Brazil is big on referring to athletes by just one name. Which I don’t have a problem with, generally, and especially not for athletes.

Their given names,  Portuguese-based most of them, tend to be elaborate affairs. Pele, the most famous Brazilian of them all, was christened Edson Arantes de Nascimento, which is a lot of name to carry around when you just want to score buckets of goals. So Pele works fine.

Brazil’s athletes, soccer players in particular, want to be known by something punchy and short. Helps for marketing purposes, too. And newspaper headline writers love it.

But it seems to me a point in time arrives when some Brazilians need to consider using what the rest of the world would call … “real names.”

To wit:

Serious people with serious jobs.

Thinking in specific of soccer coaches here. And two come to mind.

One is Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri. Or “Dunga,” as the world knows him.

The other is Adenor Leonardo Bacchi. Or “Tite,” as he has been known since his playing days.

Dunga turns 47 next month and spent nearly four years as Brazil’s national coach.  Right into the quarterfinals of the 2010 World Cup.

Tite is 49, and was named coach of the Al Wahda club of the UAE Pro League over the weekend.

That is, they are (or were) in charge of multi-million dollar sports teams.  They make up lineups. They push certain guys’ careers ahead and retard those of others. They presumably have input into player purchases and contracts. This may be sports, but these are serious jobs.

And we have guys doing them with ridiculous nicknames.

“Dunga”, we are told, translates to “Dopey.” And the way the story goes, in his wikipedia entry, a relative decided that little Carlos was unlikely to grow to any stature, and decided he looked like one of the Seven Dwarfs of Disney fame. The relative could have picked “Doc” or even “Happy” but he went for the most overtly insulting of them all.

And now Dunga is carrying around this ridiculous name. At best it connotes a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously. At worst, it gives us the impression that the man is a dim bulb.

But take a look at that mug on the wiki site. Does he for one minute look like a guy who ought to be named Dopey? Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri is as serious … as cancer. And he is nobody’s fool. He almost single-handedly attempted to change the way soccer is played in Brazil, and that is a deadly serious undertaking and a very ambitious one. That man is NOT “Dopey.”

Then there is our local guy, Tite. Pronounced “tee-tee” — which doesn’t exactly make it more dignified. (Somehow, “tee-TAY” doesn’t seem as awful.)

The story on this one, as ferreted out by my colleague at The National, Amith Passela, is that Luiz Felipe Scolari, later to coach Brazil to a World Cup championship in 2002 and who is now 61, just made up the “Tite” thing out of thin air before a match, during Tite’s playing days, because he wanted to be able to shout at him (or have other teammates call out to young Mr Bacchi), without the other team having any idea to whom they were referring. It stuck. Like chewing gum to a shoe.

And so “Tite” is now in charge of the defending champions of the Pro League and will lead them into the Fifa Club World Cup, which will be held here in Abu Dhabi in December.

Just saying … one name may be fun. Handy. Profitable, even.

But when you reach a certain age or station in life, it’s time to abandon the baby talk. Take the chance that some of your countrymen will consider you stuffy or stiff.

The down side is, doesn’t it seem almost a cosmic certainty that a coach named “Dopey” was never going to win a World Cup? A Carlos Caetano might. A Dopey will not.

Likewise,  an Adenor Bacchi has a shot at winning the Club World Cup. A “Tite?” Nope.