by Alex Bellos
In the Big Kickabout, the Brazilian rainforest has a football tournament that perfectly reflects its size, exoticism and mystique. It takes place in Manaus, an improbable metropolis a thousand miles up the River Amazon, at the heart of one of the world's last wildernesses. When I visit, in 2000, 522 teams are taking part. That's quite a sum, considering that they are all local sides. But the Big Kickabout's most gargantuan eccentricity is that it is really two tournaments – a football competition and a beauty pageant. Teams are obliged to enter both. While the boys battle on the football field, the girls fight it out on the catwalk.
Audemir has taken Erica to the opening ceremony, in which all the girls must parade. When I arrive, the stadium is filling up. I walk through crowds of men in their team strips and vendors selling beer from polystyrene ice-buckets. Some people are banging drums and shaking tambourines. Others have flags and banners. It's like a crowd waiting for a significant sporting event.
Behind a central stage the beauty queens are almost ready. It is an overwhelming sight. More than five hundred women are dressed in bikini bottoms and football shirts. They are completing their make-up and shining their buttocks and thighs with almond oil. The average height is not much more than 5ft. Most have strong indigenous features, the result of hundreds of years of miscegenation of white Europeans with Indian tribes.
One girl catches my eye. She stands out from the others, having thick, unnaturally bleached blond hair and bright red lipstick. What is most striking about her, however, is her green and white shirt, printed with the word 'Arsenal'. I approach her. She introduces herself as Lady Roberta. I ask if it's her real name. She frowns: 'Of course. Why?' Lady tells me that Arsenal is one of the competition's strongest teams. She had been spotted in the street by one of the team's sponsors: 'He asked me straightaway to be their queen. It's so exciting taking part.'
The temperature has hardly cooled by the time it gets dark. The girls are told to queue up in single file, as the ceremony will shortly begin. The line stretches behind the stage for about 200m. They tie their football shirts in a knot above their tummy buttons so they can show off their hips. Tucked in each bikini bottom is a piece of paper with their competition number.
In front of the contestants is the reigning Kickabout Queen, Kamila Jeniffer. She is wearing a swimsuit, a sash, a sparkling tiara and a preposterously luxurious – and, I presume, uncomfortably hot – blue mantle. Kamila Jeniffer is standing in a buggy. She is driven on to the stage and steps on to a podium. The podium starts to rise. One metre, two, three – and soon she is ten metres higher than the stage.
The Big Kickabout takes itself seriously. Very. I feel like I am watching the opening ceremony of an international gala. Before the girls come on a soprano from the city's philharmonic orchestra sings the national anthem. She is accompanied by a rifle-wielding military escort. An acrobatic dance troupe warms up the crowd. Then the sky explodes with fireworks.
Like orderly schoolgirls out on a country stroll the beauty queens file on to the stage. They walk at a brisk pace, at arm's length apart, coquettishly flicking their hair back when it gets in their way. The crowd is cheering, lighting flares and waving coloured balloons. There are so many girls that there is no time to dawdle or pose. They walk down the catwalk, turn back and then exit. Football shirts have never looked so appealing. It is like a conveyor belt of adolescent fantasy. The parade seems endless. Have you ever seen 522 beauty queens in a row before? Actually, there were only 521. Armandao Maringa Junior, a team of evangelical Christians, refused to allow their queen to wear a bikini. She was exempted on religious grounds.
Once the girls have all been on and off they are allowed back on to dance. Music plays on the sound system as the queens fill the catwalk. Later, a samba band performs. The ceremony turns into a big concert. The tournament is declared officially open, but as yet no ball has been kicked.
The match was being played near a road. A driver passing by lost control of his Beetle and the car went straight on to the pitch. At that very moment the right winger of one of the teams was running directly to the goal. Because his head was down he did not see the approaching vehicle and they went slap-bang into each other. There was a huge crunching sound. His teammates ran to see whether their colleague was hurt. But to everyone's amazement he wasn't even scratched. In fact, he was so tough the car bonnet was dented. The driver wanted to charge the winger for repair costs! 'This is the first case of a pedestrian running over a car,' joked one of the crowd.
After the opening ceremony there is a seven-day wait until the first weekend of matches. The interim gives me the opportunity to meet Arnaldo Santos, the Big Kickabout coordinator. Arnaldo is a football commentator and has the corresponding syrupy timbre. He is wearing a silky patterned shirt and sitting in his office in Manaus's Olympic sports complex. 'The Big Kickabout is not just about emotion,' he begins. 'It's about commotion.' It sounds like a radio jingle and I suspect he has said the phrase many times before.
Now his voice has warmed up he carries on, increasing his speed and professional breathlessness. 'In the first year I ran the competition, the first day was a nightmare. No doubt about it. I've never had a day like that in my life. At 5am a footballer was killed at the bus stop on his way to a game. At 9am a supporter died of a heart attack. In one game both goalkeepers received fractures – one in the collarbone, the other in the rib. There were another four cases of broken legs. Oh my God, I said to myself, how can all this happen at once?'
Arnaldo, as expected, answers himself. It happens because of the numbers involved. He assures me that the Big Kickabout is the largest football tournament in the world. Confirmation, he knows, will only come with a mention in the Guinness Book of Records. So he is detailing every statistic. On his desk is a bound and hardbacked annual report, which has a list of all of last year's 1,330 games. The figures are impressive. About 13,000 footballers from Manaus take part. On the opening weekend, 254 matches take place on 40 different pitches. Anyone can enter, which is why it is such a colourful, unpredictable event.
The competition's premise is delightfully self-contradictory. A 'pelada', which I have translated as kickabout, is the type of disorganised, improvised football that Brazilians play wherever they have space – on beaches, street corners and open fields. Peladas use anything as a ball, the players are often barefoot and the pitches are usually precarious. Brazilians romanticise their pelada culture as the reason for their dazzling-ball control skills. The Peladao, or Big Kickabout, is an attempt to formalise the inherently informal.
'The idea is to keep the games as close to the spirit of peladas as possible,' says Arnaldo. Only one of the pitches has any grass, and few have any markings. 'We have kept the rules to a minimum. For example, there's no offside. Throw-ins can be taken with your feet. And penalties are taken at fifteen paces.'
Arnaldo, who is sixty-two, exudes a seriousness that is accentuated by a distinguished mole above his lip. He has run the Big Kickabout, now in its twenty-eighth year, since 1998. He shows me a thirty-two-page rulebook that includes a disciplinary code with 204 articles. I quickly skim the beginning. Section 1, article 1, reads like a communist manifesto. 'The Big Kickabout has as its aims the social integration of the people through sport, encouraging and bringing to the fore the courage and beauty of Amazonian youth.' Later, on closer reading, I discover paragraphs on the procedure for tropical storms, the punishment for not giving the ball back at the end of games and that queens risk declassification if they wear tinted contact lenses or G-string underwear.
In fact, certain people are forbidden from taking part: professional footballers and those who have fallen foul of the disciplinary code. Violence is a problem. Referees have been chased up trees, threatened with knives and attacked by dogs. Already, before the tournament has started, the list of Athletes Banned For Ever includes ninety-three names.
For the tournament to function properly, Arnaldo has developed a formidable organisational structure. All participants ha
ve to submit two passport photos and a photocopy of their ID cards. Five staff work full-time processing the information and organising the fixture list. He has also formed a tribunal to judge complaints, made up of eleven lawyers. They have their work cut out. Usually the Kickabout final is delayed by several weeks because of litigation by teams who allege they were unfairly eliminated.
The tournament has the form of the World Cup. It starts with group stages and then becomes a knockout competition. The winning team's prize is £5,000. The Kickabout Queen wins a brand-new car.
We move on to talk about the beauty pageant. All 522 candidates for queen are given a screen test. They must all turn up at the local TV station. Arnaldo mimes what the camera does: 'It starts on the face and then goes down her body to her toes. She turns around and the camera rises up her back. Then we do a close-up. We can do about a hundred girls an hour.'
Each candidate also has her picture taken and sticks it on a detailed form with precise body measurements, hair and eye colour. Arnaldo then takes all the videos back to his house and chooses the best 120, who qualify for the second round.
'We have a standard. The girls have to be beautiful and curvaceous. You see, if we just judged on legs it would be impossible to choose. A characteristic of the girls round here is that they have great legs and bums. Things start to get complicated above the waist.'
The twenty-eight rules of the beauty pageant do not exclude anyone from participating. This year, contestants range from twelve to twenty-eight years old. About forty are mothers, fifty are competing for the second time and twenty-three have already modelled professionally. One is a stripper. Her team were so awed by her performance in Manaus's red-light area that they invited her to be their queen. I think she is the most authentic candidate. In an unfortunate double entendre, the word 'pelada' is also the Portuguese word for 'stark naked'.
The male and female events run concurrently. The first phase of the football tournament has teams arranged in groups of four or three, with the top two qualifying for the next round. The beauty pageant is divided into eight heats of fifteen queens, which are broadcast on local television.
Both competitions carry on side by side. But they are not independent. Far from it. The most idiosyncratic feature of the Big Kickabout – and it was a tough call – is that if your football team gets knocked out, then your queen can have you reinstated.
'This is the way it works,' says Arnaldo. 'The sixteen queens that make it to the last round qualify their teams for a parallel football tournament. The winner of the parallel tournament gets a bye to the Big Kickabout quarter-final. It's really worth having an attractive queen. Look, in 1998 Arsenal were eliminated but got a second chance because they had a winning queen. Arsenal ended up Kickabout champions.'
Manaus, during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, was turned by the exportation of rubber into one of the most prosperous cities in the world. The building that best symbolises the era is a neo-classical opera house that was built with iron from Scotland, stone from Italy and tiles from France. A block from the opera house is a two-storey office the Big Kickabout uses as its administrative headquarters. I visit on the morning that the local newspaper prints a list of the girls selected for the second round.
I see my first commotion. A man is shouting and cursing at the administrative staff. He is an Arsenal player. Lady Roberta, his queen, was not on the list. 'This is an outrage. There are girls who qualified who are the size of little potatoes – ours is tall. We have never been eliminated in the first round before.'
I ask for Arnaldo and am directed to a back room. He looks nothing like the smooth executive that I met before. He is tired and stressed. There are bags under his eyes. His shirt buttons are almost all undone. He is sat surrounded by pictures of hundreds of queens in swimsuits.
He is going through them one by one, making the final selection. He says he has been up all night watching the videos. 'I can't bear it any longer. We have only chosen 105 so far. I have seen so many that I can't tell the difference between them any more.'
I ask what happened to Lady Roberta? It was a mistake. She had qualified but the fax to the newspaper got jammed. Anyway, he is impatient with people's complaints.
The pressure has put him in a temper: 'People don't realise the work that this involves. It's not a game. It's very organised. Professional football in the state is not as organised as we are.'
Arnaldo, almost shouting now, says that he has just struck a team off today because he discovered it did not bring a queen to the opening ceremony and the excuse was not good enough.
'My decision is final. Last year I banned a candidate because she took her bikini top off when the newspaper photographer asked her. Candidates have to have good posture.
'It was a shame – she was an attractive girl.'
He launches on an emotive and self-justificatory defence of the Big Kickabout.
'The tournament is an escape valve. It suffocates social disorder.' His forehead is pumping.
'What sustains this country is the fact that it has football. Football is the shout that comes from the depths of those who hardly live, of people who aren't sure where their next meal will come from. The jubilation of scoring a goal renews the soul.'
When the player arrived the game had already started. He signed the forms and went straight on. The first time he touched the ball he dribbled half the team and scored a goal. Then he ran off into the jungle. No one understood why. Minutes later the police arrived and his haste was immediately explained.
Vila Nova are from São Francisco, a typical working-class neighbourhood of Manaus. Most of the homes are made of wooden planks. The streets have recently been asphalted. There is a mild smell of sewage. You can see that urbanisation is a constant battle against the forces of nature – where residents have not cleared space, thick vegetation grows.
Audemir is a quiet and industrious man. He has a messy black fringe that almost brushes against his eyebrows. We are sitting with his friends at the local bar, Novo Encontro, which is a simple wooden shack with a big fridge of beer.
'This is where it all began,' he says. 'We realised our area didn't have a team in the Big Kickabout. We thought it should, so we founded one ourselves.'
The Amazon has long attracted migrants seeking fortune. Many ended up in Manaus, the rainforest's largest inland urban centre. It is a city of hope. Novo Encontro means New Encounter. Vila Nova means New Villa. Audemir chose the name – copied from a professional club in central Brazil – because it chimes with the pervading atmosphere of starting afresh.
Using the official terminology that is de rigueur for Kickabout start-ups, Audemir appointed himself Vila Nova's president. He named Mauricio Lima, his brother-in-law, vice-president and another brother director of sport. Four other brothers-in-law were involved in the team, which debuted in 1998.
The club is now the focus of community life. 'São Francisco used to be divided into little groups,' says Mauricio. 'People didn't mix. When the team started to play well, everyone got together. We started out with a hundred fans, mostly family, and this reached three hundred at the end.'
It has turned mild-mannered Audemir, who is a bar waiter, into a local celebrity. This year he managed to assemble a squad of twenty-six players. He has also changed the name of the club abbreviations from FC to the much more modern-sounding AA, or Associacao Atletica, Athletical Association. Vila Nova may be small but its self-image is optimistic and grandiose.
The Big Kickabout's bureaucracy is time-consuming and potentially costly. Audemir spends much of his free time registering players, organising kit and trying to raise money. He has with him a leather file with the details of all his players and letters asking for sponsorship.
And Vila Nova's queen? When the club was starting out, Audemir, again, relied on family. In 1998 it was his niece and in 1999 it was his sister. Neither made it past the first round. Audemir did not expect any different; he had chosen for con
venience rather than beauty. Better an ugly queen than no queen at all. This year, the team's local popularity has meant that he has been able to choose a much more glamorous candidate. Erica dos Santos is a local belle; she was spotted taking part in the neighbourhood's folk-dancing festivities.
Not every club in the Big Kickabout is tied, like Vila Nova, to a particular neighbourhood. Because the tournament is free and open to anyone, clubs are formed around a myriad of social circles. A firm of beefy security guards, immigrants from the same jungle village, and a rock band all have their separate teams.
Another, Barra Pesada FC, are overweight. Three months ago one of their players had a heart attack during a game. 'We won the game but we almost lost a friend,' says team member Fernando de Abreu. He knows the team's chances of winning the beauty pageant are slim. 'Our queen – she couldn't be otherwise – is the fattest in the contest.'
I cannot imagine that any other football competition more accurately reflects its surrounding society than the Big Kickabout. The competition is the surrounding society. The 13,000 footballers come from all parts of Amazon life. The Big Kickabout is Manaus, in all its wild, sexy, lawless, sprawling enormity.
The team's names are colourful too. As well as Arsenal, there is a team called Manchester. 'We chose it because it's a beautiful name,' says the club president, 'and because we have no money.' Aston Vila, Ajax, Barcelona and Real Madrid are recognisable doppelgangers. El Cabago Futebol Clube, meaning Hymen FC, is an example of the local sense of humour. Colonel Kurtz, if he had been staked out in the Amazon, would surely support Apocalipse Clube.
A day after spending time with Vila Nova I visit a team at the other end of the financial scale. Unidos da Glória, or Glória United, has the set-up of a professional club. It is based in Glória, a traditional neighbourhood of Manaus. The team is sponsored by the Amazon's largest flour company, which means it can pay for a squad of twenty-two players, a proper coach, good quality equipment, transport and a decent amount of beer for afterwards. Glória's 'wardrobe assistant', Fernando Salles, is paid to keep three footballs and the twenty-two sets of socks, boots and shorts in the three-room hut where he lives with thirteen family members.
