Earlier this year, an American sportswriter by the name of Wright Thompson travelled to Uruguay to speak to some of the people who knew Luis Suárez to try to get a better picture of his background. Thompson had heard of one story going back to Suárez’s childhood, of him being sent off in a youth match and head-butting the referee and how one witness had described the victim’s nose bleeding “like a cow”. He wanted to know if it was true. He wanted to find the referee.

Thompson went to Montevideo and spent weeks on the case. Everywhere he went, there was a common theme. “Everyone defended Suárez,” he recalled. He trawled to the end of the internet and he tracked down Enrique Moller, the local attorney who reviewed all youth league disciplinary problems. Moller remembered an incident involving the 15-year-old Suárez, but said he had no details. At Nacional, where Suárez played his youth football, they told Thompson all the records were lost. At the national library, he searched the bound volumes of El País and El Observador but found nothing.

Someone told him the Uruguayan football federation would have records, but they did not. Thompson, writing for ESPN, had the impression people did not really appreciate him, a foreign journalist, asking questions about a guy they felt was persecuted outside their country. They are protective in Uruguay about Suárez, as a couple of English journalists found out last week when they travelled to one of the team’s press conferences in Sete Lagoas, in the countryside near Belo Horizonte. Suárez was due to talk and three security guys, in bouncer pose, made it clear they were required to leave.



Thompson was persistent. Eventually he got the name for the referee, Luis Larranaga, and arranged to meet Martinez Chenlo, one of the sports editors of the Montevideo papers. Chenlo rolled his eyes and told him the same as everyone else: it was garbage. To prove his point, he rang a guy named Ricardo Perdomo, who had coached Suárez in the youth leagues. Thompson recalled Chenlo grinning at him throughout the phone conversation “as if he were getting all the details he needed to prove that the story was made up”. Then he hung up and explained what had happened. Suárez was 16, not 15. Nacional were playing Danubio, another local team, and it was absolutely not a head-butt. He was simply protesting about a referee’s mistake, and who doesn’t do that? Sure, his head hit the referee’s face, but not on purpose. “He fell,” Chenlo said, “accidentally into the referee.”

He fell. One thing you learn about Suárez: he does a lot of falling. “Note how Suárez stumbles after jumping for the ball and how his face hits the shoulder of the Italian player,” one report from Uruguay explained of the assault on Giorgio Chiellini on Tuesday. Óscar Tabárez, the Uruguay coach, told a BBC reporter he had an “agenda” for asking about it. “This is a football World Cup, not about cheap morality,” he said.

Another report, on the Tenfield website, said the only people who cared about the biting were English.

“Their intention was for Fifa to expel Luisito. It would be good if these Englishmen remember how they won the World Cup in 1966 with a ball which was not a goal.”

And on it goes: the brainwashing, the buck-passing, the deception. “There was no single picture to prove there was a bite,” according to El Observador, questioning whether the photographs from foreign news agencies had been altered. El País reminded its readers that the English press “harassed the Uruguayan after the bite on Branislav Ivanovic”. Últimas Noticias noted: “Nobody talks about how Suárez was injured in the jaw and the eye”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uruguay captain, Diego Lugano, describes Luis Suárez's alleged bite during their final World Cup group match against Italy as inconsequential

All of which can make writing about Suárez slightly awkward when we already know the response, the denial, the finger-pointing and the automatic counter-allegation that this is some kind of payback time from a vengeful English press, who would never dream of treating one of their own this way. Someone, perhaps, should tell John Terry that after the avalanche of criticism for his abuse of Anton Ferdinand, coming directly after Suárez’s own racial-abuse case.

Or just imagine if Wayne Rooney had sunk his teeth into opponents on three different occasions. But the default setting will not budge. Suárez’s apologists follow like ants. They have their lines prepared and it is clever, in a warped kind of way. Every article from an English newspaper or website feeds the delusion.

So here is a prediction from Cathal Kelly, a sports columnist for the Toronto Star, in a piece he wrote about Suárez from 15 December 2013. “He will do something insane at this summer’s World Cup – mark it down. Afterwards, he will prompt an ugly transfer saga for a world-record fee.”

Halfway right, and there is plenty of time for Suárez to attempt the second part. His misbehaviour is shocking, but no longer surprising. It is a recurring theme and there will, almost certainly, be a next time.

In Argentina, when Carlos Tevez was on strike from Manchester City, a journalist from Buenos Aires told me how many of his colleagues never reported a single word about it because that would have meant criticising, or at least questioning, a player they revered too much. They pretended instead that he was simply on holiday, which, I suppose, he was.

Suárez is treated in a similar way and maybe that is a part of the problem. At Liverpool, they have redrawn the line just about every time he has crossed it. His story last season was put forward as one of redemption, the narrative being that he had learned from his mistakes and decided it was time to show the world it was untrue to think he was a lunatic or, as Thompson put it, “bat-shit crazy”. What actually happened was that he put it on hold. More fool the people who lapped up all that public relations fluff. “North of his feet,” Kelly also wrote, “there is nothing good about Suárez.”

Not everyone thinks the same. But it is certainly true that a less talented player would have been kicked out of the sport, or removed to its edges, a long time ago. The bite is one thing, but it is actually the pretence that it never occurred afterwards that tells us more. He did the same after the Ivanovic assault: limping, indignant, wearing a faux look of outrage, wanting punishment for the Chelsea player.

Some believe this shows his attacks must be pre-meditated. But what kind of fool would set out in a World Cup match, watched by a global audience, to do this, knowing the consequences?

More likely, it is deeper than that. Toddlers bite. Dogs bite. Normal, fully functioning adults don’t. When it is part of a long, unending pattern, that is when it looks pathological and the perpetrator needs professional help. We can all play at amateur psychology but the evidence here points to someone who is incapable sometimes of processing the things that threaten his ability to win, or score goals, as a normal act of his sport. Suárez takes it as a personal affront, maybe even an act of aggression.

The problem – or one of the problems – is that he is so heavily indulged it actually feels like he has started to believe what he says about it all being the imagination of others. If there is one person around him telling him he needs time with Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist at Anfield, we can be sure there are another 100 or so saying he is absolutely fine, and that it is the rest of the world with the problem.

Now, at the Uruguayan camp, they are trying to make a case that Chiellini made it up, that the photographs were doctored and that the controversy is the work of the embittered English. Perhaps they should look at the front page of O Globo and its “El Loco!”headline. Or how Suárez Bite III is being treated elsewhere.

Instead, Uruguay have adopted a siege mentality that ultimately does their player – violent, deceitful, unapologetic – no long-term good.

Then there was that piece by Thompson of his time in Montevideo and where his investigation finally led him. The story is well known of how Suárez dedicated his life to football so he could be reunited with his girlfriend, Sofia, after her family moved to Spain. But in November 2003 he was working as a street cleaner and in one of his darker moments.

A championship was on the line and in the final match of the season, with 15 minutes to go, Suárez flew into a Danubio player. The referee showed him a yellow card and Suárez appeared in his face. Larranaga went back to his pocket for a red. Suárez snapped.

Often with rage, there are hidden layers about what brings it to the surface. Before leaving Montevideo, Thompson sent a message to Suárez’s mother, to clarify when Sofia had moved away. The reply came back: October 2003. It was the month before her lovesick boyfriend had one of those unfortunate falls.