Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Marcelo's mum, Maria Nazareth, is waiting for me. Before she invites me in I look at the view. From her house you can see the Sugar Loaf Mountain, Guanabara Bay, Copacabana's tower blocks and the deep blue Atlantic Ocean beyond.

  We go in through a gate that has plastic Coke bottles in lines on the top. Maria Nazareth is as thin as a post and has a tough, expressive face. She cackles when she laughs, which she does frequently. Her home is a small box divided into two rooms and a living room. She has a picture of Marcelo posing with a team on one wall. On the opposite she has hung a triangular flag of B68 and the Faroese Football Association. We are joined by Dilma, her daughter, who lives in the same block. Vilma, another daughter, lives next door. Ilma, the eldest daughter, has moved away.

  'When Marcelo said he was going we were scared stiff,' says Dilma. 'We didn't know anything about where he was going. We didn't even know where the Faroes were. You see so many things on the TV about footballers being sold to foreign countries, being neglected, going hungry and not even having the money for the journey back.'

  Maria de Fatima, Marcelo's sister-in-law, comes in and insists that she bakes me a cake. By now the room is crowded with another five children. One of them, a young boy, tells me that he plays for a football team on the beach. He says that when he grows up he wants be like his uncle and play in Europe.

  The Marcolinos are a football family. Maria Nazareth was sixteen when she married her husband, who played professionally for teams in Rio. He never earned enough to leave the favela. Friends said that if his children were half as good as him they would be footballers too. Marcelo started in the junior divisions of Fluminense and Botafogo, two good local clubs. He turned professional at Madureira, a weaker team in the suburbs and then moved to clubs progressively lower in the Brazilian food chain. Until he fell out the bottom and ended up on the other side of the world.

  Had Marcelo not inherited his father's ball skills he would be in a job like his Cabritos Hill contemporaries – who are waiters, maids and motorbike couriers; the bottom of the labour market, servicing middle-class Copacabana below. Dilma tells me she works in a bikini factory.

  The cake arrives and we eat it with fizzy guarana juice. Maria Nazareth thinks she understands how football works, since both her husband and a son devoted themselves to the game. 'There are so many good players in Brazil that to be a success you need someone behind you. He found himself a backer there in Denmark. He is now a big success there. People love him.'

  Maria Nazareth installed her first telephone last year. She says she knows Marcelo's decision to go was the right one since he rings home every week and says: 'Mum, I scored lots of goals.'

  Dilma adds: 'He really fought hard to be a footballer. He's happy because he's doing all he ever wanted to do.'

  ***

  Two miles from Cabritos Hill is Leblon, one of Rio's wealthiest neighbourhoods. Fábio Menezes lives there with his parents and 420 football shirts.

  He invites me in to show me the collection. The shirts are lined up in a long rack. A few with famous autographs have not been washed, which gives his bedroom the fuggy aroma of a jumble sale.

  'I bet you can't guess which one this is?' He points to a blue shirt with the initials KSI. He is correct. I am foxed.

  'This is Iceland's national strip. It's from when they played against Brazil in Florianópolis. Brazil won 3-0. It was Ronaldo's first match for the national side and he scored a goal.'

  He is enjoying impressing me with his knowledge. He selects another strip.

  'Now this one is really difficult.' Before I have time to choose either a look of perplexity or astonishment, he says: 'South Melbourne. World Club Championships. Last year. Almost impossible to come by.'

  I congratulate him on such a rare garment. He shows me some more moderately interesting pieces of malodorous memorabilia. He explains that the collection started because his father is a well-known radio commentator, who was able to get hold of many team shirts from his personal contacts with players. A genuinely fascinating collector's item is an example of the only time the Brazilian national team had advertising sewn on their shirts – 'vs. Chile, in Uberlândia, 1987' – but it somehow seems less surprising than the number of club tops he has from Scandinavia.

  Fábio is thirty-two. He is a big man with a pasty face and thinning hair. We leave the flat, in a guarded condominium, and walk to a nearby restaurant. It is one of the coldest days of the Rio winter – a gruelling 15C. Brazilians are wrapped up warmly in jumpers and coats. Except Fábio, who is in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. 'This is the ideal temperature for me,' he says, walking through the evening drizzle without an umbrella. 'I will never be cold again.'

  Fábio will go down in history as the man who pushed Brazilian football to its northern extremes. Like the polar explorers who took humankind to new limits, he led his countrymen further north than they had ever been before. He is the agent who first exported Brazilians to Iceland and the Faroes.

  We enter the first restaurant we pass, a recently opened establishment offering vegetarian cuisine. We sit down and he tells me how he did it. 'It's easier to place a Brazilian footballer in a team than it is a footballer of any other nationality,' he says. 'There is a worldwide fad for Brazilians. It's sad to say, but it is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival. Irrespective of talent, it is very seductive to have a Brazilian in your team.'

  Demand, he says, is met by an endless supply. There are about 23,000 professional footballers in Brazil. They play in more than 500 professional clubs. Fábio says that one reason exports have grown is because the internal market has boomed. 'There are more players than ever before because there are more clubs than ever before. The best way to project yourself in Brazil is either to start a church or a football club. Brazil is a dirty country. People use football clubs to serve their own interests.'

  Fábio says that even though not every Brazilian is a good player, there are certainly enough successful transfers for Pelé's romantic legacy to survive. He adds: 'It's also economic. Brazilians are cheap labour.' The violent contrast of Rio's cityscapes is mirrored in football. Top players at the best Brazilian clubs earn salaries comparable to colleagues at the richest clubs in Europe. Yet most footballers hardly earn enough to live on. Almost 90 per cent take home less than £100 a month.

  Every Friday I buy the football weekly Placar. Each issue profiles a Brazilian playing abroad. The section is called 'End of the World'. It is the most gripping read in the magazine, since the stories are an unresolved mix of tragedy and joy. The Brazilians invariably make the same comments, whether they are in Singapore, India, Guatemala or Kazakhstan: they are making more money than they ever did in Brazil, which was too competitive anyway, but they miss their mothers' rice and beans terribly. Fábio says that he is inundated with players desperate to be sold abroad. Many promise to supply forged birth certificates claiming they are younger, hoping this will make them more attractive. No country is too small or too remote or too inhospitable.

  I ask Fábio why he decided to become an agent. He said it happened by family accident. In the early 1990s, when he was a law student at Rio's Catholic University, he spent a holiday backpacking round Europe. He paid a visit to a Finnish journalist his father had met when commentating on a Brazil friendly in Helsinki. A year later the Finn called up Fábio in Rio. FC Jazz of Pori, a small town 160 miles from the Finnish capital, wanted to sign a Brazilian player. Could he help?

  He thought carefully. Bangu, his favourite team from the Rio suburbs, had an excellent striker called Dionisio. Fábio approached the club. Dionisio was sent to FC Jazz on loan. Fábio earned £1,000, a tidy sum for a hard-up student. Dionisio was a great success. He was transferred to another club, TPV, where he was top scorer and his club became champions of the Finnish league.

  Being an international agent seemed easy. It was informal, based on networks of friends. Fábio sold
one more player to FC Jazz and once he graduated started to look after players in Rio's second division. His Scandinavian contacts went in the deep freeze for a few years until, in 1998, Iceland called.

  It was Páll Guðlaugsson. He had seen FC Jazz in the Intertoto Cup. He thought that the Finnish club's Brazilian gave it an edge. He told Fábio that he wanted a bunch-three for his team, Leiftur, and six for his Faroese friends.

  The man from Iceland was buying in bulk. Fábio called around and rustled up some players. Páll flew in and liked what he saw. They shook hands on a deal. Páll invited Fábio to live with the players in Iceland since he spoke English and could act as an interpreter. Fábio flew out. He stayed two and a half years.

  'Football opens doors,' he says. 'Even as a law graduate, my prospects to earn money in Iceland were better than in Brazil.'

  Leiftur are from Ólafsfjörður, a fishing village of about 1,000 people and situated on the island's northern coast-six hours drive from Reykjavík and only thirty miles south of the Arctic Circle. Thanks to his status as the Brazilian agent, Fábio managed to get a job in the office of a fish-exporting company. During the afternoons he worked in a fish factory to learn Icelandic.

  I ask him if it was a happy time.

  'Is money happiness?' he replies.

  After six months in Ólafsfjörður, another Icelandic team approached him for some Brazilians. Keflavík, a town near Reykjavík, wanted three. Fábio flew to Rio and rounded up some candidates.

  'If I had more time I could have got better players. What is very difficult is the cultural level. The intellectual level. The Brazilian mentality is different,' he says. I ask if the problem was the language, the playing style or – perhaps-the Icelandic diet?

  'The three guys were sent back after a month,' he says sombrely. 'They were caught stealing watches in the changing rooms.'

  Fábio lived in Keflavík for a year and a half. He worked at another fish exporters and on weekends was the most qualified pizza waiter in Iceland. 'I had nothing else to do. My life was work and saving money.'

  He appears traumatised by the experience, as if he had been in enforced exile. He repeats that he is never going back again. He never allowed himself to get a girlfriend to warm the cold nights. 'I didn't want to stay there the rest of my life. I'm not crazy. I wouldn't want to bring anyone from there to live here.' Whenever the darkness got to him too much he would go to his coat, where he kept the money he was earning in cash dollars, and count out the notes one by one. 'That was my medicine. It always made me feel better.'

  His repressed anger spills over when I mention the Faroese. He describes Niclas Davidsen, the B68 president, as a swindler and his Brazilians as untrustworthy scumbags. When Fábio took his footballers there he had not been told that Faroese tax is 40 per cent. Once the players discovered this they renegotiated their contracts directly with B68, cutting Fábio out of the deal.

  'These people – they are nothing,' he spits. 'They will come back and go and live in their favelas and I will not be there to help them.'

  He adds, 'If you had a really good player he would never want to go to play in the Faroes. It's as simple as that. Only a really desperate player would want to go there. There is no future.

  'But Robson is not that bad,' he insists. 'He's certainly good enough to play in the Faroes. He must have been kept out for other reasons. It could be jealousy. Brazilians make people very jealous, you know.'

  Fábio has respect for Robson. He tells me how they met. 'Robson's brother has been my hairdresser for years. Robson is a good man. He is honest and loyal. I gave him an opportunity to improve his life.'

  Does he not feel a certain responsibility that Robson is now trapped in a foreign land?

  'What can I do – I don't think for his dick. But isn't it better him being there than going hungry here? I am happy he has a decent life.'

  Our conversation turns to the Intertoto Cup. A week before, B68 played their long-awaited fixture with Sporting Lokeren.

  The first leg was in the Faroes. Lokeren is one of the most multinational clubs in Europe. It has players from Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Iceland, Yugoslavia and Bosnia. It sent a reserve squad to Toftir of Belgians and Congolese.

  On the evening of the match it was cold and windy-typical midsummer Faroese weather. Only about 300 people braved the elements and went to the stadium. Lokeren took the lead after ten minutes. Marcelo equalised on the half-hour. Seven minutes later B68 scored again. For a moment it felt like the Faroese were in reach of a historic victory. But just before the half-time whistle the Belgians drew level.

  Sosialurin, the Faroese newspaper, wrote: 'Lokeren fielded a young and inexperienced team, but in the second half it became more and more obvious that they were in much better form than B68's players. In the last twenty minutes there was no air left in the Toftir team, and they could easily have lost by more than 2-4. The marking became loose, and several times the visitors outnumbered the home team when they got counterattacks.'

  A week later, B68's squad flew to Brussels, and then took an hour's bus to Lokeren. The three Faroese fans who travelled with the team saw a dull second leg in which both teams were happy to defend. It ended 0-0.

  Sporting Lokeren are not a strong team. Not even their first team, which was described as 'dismal' in the British press after they lost in the Intertoto second round to Newcastle United.

  I wonder how Marlon and Messias had done. They had not. For both games they were left on the bench.

  In 2001, B68 were again third in the Faroese league. In 2002 they fell to sixth. Marcelo, Messias and Marlon fell out with the club management and after the season ended they promised never ever to return to Toftir. Robson is expecting his second child.

  Chapter Two

  HEROIC FEET

  'The Brazilians play [football] as if it were a dance. This is probably the result of the influence of those Brazilians who have African blood or are predominantly African in their culture, for such Brazilians tend to reduce everything to dance, work and play alike.'

  Gilberto Freyre

  New World in the Tropics, 1959

  Football in Brazil has its Year Zero. In 1894 Charles Miller disembarked at the port of Santos with two footballs, one in each hand.

  'What is this, Charles?' asked his father, John Miller, who was waiting on the dockside.

  'My degree,' he replied.

  'What?'

  'Yes! Your son has graduated in football.'

  Miller fils was returning to Brazil after spending his school years in Southampton. Miller père was a Scottish rail engineer who, like many European immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century, had followed the lucrative smell of Brazilian coffee. John put down track linking Santos to the inland plantations of São Paulo state. He sent his son back to Britain for boarding school, where Charles was such a promising left winger that he played for St Mary's, a forerunner of Southampton FC.

  Charles Miller

  Whether or not football was played on Brazilian soil beforehand, Charles is deemed the 'official' progenitor. He can hardly have imagined the role his spherical baggage would have in the country's destiny. The two footballs would later turn him into a national hero, immortalised in a street name in central São Paulo – the Praça Charles Miller. His name also lingers in football terminology: a trick he developed, in which you chip the ball behind your leg, is known as a 'chaleira', a corruption of 'charles'.

  Brazil had to wait a few months before Charles's footballs were put to use. With good reason. The British community was midway through the cricket season. In time, however, he set about organising football kickabouts with friends. According to lore the first 'controlled confrontation' between two teams happened on a piece of land where the mules that pulled São Paulo's trams grazed. The participants were expatriate employees from the railway and the gas companies. 'The general feeling was "What a great little sport, what a nice little game,"' reminisced Charles fifty years later. Soon his kickabouts were
being noticed. Some were left confused. 'It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with great sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts,' wrote a journalist in 1896.

  In Rio, two hundred miles up the coast, football's arrival was similarly inconspicuous. Oscar Cox, another Anglo-Brazilian, returned with a football from his studies in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1901 he arranged a game between members of the Rio Cricket and Athletic Association and young well-to-do locals. It was the first time football in Rio spread beyond the Brits. The event passed almost unnoticed. The spectators were made up of the father and sister of a player, two friends and eleven tennis players who stumbled on the game by chance.

  Oscar Cox

  Yet the yellowish bladder gained adepts. Fast. Brazil's first football club was founded in 1900 – by a German colony in Rio Grande, near the Uruguayan border. São Paulo inaugurated a local league in 1902. Charles Miller, two years later, wrote in a letter of how enthusiastically Brazilians were taking to the game. 'A week ago I was asked to referee in a match of small boys, twenty a side; but no, they wanted it. I thought, of course, the whole thing would be a muddle, but I found I was very much mistaken . . . even for this match about 1,500 people turned up. No less than 2,000 footballs have been sold here within the last twelve months; nearly every village has a club now.'

  Football's European origins helped establish it as the sport of Brazil's white urban elite. Oscar Cox and nineteen friends founded Fluminense, Rio's first club, where matches became glamorous social events. Teams comprised of young students and professionals from the city's best families. Fluminense was a stage to show off cosmopolitanism and refinement. In the stands, women wore the latest fashions and men, impeccably dressed in suits and ties, attached coloured team ribbons to their boaters. They revelled in the Englishness of it all, cheering players with 'hip hip hurrahs'. The sport was resolutely amateur, in tune with modern European theories of fitness and hygiene.