Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  On the afternoon I arrive there is a barbecue to commemorate the club's eleventh birthday. About two hundred people have turned up. Three large speakers are balanced precariously on each other, blaring out music sung by a man playing a Yamaha organ. The noise makes it impossible to talk.

  The power behind Unidos da Glória is Américo Loureiro. He has a stubby nose, thick eyebrows and a necklace with a blue image of the Virgin Mary hanging on his hairy chest. Américo worked in a wood factory for thirty-six years, and was a union leader for twenty-five.

  We walk down the street so as to be able to hear ourselves. 'Unidos da Glória are the passion of the neighbourhood. We have more fans than anyone else,' he says. This year he is trying to make up for a poor showing in 1999. 'Last year we waited a long time to look for players. By the time we got round to it, all the best players had already been contracted by other teams.'

  He has also put particular thought into Glória's queen. He invited last year's runner-up, Samantha Simoes. 'We made her a proposal. It's hard for a girl to refuse. It's like a footballer being asked to play for Flamengo.'

  The Amazon is a place of fable and legend, partly because of the influence of indigenous oral Indian culture, and the Big Kickabout has developed a mythical history of its own. This has been helped by raconteurs like Américo who, having been involved in the event since its inception, never miss an opportunity to embellish an anecdote. Usually involving himself. Only the stories don't always have a time or place and the characters don't always have names.

  Originally Américo was involved in a team called JAP. He tells me that once there was a side called São José. They were from upstate and invincible in their region. One year they decided to play in the Big Kickabout. They came to Manaus and demanded to be in the same group as JAP. Américo cackles: 'After twenty minutes we were 24-nil up. Even our goalkeeper scored.'

  As we are talking Messias Sampaio turns up. His appearance is unexpected good fortune, since I was already planning to speak to him. Messias invented the Big Kickabout in 1973, when he was working as a journalist. Thanks to its prestige he launched a successful political career. He is now leader of the city council.

  Messias is here to show solidarity with Glória and Américo, whom he employs as a political aide. He is immensely personable and we sit down on small plastic stools. He has wispy hair, bad teeth and talks eloquently, with a politician's sense of patience and timing.

  Manaus's belle epoque only lasted until an Englishman took the rubber plant to Asia, where it could be cultivated more efficiently. The city then endured half a century of collapse until it flourished for a second time – as the site of the world's most unlikely industrial park. In 1967 Brazil passed a law giving tax breaks to build factories in Manaus. It was, together with projects like the Trans-Amazon Highway, part of the military government's policy to 'colonise' the rainforest. The inducement worked, and the city changed from being a depressed backwater to Brazil's main producer of light electronic goods. (Despite obvious logistical problems, such as the lack of a road or rail link to the south of the country.) The population boomed from 300,000 in 1970 to 1.4 million at the end of the century.

  'A huge amount of young people came to Manaus looking for work in the early 1970s,' says Messias. 'But there was an enormous lack of leisure facilities.' Messias was asked by his employers, the local media group Rede Calderaro de Comunicação, to come up with a large promotional event in which the public could participate. An amateur football tournament was the ideal solution. Brazil had won the World Cup for the third time, cementing football's place as the people's passion. Yet Manaus did not have a strong professional scene. The few professional clubs played in the nationally irrelevant Amazonas state league. Messias sensed a demand for competitive football.

  He sensed right. The first Kickabout had 188 teams. The second 286 and by the third the number was more than 500. It grew in parallel with the industrial park and the tournament rapidly embedded itself in the fabric of the city. Even though it is still funded by Rede Calderaro – at an annual cost of £200,000 – it is a local institution.

  The Kickabout was embraced so enthusiastically because every Brazilian, so the saying goes, sees himself as a footballer. In the Big Kickabout, everyone can be a footballer. I think the tournament became enormous for other reasons too. Manaus is so remote and disconnected from Brazil's centres of power that its residents, like English expats on the Spanish coast, feel a need to overexaggerate national characteristics.

  After the first Big Kickabout Messias pondered how he could involve women in the event. 'I remembered that there were many female football fans. In fact, there were many beautiful female fans. So we wondered how we could mesh these two things.' As he says this he puts his hands together so his fingers link.

  'Women's football didn't exist at the time. So in the second year I insisted that every team present a queen. It was a complete success because it characterises the two things that Brazilians like best – football and women.'

  For several years the opening ceremony was held in Manaus's main avenue. Queens paraded on floats, as if it was a fully-blown carnival procession. Messias boasts: 'The Kickabout's beauty pageant is so popular now it's more important than Miss Amazonia!'

  The introduction of a beauty contest needs to be understood in a regional context. The Amazon hardly has an event that doesn't include an ambassadorial role for attractive young women. The carnival has its queen, as do the festival days of saints Peter, Anthony and John in June. And each rainforest municipality has a queen tied to its principal agricultural product. Coari has a banana queen, Maues has a guarana queen, and so on for oranges in Anori, milk in Autazes, acai in Codajas and cupuagu in Presidente Figueiredo. It seems only natural that football has one too.

  I ask Messias why he decided to let the teams with the prettiest women back into the football competition?

  'I did this to make people invest more in their queens, so they took that part seriously. But there was another reason too. Just say that a team is very good and they lose because the referee makes a mistake. The tendency in such cases is to go and beat him up. Football deals in passionate feelings and referees don't have bodyguards. But if the team knows that they might not be knocked out because they still have a queen then they are less likely to turn violent. The queens act like a tranquilliser.'

  Messias believes that the strength of the Big Kickabout is that it lets people at the bottom of the social scale act as if they are at the top. To be president of a football team is a mark of respectability. In a society marked by inequalities, the tournament promotes equality. No matter how humble they are, teams mirror the structure of professional clubs. Nine out of ten, for example, have their own coaches. Messias believes, also, that because the rules are so egalitarian it mobilises every section of society. 'Criminality goes down during match days,' he adds 'because everyone is involved.'

  We chat about why the competition became so enormous. Messias believes that Manaus has the most football-obsessed people in Brazil. 'People here have so many obstacles. The dirt pitches, the heat, the rain. And the more obstacles you put up the more the people fight to overcome them.'

  Imagine the scene. The procession of the queens was still held in the city centre. The public packed the avenue to see the pretty brunettes pass by. Everything was going perfectly when a beautiful girl started to catch everyone's eye. From what was said she was truly spectacular. Tall and slender like a doll. She did not walk – she glided. From her pointed high heels she looked down on everyone around her. Other contenders were already considering sabotage. 'How about breaking one of her high heels?' thought one machiavellian mind. Suddenly, someone shouted: 'She's not a woman!' Eek! I wonder how many guys were already fantasising erotic thoughts?

  Nei Rezende invites me to his family home, which is a wooden hut on stilts. Outside, his father swings gently in a hammock. A black dog is tied to a chain and fast asleep. I climb the steps inside and stand on the uneven floor. I
can see it is a sporting household. By one wall is a set of shelves cluttered with medals and trophies. Behind them are posters of football teams and glamour models. The two things that Brazilians like best.

  Nei is a Big Kickabout pro. He could have joined one of Manaus's professional clubs, but he turned them down because he earns more playing in the 'amateur' competition. He was signed up for £500, a mobile phone, twenty sacks of cement and 2,000 bricks to build a house. As a professional he would be earning the minimum wage, which is £50 a month. In 1998, the last year for which figures are available, thirty people applied to the Amazonas Football Federation to have their professional status revoked so they could play in the Big Kickabout.

  Many of the richest teams are connected to local businesses. Nei says that some of his friends play for these teams in exchange for a full-time job. The Big Kickabout, they realise, offers a more secure future than a career as a professional player.

  The Big Kickabout is the best way to make a name for yourself in Amazonas football. Manaus has more than sixty neighbourhood leagues. 'All through the year, the main teams have scouts at the local championships,' says Nei. 'If anyone stands out they get his telephone number and sign them up.' It turns the tournament into a shop window of new players. Franca, the Big Kickabout's most illustrious alumnus, reached the national team. Franca headed the equaliser in a 1-1 draw against England at Wembley in May 2000.

  Nei hopes that the tournament will launch him too. 'I stopped studying at primary school. Football is the only thing I know how to do. My aim this year is to make a name for myself in the Big Kickabout.'

  Manaus has eight professional clubs. Only two, which play in the national second division, can afford to pay more than the minimum wage. The rest survive on nothing. To understand their penury, I visit America FC.

  America is based in a garden shed.

  The shed is situated across Amadeu Teixeira's patio. Amadeu, now well into his seventies, is a distinguished-looking gentleman. He has a narrow, withered face with sunken blue eyes and slicked back hair. When he pronounces 'America' it sounds like 'Omega' because he has no teeth.

  He leads me into the team 'headquarters'. It is crowded with medals, trophies, pictures and sports kits. There is a banner on the wall that says: 'Amadeu Teixeira: A Football Legend'. I do not disagree. Football coaches in Brazil are considered lucky if they last a season. Amadeu was made coach in 1956. He still is. I would wager that he is the longest-serving football coach in the world.

  America's largest trophy is taller than Amadeu himself. It has three tiers: a model of a footballer stands on what looks like a giant cocktail shaker, which stands on a metal platform supported by four columns. He tells me it is for America's greatest triumph: the 1994 Amazonas state championship. Amadeu won his first, and only, state title after thirty-eight years of trying.

  'Continuity is the key,' he mumbles.

  Amadeu's longevity seems all the more remarkable considering the lawlessness of Amazonas professional football. Lesser men would have given up decades ago.

  'We should have won the state championship several times before,' he claims. 'In the 1970s we played Nacional in the final. Nacional's president was also the state governor. He stood at the side of the pitch shouting to the referee to tell him to red card our players. From what I recall we had two players sent off.

  'In another year we played the final against Rodoviaria. We were winning when all of a sudden the lights went off. No one knew how to switch them back on. Can you believe that? So a rematch was arranged, which we lost.'

  Using a piece of paper to represent a pitch he uses his finger to trace where the ball went when America were in the 1988 final with Rio Negro. 'One of our players kicked the ball into the box. One of their players jumped to head the ball but it bounced in the wrong way into the goal. The linesman ran to the ref and made something up. The goal was then cancelled. The referee was a famous guy who had flown up from Rio especially. Everyone knew that he had lunch with Rio Negro and sat at the table with the president and the players.'

  Amadeu was a thirteen-year-old boy when he founded America with his schoolfriends. This is one aspect of his career, however, which is not out of the ordinary. Botafogo of Rio, for example, was founded by fourteen-year-olds. Amadeu had a career as an administrator in the mayor's office, but devoted his spare time to the club. He developed youth teams and even tried out other sports, like cycling, volleyball and basketball.

  One day in the 1960s he saw a girl playing football in the street. She was nicknamed Pelé and was as good a dribbler as the boys. It inspired him to develop the idea. He found enough girls to form two teams. But during a training session a legal official turned up. News of his innovation had reached Brasilia. The Minister of Education was sending him a message: women playing football was forbidden by law.

  Amadeu shows me a newspaper cutting from 1969. 'Up there in the Amazon there's women's football' reads the article, from a São Paulo newspaper, written as if nothing was more amusing and exotic. Four years later, far less controversially, a woman's place in Amazonian football became wearing a bikini and competing for Kickabout Queen.

  As well as the professional state league, the Amazonas Football Federation organises the Copa dos Rios, the Rivers Cup. It is an amateur tournament between teams representing the state's municipalities. Since Amazonas is three times the size of France and the principal mode of transport is by boat, the competition is perhaps the best example of the lengths Brazilians will go to play football. Referees from Manaus will often spend weeks travelling up rivers to get to matches.

  Municipalities invest heavily in the Rivers Cup because it is one of the only ways that distant and isolated communities socialise with each other. 'There is no other cultural activity that integrates the municipalities like the Rivers Cup. It is the only event that really brings them together,' I am told by Fernando Seabra, a manager of the Amazonas Association of Municipalities.

  This is not entirely true. The Big Kickabout also involves teams from the remote rainforest. In 2000, ten Amazonas municipalities will have their own kickabout championships (with queens, of course). They will take place in villages and towns stretching to 350 miles from Manaus. The winners of the upstate tournaments play-off for a place in the Big Kickabout's final rounds. If you include all the affiliated competitions, total participation in the Big Kickabout doubles. In 1995, it reached some 30,000 footballers.

  The score was getting humiliating. On the goal that made it 4-0 a supporter of the losing team ran on to the pitch wanting to savage the ref. Francisco was on the verge of cuffing the official when, faster than a ray of sunlight, Eurico entered the scene. Eurico was the central defender and as big and tough as a bouncer. Francisco suddenly recoiled. He was not stupid. He kneeled on the ground and pleaded with the ref to save his skin. They all struck a deal. Francisco was a cab driver. He agreed to give the ref a lift home. Two decades later Francisco still drives a cab. Whenever he passes the ref he always stops and offers him a lift. Everyone thinks he's still scared of Eurico.

  Amazonas, despite being the second-least densely populated state in Brazil, is paradoxically one of the most urban. Half of its population lives in Manaus. Demographically, it is like an overpopulated island surrounded by an almost empty sea. When I take a taxi to an outlying neighbourhood, where the city is pushing into the rainforest, I am astonished by the monotony that I see from my window. We could be in any poor city in Latin America. For most of its citizens, the Amazon is urban brown, not a lush equatorial green.

  At 7am, after an hour's drive, my taxi pulls up outside House 16, Street 8, Block 13. It is a small lot of land with a tiny hut, where Paulinho Jorge de Moraes lives with his pet cat. Inside, yellowing posters of Rio de Janeiro football teams are stuck on the walls. Paulinho is the only man to have been part of the Big Kickabout organising committee every year since 1973. When I arrive he is already in his ref's outfit. He has a smile of gold-capped teeth and is wearing gold bracelets, a go
ld signet ring and chains of gold necklaces with lucky charms. He would not look out of place in a pub in the North East of England.

  If one man best symbolises the fantastical nature of the Big Kickabout, then it is Paulinho. His friends advise to discount 30 per cent of what he says as wild fantasy. He claims to be 5ft tall. It is an opportunistic overestimate.

  Perhaps the only statement concerning Paulinho that is not an exaggeration is that the Big Kickabout has defined his life. It has empowered him with a self-respect and citywide prestige that would have been otherwise unimaginable.

  'Ever since I was really small I always wanted to be a referee. My mum was always against it because she thought I would get beat up too much, but with time she got used to it,' says Paulinho, who is fifty-two years old. 'When you are a referee what is important is not size. What is important is an understanding of the rules.'

  Paulinho is a fearless disciplinarian. In twenty-seven years of Big Kickabouts he claims to have sent off 5,982 players. I sense that he is less a referee than a one-man war against the regular-sized. 'Normally I'll send off between eighteen and twenty players a weekend. It's much more common for me to send someone off than not.' Everyone needs to be careful when Paulinho is on the pitch. Once, an angry supporter called him 'Bar of Motel Soap' for being bijou and perfectly formed. 'I showed her the red card,' he snaps.

  I ask if he has ever suffered violence. Paulinho tells me he has been chased off the pitch by a woman with a broom and given eight stitches when a player punched him in the head. 'The police found him and took him to me and asked me to beat him up,' he adds. 'Now he is one of my best mates.' Another time he sent off a man who was as 'big as a monkey'. The man had to be restrained from invading the pitch and retaliating. But when, that evening, they bumped into each other in a bar they shook hands. Paulinho says: 'He invited me to a brothel, paid for drinks and women to come to my table. It's these memories that makes the Kickabout such a beautiful event.'