Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  The relentless demands of industrialized warfare have been a powerful catalyst for the creation of national state institutions and a collective sense of national identity, but Brazil never experienced this. Although its military was kept busy fighting a gruelling nineteenth-century war with its Paraguayan neighbours, suppressing independent ex-slave communities in the north-east, putting down a rash of mutinies, regional rebellions and revolts, and even sending a brigade to fight on the Allied side in Italy in the closing years of the Second World War, none of these conflicts could serve as a crucible of national myth, heroic triumph or collective fortitude. Given Brazil’s calamitously low level of literacy, the creation of a national public sphere through a shared language and literature was not a plausible strategy either.

  In this light, Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s apparent flippancy belies a profound problem for Brazilian nationalists of the early twentieth century. At the most protean moment of Brazil’s search to define itself, the answer could not simply be imposed from above on white, literate and elite terms. Brazil henceforth would have to incorporate some notion of its African demographics, its complex ethnicities, and the non-literate tastes and practices of its emerging urban popular classes. Brazil was, in actual fact, rich in precisely these cultural forms: popular music from choro to the samba and their accompanying dances and carnivals; candomblé, the generic term for African religious and spiritual practices forged from the hybrid of African cultures compressed under slavery; umbanda, the emerging urban form of candomblé that actively mixed African spirits and Catholic saints, pagan ritual and the Roman sacraments. Yet despite the various attempts made by Brazil’s elite to appropriate these forms, and to integrate at some level the African contribution to Brazilian life, they did not carry a sense of modernity. On the contrary they remained rooted in deeply antiquated cultures. Brazilian nationalism required a cultural practice that could encompass the full spectrum of the nation’s complex social and racial hierarchies, and that acknowledged the nation’s past but set it on a course for the future. Football, especially in its initial association with Britain, the most modern nation of the time, provided just that. It was in this context that the game, as a physical bodily practice, as a collective ritual, as a carnivalesque spectacular and as a historical narrative, open to all Brazilians, acquired its status in the national pantheon; a position solidified by the global success and poetic acclaim of the national team.

  Although football was introduced by the British in São Paulo, and initially played by a predominantly expatriate body of players, it is remarkable how swiftly and completely these influences were overtaken. By the end of the First World War, just twenty years after the first recorded games had been played in São Paulo, the British influence had dwindled to almost nothing. Portuguese vernacular rapidly replaced the remnants of English in the game’s vocabulary. Corinthians, the team of working-class São Paulo, retained their Anglo-Hellenic name, but the gentlemanly, amateur ethos of elite British sports culture was on its last legs and by the end of the 1930s it had collapsed altogether. British football, represented by touring professional teams, was already seen as profoundly different from the emerging Brazilian style of play. Over the next half-century, as well as being the most popular participatory sport, with the biggest crowds and the overwhelming favourite of media audiences of all kinds, football would become a subject of inquiry and depiction in almost every form of Brazilian popular culture and high art.

  Whereas the response of the visual arts in twentieth-century Britain to football can be boiled down to a single Lowry canvas, football has appeared in the oeuvre of dozens of Brazil’s leading artists – from the nationalist surrealism of Cândido Portinari to the abstract geometries of Ivan Serpa to the pop art of Claudio Tozzi. Its writers and novelists have, again and again, found space for the game in their literary landscapes: from Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, to José Lins do Rego’s epic saga of life on Rio’s periphery, Água-mãe, from the urbane and witty crônicas of Clarice Lispector to the sharp short stories of Edilberto Coutinho’s Maracanã, Adeus. The game has also been a thread and connector across the many spheres of Brazilian life. João Cabral Melo Neto was a diplomat who wrote poetry and his poetry featured Pelé. Pelé, a footballer, has gone on to be a businessman, the minister of culture and a singer and composer. The composer Ary Barroso crossed over into football commentary and then to municipal politics. Politicians regularly seek the presidency of clubs, while club presidents try to make the transition to formal politics. The crowd can become musicians, while musicians have endlessly written and composed songs for players and clubs. Poets and dramatists commentate on football. Football commentators like Washington Rodrigues and João Saldanha have become coaches.

  When Globo’s leading commentator Galvão Bueno criticizes the Seleção’s opponents for a fumble or misplaced pass, he says with a mixture of pity and contempt, ‘They don’t have the same intimacy with the ball.’ It is a tone that assures you that he and his listeners are quite convinced that whatever its origins, whatever the competition, it is only in Brazil that football is truly at home, sunk deep into the web of meanings and memory that the nation has spun around it.

  III

  This kind of intimacy with the ball is a mixed blessing, or as musician and composer José Miguel Wisnik has more floridly described it in his 2008 book, Veneno Remédio – a poison remedy.4 In part this is because football is an unpredictable game. All the statistical evidence reinforces the observation that on any given day the worst team can win, that favourites are more vulnerable than in other sports, that the place for the random, the chaotic and the unexpected is surprisingly large in football. To gauge if not the ultimate fate, then at least the spirit and feel of the nation by the performance of one’s national football team is a risky choice for a culture, even one like Brazil with a preference for ritual over reason; but the trade-off between the instrumental logic of winning and the creative aesthetic of play has, as Roberto DaMatta makes clear, its own wisdom and logic:

  In futebol there is art, dignity, genius, bad luck, gods and demons, freedom and fate, flags, hymns and tears, and above all the discovery that although Brazil is bad at a lot of things, it is good with the ball. It is a football champion, which is very important. After all, it is better to be a champion in samba, carnival and football than in war or the sale of rockets.5

  The real price of making football the avatar of the nation is that the game’s deep connections to Brazil’s social structures, economic institutions and political processes are also laid bare. For the most part these have made much less edifying viewing, for Brazilians and foreign observers alike, than the game itself. The history of Brazilian football, like the history of the Brazilian nation, must reckon with some harsh sociological realities. First, Brazil’s location in the global economy has, despite everything, remained as a supplier of raw materials, from soya beans to footballers, so that Brazil reaps only a fraction of the economic value of its fertility.

  Second, Brazil’s economy and social relations are marked by an almost unparalleled level of inequality, across region, class and race: the global north and the global south sit side by side in Brazil’s biggest cities. Social hierarchies and patterns of authority established centuries ago still persist. This is both the engine room of Brazil’s endless conveyor belt of footballing aspiration and talent, and the source of so many of the game’s pathologies: its harsh and often unfair treatment of players and fans; its persistent racism and sexism; and the systematic advantage that accrues to the already powerful, be they clubs or players.

  Third, Brazilian football operates in a political and administrative culture that has struggled to live up to the democratic aspirations of its constitutions. In part this has been a consequence of the role of the military in arbitrating political conflicts and their predilection for coups and periods of governmental authority. However, even in their absence, the Brazilian state has been riddled with corruption and nepotism, has a weak s
ense of the public good, and has a dismal record of transparency and accountability. Increasingly its clubs and its football federations have been run on this model. Brazil, of course, has no monopoly on such practices in the world of football, but it is an ugly, vicious and chaotic football polity nonetheless.

  Fourth, Brazil is a violent society. This is nothing new. The limited reach of the rule of law, the prevalence of weapons, and the erratic probity of its multiple police forces and militias, together with the long shadow of the country’s history of forced labour, have all left their mark. Over the last three decades, approaching two hundred people have died in football-related violence in Brazil and thousands have been injured. Fights between players, officials, police and fans at both the highest level and the most marginal grassroots of the game are tragically common.

  This book is a short history of the many dimensions of Brazilian football: its brilliance, its magic, its style and its dash, and the fabulous myths and stories that have been constructed around it; its tragedies and its miseries, the light it shines on the economic and political injustices of Brazilian life; and, just occasionally, the example it offers of a society that might underline Brazil’s conviviality and creativity rather than its brutality and conservatism.

  1

  Champagne Football: The Game of the Belle Époque, 1889–1922

  Gentlemen and Players: Fluminense host the professionals of Exeter City, 1914.

  The first bug fell in Campinas, miles away; it was a caterpillar. The second bug fell thereabouts too, it was a woolly bear; the leather ball fell in a field. It was thus that Mannape introduced the coffee bug, Jique the cotton boll weevil and Macunaíma the football; three of the main pests in the country today.

  Mário de Andrade, 1928

  Football is as important in Rio de Janeiro today as the theatre is in Paris.

  João Carlos, 1919

  I

  Football as popular curse, football as high art; the magical invention of an indigenous Brazilian anti-hero or the centrepiece of the nation’s distinctive tropical urban modernity; either way, as the account of football in Mário de Andrade’s epic novel Macunaíma and this description of the game in a Rio newspaper crônica suggest, Brazil’s elite were not merely playing and watching football in the first three decades of the twentieth century, but thinking and writing about it, asking it to stand for something important, even profound, about the emerging Brazilian nation.1 Andrade’s novel takes indigenous folklore as the backbone of his tale. Macunaíma, described as a ‘hero without a character’, a shape-shifter possessing more than one life and voice, is sent on a long journey from the rainforests of Amazonia to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in search of a lost amulet. Playful and surreal, the book was a bravura combination of ancient mythic narrative and fractured modernist prose, Latin magic realism before the term had been coined, its meanings and symbols as slippery as its characters. Football might be a curse, but it was a Brazilian curse, not an import. In fact, by the 1930s, Andrade was a quiet football fanatic, exclaiming of his favourite player, ‘What a dancer!’ and complaining of the ‘three hundred and fifty reasons that keep me from the stadium’.2

  He has not been alone in the impulse to invent a Brazilian football creation myth. Nationalist historians of physical education have tried to claim that indigenous ball games provided both context and example for the emergence of Brazil’s distinctive modern sporting culture. In Carlos Diegues’s film Quilombo (1984), set in the independent communities of north-eastern Brazil created by runaway slaves and paupers of all kinds, one scene depicts two boys practising capoeira. From off screen, from nowhere, a ball appears in the air and without breaking step the boys incorporate it into their wheeling and swerving. There is not a scintilla of truth in any of these claims, but that is hardly the point.

  More prosaically there are scattered reports in the Brazilian press, as well as the memories of elite Brazilians recalling the 1870s and 1880s, which reveal that slaves, the urban poor and dockworkers attempted to improvise some version of the strange but magnetic ball game they saw played by British merchant seamen, while wealthy schoolboys tried to mimic their footballing peers encountered on visits to Europe.3 There is no evidence, however, that they possessed a real football or a copy of the FA’s Laws of the Game, first printed in 1863. For both of these objects, Brazil would await the return from his English public school education of Charles Miller, son of a Scottish émigré father and an Anglo-Brazilian mother, herself connected to a great São Paulo coffee dynasty. Disembarking in 1894, he carried with him in his kit bag two leather footballs and a copy of the rule book. Both would spread with the speed and self-replicating energy of the most lethal weevil or virulent bug.

  At first glance imperial Brazil did not appear fertile soil for football or indeed sport of any kind. As it was a slave economy for over three centuries, all forms of physical labour and exertion carried a subaltern taint; the ruling elite disdained work and, given the epidemiology of the day, preferred to refrain from close contact with large gatherings of people. Luíz Edmundo, an early twentieth-century historian of Rio under the Empire, recalled, ‘Until the end of the century we were, in fact, indifferent to the pleasures and benefits of sport.’ The word ‘sport’ had actually appeared in Rio’s newspapers between 1840 and 1860, but its meaning was closer to the idea of games or an entertainment, referring for the most part to the city’s increasing interest in gambling, card games and bullfights.4 From the 1870s onwards, spurred by visits to Europe as well as the tastes of a new wave of prosperous and professional European migrants to Rio, the city’s elite loosened up and began playing. First, they started swimming, making the shift from therapeutic bathing to recreational paddling and eventually competitive swimming. A flotilla of bath houses was erected in the Baía de Guanabara at the end of the century and they were used by male and, for the first time, female swimmers. There were also new crazes for skating, cycling and athletics, and so by 1885 Rio possessed two skating rinks, a velodrome (as did São Paulo), swimming pools, gymnasiums and clubs where, in addition, gentlemen could fence, wrestle and play billiards. In the British-dominated clubs cricket flourished, but it made few converts. Established papers and magazines found more space for sports news, and new journals like O Sport, started in 1891, and O Remo, first published in 1900, wrote about nothing else. The pages of every publication began to carry adverts for sports-sponsored products and medicinal tonics.

  Yet all of these games were dwarfed in popularity by Rio’s favourites – rowing and horse racing – for here alone the athletic was made spectacular, and sport mixed most easily with socializing. The first organized horse racing took place in the 1810s, initiated by the colony of British merchants. By 1895 Rio possessed four racecourses, with tram routes adapted to their location and local press brimming on a daily basis with rumour, review and preview of the racing scene. While organizationally the sport was in the hands of the rich who owned the clubs, the course and the horses, attendance was for virtually everybody. As the Gazeta headline read in 1875, ‘Let’s go to the races! Rich and poor, men and old men, old women and young women.’5 In addition to the prestigious Jockey and Derby clubs, whose facilities and architecture matched the wealth of their patrons, more basic tracks were available in the working-class neighbourhoods of Prado Guarani and São Cristóvão. Such was the fervour for the races that the rich were prepared to travel across town and slum it there; there was not only the frisson of downward social mobility available, but also illegal betting.

  Horse racing, for all its pleasures, had an ineradicable rural and agrarian feel. It was the spectacle of the past. For a more modern edge, Rio turned first to rowing. Based in the now exclusive and multi-sport social clubs of the beaches of the Zona Sul, the craze for rowing marked a shift among young Cariocas (as the city’s inhabitants are known) from merely watching sports to playing them as well. By the early 1880s up to 30,000 people would line the beaches and quays that overlooked Rio’s bays to watch boat
s compete, and spend the day drinking and mingling before making the short walk to a beachside house party or the luxurious dining rooms of the rowing clubhouses. Indeed the sport was so popular that in 1903 the mayor of Rio, Pereira Passos, won plaudits and votes for spending public money on improved regatta facilities in Botafogo. It was to be rowing’s high point. Just a year later, the organizers of one of Rio’s biggest regattas wrote to the organizers of the city’s football matches begging them not to hold their games on the same day as their event, for the crowds they were drawing so depleted theirs.

  II

  Charles Miller, with the kind of sentimentality in his voice that suggested he had fully acculturated to Brazilian norms, recalled his return from England in October 1894 to Santos, the port city to the south of São Paulo:

  On the quay . . . solemn, as if he were at a funeral, my father was waiting for me to disembark holding my degree certificate. But in fact I appeared in front of him with two footballs, one in each hand . . . The Old Man, surprised, enquired: