Renato Costa or Renato Herrera, a former Brazilian soccer player who played in the NASL, passed away at the age of 75.
In 1969, he played in the National Soccer League with Toronto Hellas. In 1977, he was named to the Rochester Lancers Team of the Decade. The following is an article that is on the FrontRow soccer website, by Michael Lewis. Known as Raul Herrera in Rochester during the 1970 season, the Brazilian-born midfielder scored eight goals and added three assists during the regular season as he helped the Lancers to the Northern Division title in the six-team league. He also played for the Los Angeles Aztecs’ title-winning side in 1974.
Lancers head coach Sal DeRosa, who directed the team to the championship, called the forward “a great, skillful forward. A very intelligent player who was outstanding.”
It was Costa’s scoring heroics in the postseason against that forged Costa’s reputation with the club.
In a two-game, aggregate goal series with the Washington Darts, Costa turned into the MVP. He bagged a brace, striking on either side of halftime to power Rochester to a 3-0 triumph in front of a crowd of 9,321 at Aquinas Stadium.
“Our team, although very tense at the start, playing with sprit,” Costa said. “All of us were superstars.”
DeRosa concurred. “I can’t pick a hero and with a win like this, all 11 can share the honors,” he said.
Costa lifted the hosts into the lead in the 26th minute, directing Yao Kankam’s drive past goalkeeper Lincoln Phillips. He doubled the lead in the 61st minute. This time Gladstone Ofori banked a shot off the crossbar that the Brazilian headed home before Marotte converted a penalty kick after Frank Odoi was fouled in the area in the 72nd minute.
“We will go to Washington next week in the same spirit,” DeRosa said. “We won’t go there with over-confidence.”
The win, however, came at great cost to the Lancers as Metidieri was forced out of the first leg with a slight dislocation of the right knee early in the second half when he was tackled by Willie Evans. Metidieri, who was seen hobbling around on crutches, was listed as questionable for the second leg.
With a three-goal lead entering the confrontation, the Lancers seemed to be in the drivers’ seat. Their quest was helped when Herrera, off a Metidieri pass, beat Phillips from point-blank range for a supposedly insurmountable four-goal advantage in the series in the 40th minute. Washington found the net a minute before halftime and added two goals in the second half.
The Darts won the battle, 3-1, but the Lancers won the war and the aggregate goals series, 4-3.
Several days after winning the title, Costa was one of five Lancers called into an NASL all-star team that was coached by DeRosa and defeated Santos of Brazil and Pele, 4-3, in a friendly.
When he rejoined the Lancers in 1973, the Brazilian went by his real name. Costa, who went on to become the staff director of a YWCA in Glendale, Calif., revealed the mystery behind his two names.
“He was mad because he couldn’t make [playing in] Mexico Sunday,” Metidieri said. “Something went wrong. So he used to his name used to be different in Mexico than here, one there and the other one there.”
Costa told this writer in 1980: “My Mexican club wanted $10,000 for my release, but in 1970, Rochester didn’t have that kind of money. [Coach Alex] Perolli said to come anyway, that he’d change my name.”
In 1980, Perolli said Costa already had the name Herrera on his passport. “When he came here, he came here under the name of Raul Herrera,” Perolli said. “He had that name on the passport. What he did, I don’t know.”
Neither did Lancers general manager and chairman of the board Charlie Schiano, who followed his own 1970 policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“I don’t know what really happened, but his real name was Renato Costa, because when he came back in ’73,” he said. “I suspected there was a little shenanigans by our coach because he never told us his real name was Renato Costa. I suspect he was banned from soccer for a year or something and Alex pulled one of his deals. I never really asked because I didn’t want to know. He was a great forward, a wonderful person. He contributed so much to our team.”
Not surprisingly, it led to a great deal of confusion. “Except for Luis Marotte, no one on the team knew my real name,” Costa said. “When we played against another team, one of my friends asked me, ‘Where is Herrera?’ I told him I was Herrera. I asked him to remain quiet, that my professional career would be in jeopardy. I could be banished from soccer.”
It even confused Costa. “My teammates would say, "Raul, pass the ball to me,’ ” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know they were calling me.”
Born in Bahia, Brazil, Costa ventured to North America, playing for Toronto Hellas in the National Soccer League of Canada in 1969. The next season he signed with the Lancers.
He returned to the team in 1973, playing two matches. In 1977, Costa was named to the Lancers’ team of the decade.
Costa was a member of two NASL championship sides, helping the Aztecs to the league crown in their expansion season in 1974. He scored three goals and collected four assists in 16 appearances that season while playing for Perolli, who resurfaced as head coach of the Galaxy.
After that season, Perolli left the team and became head man at the 1975 expansion club, San Antonio Thunder. He wanted the core of his LA championship team in San Antonio, so he dealt UCLA forward Sergio Velasquez to the Galaxy for seven players.
Costa was involved in one of the most unusual trades in soccer history, at home or abroad. He, along with former Lancers teammates Marotte, Pedro Martinez, Julio Cesar Cortez, Ricardo de Rienzo, Mario Zanotti and Blas Sanchez to San Antonio for Velasquez and the Thunder’s two first-round picks in 1976 and 1977, on Jan. 21, 1975.
He played two seasons with the Thunder, collecting two goals in 14 matches.
Costa performed with the Los Angeles Maccabees, who lost to the New York Pancyprian Freedoms in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup final in 1980."