back. His name is Wilson Sorio, born in Brazil in the late 1930s, a professional footballer in Italy in the second half of the 1950s, in a provincial city that in those years was a small, surprising powerhouse of Serie A: the SPAL of Ferrara. His story is a footnote in the great novel of Italian football, but it is a meaningful fold in the history of the surname and deserves a dedicated entry.
Brazilian origins
Wilson Sorio was born in Guarujá, a coastal town in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The date of birth is uncertain: the historical archive of the Italian Enciclopedia del Calcio (edited by Dario Marchetti) gives 12 February 1937, whereas the Italian Wikipedia entry records 12 February 1939. The discrepancy remains unresolved in the public sources: one of the two may be a typographical error, or there may have been — as often happened at the time for South American players arriving in Europe — an administrative correction at the moment of transfer. The 1937 date appears the more plausible, given that it comes from a specialist Italian reference work with access to SPAL’s club records.
Guarujá is an island — the Ilha de Santo Amaro — facing the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the port of Santos. It is a land of working-class football and commercial ports, geographically part of that great São Paulo conurbation which, in the same period, was launching Pelé at Santos FC. Wilson Sorio grew up in a Brazil that was becoming conscious of its own footballing talent, even though the Brazilian national team would not win its first World Cup until 1958, by which time he was already in Italy.
His first professional club was Jabaquara Atlético Clube, a Santos side founded in 1914 by dockworkers and labourers of the area, historically tied to the port’s working community. Jabaquara was — and still is — a second-tier club within Paulista football, but in the 1950s it played a significant role as a nursery for Brazilian professional football. Wilson Sorio played there during the 1956–57 season, before making the leap to Europe.
Arrival in Italy: Paolo Mazza’s SPAL
In 1957 Wilson Sorio joined SPAL of Ferrara in Serie A. To grasp the significance of this, it is worth recalling what SPAL was in those years. Under the visionary chairmanship of Paolo Mazza — a football man who became legendary in Ferrarese memory, to the point that the municipal stadium is now named after him — SPAL was a provincial club that had managed the remarkable feat of establishing itself permanently in the top flight of Italian football from 1951 to 1964, a “school” that launched Italian talents and stocked itself with carefully scouted foreigners. In those years Ferrara welcomed Argentines, Brazilians, Germans, Hungarians, Danes, Swedes and a Turk: a small provincial League of Nations that lent prestige to the city of the Este.
Wilson Sorio fitted into this flow of foreigners as one of the first Brazilians in the club’s history, preceding by a few years Carlos Heidel Feresin and Carlos Cezar de Souza, who would arrive in the early 1960s. He was an interno — a now-obsolete term denoting a linking attacker, what we would today call a number ten or second striker — playing in an offensive but not central role.
The Serie A seasons: 1957–58 and 1958–59
Wilson Sorio’s Serie A debut came on 19 January 1958, in Atalanta–SPAL 0–0. He was twenty or twenty-one years old, depending on which birth date is correct, and found himself playing against opponents called Inter, Milan, Juventus and Fiorentina. His first season (1957–58) closed with 9 appearances and 1 goal — modest figures, but not insignificant for a debuting foreigner taking his first contact with Italian football.
The second season, 1958–59, was the one of his fullest expression: 21 appearances and 5 goals. Five goals in a 1950s Serie A campaign was a respectable haul for a non-starting attacker in a provincial side. That year SPAL finished mid-table, and Wilson Sorio contributed to the cause.
After the 1958–59 season the traces of Wilson Sorio in the Italian sources grow fragmentary. The archive of the Enciclopedia del Calcio records for the subsequent years only “ND” (Not Available), which suggests that the player left SPAL — probably returning to Brazil or moving to minor clubs not documented by Italian sources. The fact that the Italian Wikipedia states that Wilson Sorio “played two seasons in Serie A with SPAL” is consistent with the Enciclopedia del Calcio data: two effective seasons in the top flight, 1957–58 and 1958–59, for a total of 30 appearances and 6 goals.
The historical frame: Brazilians in Italy in the 1950s
Wilson Sorio’s story is part of a broader and more significant phenomenon: the first wave of Brazilian footballers in Serie A, decades before the great stellar migrations of Ronaldo, Kaká, Adriano and Thiago Silva. In the 1950s, several South Americans arrived in Italy who, in many cases, were Italo-Brazilian oriundi or who exploited regulatory loopholes to be regarded as Italian. SPAL was one of the clubs that distinguished itself in this policy of low-cost international scouting, applied intelligently by chairman Paolo Mazza to offset the limited resources of the Ferrarese club compared with the great clubs of the North.
Wilson Sorio was never a star. He won no trophies, never wore the shirt of the Brazilian national team, was never called up for the World Cups of 1958 or 1962 that Brazil won with Pelé, Garrincha and the rest. He was one of those many footballers of solid technical quality but discreet destiny who passed through Italian football in the post-war years. And yet his presence is documented, his matches were played, his goals — six in Serie A — are in the official statistics of the Federation.
A curious onomastic coincidence
There is one aspect worth underlining, because it touches the heart of this project. Wilson Sorio is a Brazilian, and his surname — Sorio, identical to the one rooted in Vicenza and Verona — does not descend in a direct line from the Venetian Sorios documented in this research. But it almost certainly descends from them collaterally.
Brazil, and especially the state of São Paulo, received between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a massive Venetian immigration: peasants dispossessed of the lands of the Triveneto, driven from the countryside by the post-unification agricultural crises, who left in hundreds of thousands between 1880 and the First World War, and again after the Second. They were taken in by the coffee fazendas of São Paulo, by the emerging working-class neighbourhoods of Santos and Guarujá, by the colonisation territories of Rio Grande do Sul. From them descends a significant portion of today’s Paulista population, and from them come Italian names that can still be heard in Brazilian footballing chronicles: Costa, Rossi, Bianchi and — precisely — Sorio.
Wilson Sorio, born in Guarujá, is therefore almost certainly the son or grandson of Venetian emigrants, probably from Vicenza or Verona, who landed in Santos between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. When in 1957 he made the reverse journey and arrived in Italy to play for SPAL, in a certain sense he came home — not to the homes of his ancestors in Gambellara or Verona, but to Italy nonetheless, the country where his surname had been born centuries earlier. A small historical symmetry that, for the site you are reading, weighs perhaps more than the six goals he scored in Serie A.
What happened next
The Italian sources have no firm information on his life after 1959. Wilson Sorio is mentioned in the archives of SPAL and the Enciclopedia del Calcio for his two Ferrarese seasons, but he then disappears from the radar of Italian football. It is not clear whether he returned to Brazil, continued his career in lower divisions, or stopped playing altogether. The most up-to-date Brazilian genealogical databases may hold information on his family and later life, but they fall outside the sources consulted for this research.
What remains is the record: two seasons in Serie A, thirty or so matches, six goals, a Venetian surname that returned to Italy after crossing the Atlantic one or two generations earlier. A small, dignified trace of the surname Sorio in the book of post-war Italian football.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia entry “Wilson Sorio”; the historical archive of the Italian Enciclopedia del Calcio edited by Dario Marchetti; the Wikipedia entry “Ars et Labor Ferrara” for the SPAL of Paolo Mazza; Statscrew and Worldfootball statistical archives for SPAL seasons 1957–1964; documentation on Venetian emigration to Brazil.