Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Rio players bid farewell to their hosts at São Paulo's Luz train station, after the first matches between teams representing each city, in 1901

  Brazil, at the turn of the century, was undergoing a period of great social change. The country had only abolished slavery in 1888 – the last place in the Americas to do so. Brazil was also the country that imported more slaves than anywhere else – about 3.5 million, six times more than the United States. Many newly liberated slaves moved into the cities, creating a large impoverished underclass.

  Football would only become 'Brazilian' when blacks were able to play at the top level. At first they were excluded from taking part. This did not diminish their curiosity. Unable to enter Fluminense by the front door, they climbed neighbouring rooftops and watched from there. The game, as they discovered, was much more interesting than cricket. And it was simple to copy. All you needed was a ball. If you could not afford it, one could be improvised inexpensively with, for example, a bundle of socks, an orange or a cloth filled with paper. You didn't need proper kit or even a pitch. The informal game, which could be mastered without a privileged background, spread rapidly among the urban poor. By the 1910s football was Brazil's most popular sport and Rio was believed to have had more football pitches than any other city in South America.

  Blocks on a rooftop sneak a view of Fluminense, in 1905

  Football was acquiring opposite reputations. It was both the private hobby of the rich and the preferred pastime of gangs of poor youths. Kickabouts became a common sight in Brazilian streets. On their way to Argentina in 1914, Exeter City arrived in Rio. As they were coming ashore they spotted a game of football in progress 'only to discover that . . . they were all niggers. Black as your hat, and most of them playing in bare feet.' Exeter chairman M. J. McGahey sent the dispatch to the Exeter Express and Echo. He would have another fright when the tour party passed through Santos. 'If you imagine one of the worst junior grounds you know of, and then take it up and shake it like a carpet and plentifully besprinkle it with stones and pieces of bricks, and then bake the lot in a tropical sun, you will have some remote notion of the ground.'

  The first club in Rio to field black players was the Bangu Athletic Club, a team started in 1904 by the British managers of a textile factory in the outlying suburb of Bangu. Factory workers, many of them non-white, were allowed in the team. But Bangu was the exception. Rio's important clubs stayed aristocratic. Bangu was not strong enough to threaten the status quo, and, paradoxically, it buttressed the game's 'amateur ethic' since its players earned their wages as industrial workers.

  Slowly, mixed-race players started to filter through to the big clubs. They were made to feel ashamed of their colour. Artur Friedenreich, the son of a German immigrant and a black Brazilian, looked white apart from his frizzy hair. Before matches he tried to flatten his hair as much as he could, covering it in brilliantine and rolling a towel around his head like a turban. He was always the last on the pitch. Most famously, Carlos Alberto, the son of a photographer and the first mulatto to play for Fluminense, whitened his face with rice powder. When his make-up started to come off the opposing fans started to chant 'Rice Powder', which became, and still is, the club's nickname. To this day Fluminense fans throw talc – a cheaper version of the original powder – in the air before big games.

  Membership rules at the big clubs were essentially rules to keep the sport as white and upper class as possible. Football provided a justification to reconsolidate theories of white supremacy, which had been thrown into doubt by the abolition of slavery. The insistence on amateurism-which required players to have alternative sources of income – was an effective bar for players from poorer backgrounds.

  It took the Portuguese – another discriminated race – to open football up to everyone. Brazil was 'discovered' by Portuguese navigators, and controlled for centuries by Lisbon, yet by the beginning of the twentieth century Brazilians looked to other European countries for cultural guidance. The Portuguese were – and still are – the butt of jokes, a close-knit community of shopowners and merchants.

  Vasco da Gama, named after the fifteenth-century navigator, was Rio's Portuguese club. Vasco broke the big clubs' hegemony because instead of choosing players from among their own, Vasco's directors chose the best footballers from the burgeoning suburban leagues – regardless of background or colour. To get round the rule requiring all athletes to be otherwise employed, the Portuguese community gave them jobs in their shops. In 1923, the first year they were promoted to Rio's first division, Vasco were champions-with a team made up of three blacks, a mulatto and seven working-class whites.

  Outraged by this 'fuzzy professionalism', the main clubs set up their own league, excluding Vasco. But Vasco had great popular support. So Vasco were invited back under a set of elaborate conditions that, while not specifically banning black and poor white players, was meant to have that effect. Each player had to know how to sign their name. Vasco, with most of its players illiterate, found a way to jump that hurdle. It sent its squad to reading and writing classes and, if need be, changed their names. A player with a complicated surname would become, simply, 'Silva'. Then the league insisted that each team had to have its own stadium. The Portuguese replied in grandiose style. They clubbed together and built São Januário, the largest stadium in Brazil.

  Vasco paved the way for the end of amateurism. When, by the beginning of the 1930s, European clubs had started to contract Latin Americans, professionalism became a necessity to hold on to the country's best players. In 1933, Rio and São Paulo founded professional leagues. Barriers against class and race collapsed. In the inaugural year, the Rio club Bonsucesso fielded a team of eleven blacks. Football, once the preserve of the elite, was finally eclipsed by the masses.

  Brazilians play football differently. At least they used to. It does not matter that they might never again. The Brazilian style is like an international trademark, which was registered during the 1958 and 1962 World Cups and given a universal patent in 1970. Its essence is a game in which prodigious individual skills outshine team tactics, where dribbles and flicks are preferred over physical challenges or long-distance passes. Perhaps because of the emphasis on the dribble, which moves one's whole body, Brazilian football is often described in musical terms – in particular as a samba, which is a type of song and a dance. At their best Brazilians are, we like to think, both sportsmen and artists.

  It seems that they always played differently. Or at least as far back as we can tell. In the early years there were limited occasions for qualitative comparisons, since international games were infrequent. Yet by 1919, after that year's South American Championship, there were glimmers of what would enchant the world half a century later. In an article headlined 'Brazilian Innovation', the journalist Américo R. Netto wrote: 'As opposed to the British school which dictates that the ball be taken by all the forwards right up to the opposition's goal and put in from the closest possible range, the Brazilian school states that shots be taken from any distance, the precision of the shot being worth more than the fact that it is made close to the target. And it further states that the collective advance of the whole forward line is not necessary; it's enough for two or three players to break away with the ball, which, by its devastating speed, completely unexpected, disorientates the entire rival defence.'

  Since most Brazilians learnt from informal kickabouts, it was likely that they would play in a way less constrained by rules, tactics or conventions. Since many started playing using bundles of socks, it was also likely that their ball skills would be more highly developed and inventive. Alternatively, one could explain the flashy individualism by pointing to the national trait of showing off in public. Brazil is the country of carnival, not of self-negating uniformity. Archie McLean, a Scottish League forward who moved to São Paulo in 1912, put it down to irresponsibility: 'There were great players there, but they were terribly undisciplined. Their antics would not have been tolerated in Scotland. During a game a coup
le of players tried to find out who could kick the ball the highest. I soon put a stop to that sort of thing.'

  Some historians have suggested that reliance on the dribble evolved because of the racism of the game's formative years. They say that the style was created by black players who improvised artfulness as a way of self-protection against whites. If you were black, you would not want to have physical contact with a white player, since this could end in retaliation. Blacks had to use guile rather than force to keep the ball. An interview with Domingos da Guia, the most talented defender of the 1930s, supports this view: 'When I was still a kid I was scared to play football, because I often saw black players, there in Bangu, get whacked on the pitch, just because they made a foul, or sometimes for something less than that . . . my elder brother used to tell me: the cat always falls on his feet . . . aren't you good at dancing? I was and this helped my football . . . I swung my hips a lot . . . that short dribble I invented imitating the miudinho, that type of samba.'

  There is a revealing parallel here with another Brazilian invention. Capoeira is a martial art, invented by Angolan slaves, that was disguised as a dance to fool the slave owners. In capoeira, the two contestants never make physical contact. Instead, they taunt each other – usually to music – with deceptive kicks and trip-ups. The hip-swinging body language used by a capoeirista is very similar to samba dancers and Brazilian dribblers.

  Whatever the singularities of the Brazilian style really were, they soon became indistinguishable from the interpretation given to them. In 1933, coincidentally the year professionalism was introduced, a young sociologist called Gilberto Freyre published a book that was to mark a watershed in the way Brazil was regarded in academic – and popular – thinking. In Casa Grande e Senzala (translated as The Masters and the Slaves), Freyre turned racial theory on its head.

  Until Freyre, Brazil's racial mixture was seen as a weight around the country's neck. Freyre was the first person to say that its contribution to Brazil was good. Because of the high level of miscegenation – due, he wrote, to the traditional penchant of Portuguese men for dark women and the shortage of Portuguese women during colonial times-Brazil's many races got on in a different way than in other countries. Despite the brutality of the slave era, there was also a unique racial tolerance. Freyre said that the authentic Brazilian was a rich combination of European and African impulses – of, among other qualities, Apollonean rationality and Dionysian malevolence. (Freyre, unsurprisingly, is now regarded by many as as racist as his forebears). In the 1930s, however, his thoughts created a new, pro-mulatto view of national identity – which in football found its most powerful metaphor.

  Freyre took the negative and made it positive. He championed playfulness and mischief as national characteristics. The folkloric Rio figure of the 'malandro', a kind of mixed-race artful dodger, was used to embody Freyre's theories. The malandro was a sublimation of whiteness and blackness. In football terms, the malandro took an orderly British game and turned it into a 'dance of irrational surprises'. In 1938, he wrote: 'Our style of playing football contrasts with the Europeans because of a combination of qualities of surprise, malice, astuteness and agility, and at the same time brilliance and individual spontaneity . . . Our passes . . . our dummies, our flourishes with the ball, the touch of dance and subversiveness that marks the Brazilian style . . . seem to show psychologists and sociologists in a very interesting way the roguery and flamboyance of the mulatto that today is in every true affirmation of what is Brazilian.'

  Sports journalists adapted Freyre's theories, popularising the idea that not only was there a Brazilian style but that this style was a proud advertisement for the country's unique racial make-up. This view became the consensus and found its personification in the two outstanding players of the 1930s – Domingos da Guia and Leônidas da Silva.

  Exeter City attack Brazil's goal, 1914

  As football was becoming linked ideologically to national identity, it was also mobilising unprecedented displays of patriotism. When, in 1908, a team of Argentinians came to play in Rio the matches attracted larger crowds than had ever been seen before. In 1914, when Exeter City were on their way back from Argentina, they played a game against an all-star selection of Rio and São Paulo players. The match is considered the debut of the Brazilian national team. About 10,000 spectators saw Brazil win 2-0. Newspapers reported the delirium of the crowd as 'simply indescribable'. In 1919 Rio hosted the South American Championship for the first time. Brazil won and Friedenreich, who scored the only goal of the final game, gained a national prominence that until then no sportsman had ever had. As a measure of the public's interest, his boots were put on display in the window of a city-centre jeweller's.

  Football arrived at a time when Brazil, which had only become a republic in 1889, was searching for its own identity. The game's rapid dissemination gave the urban population, lacking in national symbols, a common experience. Football was also seized on by politicians, who saw how it could build national pride. President Getúlio Vargas, who came to power in a 1930 rebellion and stayed in power until 1945, used the sport to feed his ideals of nationalism and social harmony. He centralised sport, creating a national council, setting up regional federations and subsidising Brazil's expenses at the 1938 World Cup – to which his daughter accompanied the delegation.

  When Brazil travelled to the 1938 World Cup in France, the country was gripped with unparalleled excitement. Journalists invested the nation's hopes in Domingos and Leônidas. Domingos was an athletic defender with such calmness and strength of character that he could dribble his way out of danger. Leônidas was a centreforward whose acrobatic skills earned him the nickname 'Rubber Man'. Brazilians credit Leônidas with inventing the bicycle kick, in which the ball is kicked when the player's body is suspended horizontally in the air.*

  It was Brazil's third World Cup. In the first two – in 1930 and 1934 – Brazil had failed to pass the first round. The first match in 1938, against Poland, showed how much the South Americans had improved. At 4-4, the game went into extra time. Leônidas was 'simply amazing. He was our stick of dynamite. He did the impossible. Each time he touched the ball there was an electric current of enthusiasm through the crowd,' wrote a Brazilian reporter. Brazil won 6-5, with Leônidas scoring the winner barefoot, after his boot came off in the swampy turf. 'The shot, strong and unexpected, left everyone in Strasbourg's small stadium openmouthed,' wrote another witness. 'People were stunned. Europe's sports press, who thought they had already seen everything on a football pitch, reacted with fright, confusion and shouts of "bravo!, bravo!, bravo".'

  Leônidas da Silva

  Brazil were knocked out in the semi-finals by Italy, who would be champions, and beat Sweden in the play-off for third place. But even though they were not champions, Brazil were the tournament's real sensations. Leônidas was voted best player. He was the top scorer, with seven goals in four games, and eulogised by the French, who gave him the nickname Le Diamant Noir – the Black Diamond.

  When Leônidas returned home he was the most famous man in Brazil. He became the first footballer to endorse a product. A confectionery company, Lacta, launched the Diamante Negro chocolate bar. The Diamante Negro is still around – it is Brazil's second-bestselling chocolate bar and available in another ten countries, including Japan, the United States and Australia.

  Leônidas's success was seen not just as good fortune but as a national vindication since he embodied the essence of Brazil. Football played à la brésilienne was already the most potent symbol of nationhood – two decades before Brazil eventually won a World Cup. By the 1930s, there had been attempts to call the sport something less clunkily English than 'foot-ball'. But suggestions – including 'pébol, 'bolapé' (using pé, Portuguese for foot) and the Greek-inspired 'balípodo' – did not stick. Instead, Brazilian journalists started to use the transliteration 'futebol'. Futebol was not the game that Charles Miller imported in 1894. Futebol was the sport that was played as a dance; it was the
sport that united the country and that showed its greatness. Gilka Machado, held as the greatest poetess of her day, summed up the national feeling in the following poem, written about the 1938 World Cup:

  I salute you

  Heroes of the day

  You made us understand

  In a silent language,

  Writing with your entrancing, winged feet

  An international epopee.

  Brazilian souls

  - distant

  overcome the space

  mix with yours,

  follow in your footsteps

  to the rushing ball,

  to the decisive kick

  of the glory of the Fatherland

  (. . .)

  That the Leônidases and the Domingoses

  Fix in the eye of the foreigner

  The miraculous reality

  That is the Brazilian man

  (. . .)

  The brains of the Universe

  Render themselves, reverent

  To your genial feet.

  The soul of Brazil

  Lays down a kiss

  On your heroic feet!

  * In fact, the bicycle kick was invented by a Chilean, Ramon Unzaga Asla, in 1914 – which is why in Spanish-speaking countries the move is called chilena. In Brazil, a chilena is a back heel, deriving from Chilean-style spurs popular in the south.

  Chapter Three

  THE FATEFUL FINAL

  'Everywhere has its irremediable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima. Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat by Uruguay in 1950.'