Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  The footage of the exhibition itself includes most of the domestic and foreign pavilions, nearly all of which were built in the well-worn style of Portuguese neocolonial mansions or as French Belle Époque confections. Whereas world’s fairs in Europe and North America had heavily featured experiments in modern architecture, industrial products, machinery and technological and consumer innovations, Rio was dominated by food processing and exporters. The seaplane Santa Cruz aside, the most technologically advanced elements of the exhibition were the roller coaster and the roundabouts at the amusement park. The organizers’ best energies were reserved for the themes of health, hygiene and sanitation, with exhibits and lectures pointing to the successes of Rio’s recent period of rebuilding and, in keeping with the eugenic positivism of the Republic, looking forward to the development of a healthy nation through the creation of a physical culture. These points were driven home by staging a host of South American sporting championships alongside the fair: basketball, swimming, water polo, athletics, boxing and sailing. In a rare concession to the notion that indigenous Brazil might have something to contribute to the nation’s culture, a group of Pareci Indians were brought to Rio, as part of the same thinking. First encountered by a Brazilian army officer in 1915, the Pareci had developed their own ball game, zinucati. It was a version of head tennis meets keepy-uppy using an inflated rubber ball. Dressed in Fluminense kits, with their hair heavily waxed and styled in a European – even Edwardian British – coiffure, they performed at the Estádio das Laranjeiras to the perplexity of most who attended.

  However, none of these events had the drawing power or acquired the wider significance accorded to the South American Football Championship which was held as part of the show in late 1922. In anticipation of the kinds of crowds that had attended the 1919 tournament, the Estádio das Laranjeiras was expanded to accommodate 25,000 people, though even this was exceeded by the huge crowd that attended the final march; an estimated 35,000 people squeezed inside, with thousands of others in the streets or precariously perched on the hills around the stadium. As before, banks and shops closed early, and speakers were put up for the crowds that gathered on the city’s main avenues and squares. The tournament proved to be a more boisterous and controversial affair than that of 1919, with some of Brazil’s games experiencing minor pitch invasions, and during the game against Uruguay what were described by the press as ‘scenes of real vandalism’. The Rio police department resorted to putting notices in the papers warning the public that they would use their full legal authority to control the crowds.

  The five-team tournament produced a three-way tie after the completion of all the games – Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay all on five points. The Uruguayans, who had bitterly contested what they perceived to be biased refereeing by a Brazilian in their game against Paraguay, refused to take any further part. Brazil went on to crush Paraguay 3–0 in the final game and claim the mantle for the Brazilian nation in the eyes of both politicians and the football public. The absence of Arthur Friedenreich from the final (though he had played in earlier games), indeed of any of the other players of African descent who were emerging in Brazilian football, made it an incomplete avatar. Yet players were drawn this time from both Rio and São Paulo, and as the surnames of the winning squad – Kuntz, Palamone, Domingues, Barto – suggest, Brazil’s German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese strains were all present. Certainly O Imparcial thought it a universal triumph, leading with the headline, ‘All Brazil rejoices at this time with a deserved victory’. Gazeta, celebrating the country’s victories in water polo and sailing as well, wrote, ‘Brazil – Champion of land and sea’. Senator Benjamin Barroso proposed that the squad should split the gate money from the Paraguay game, over $50,000, and while this was no fortune for the fifteen players it was still perhaps twenty times what a labourer might earn in a week. The proposal was approved in the Brazilian Congress despite widespread press criticism and its contravention of the CBD’s hitherto strict amateurism. One cartoon offered a defence of the payments, showing four members of the team, all bruised, bandaged and on crutches, telling the female embodiment of the Republic: ‘And now what we want is a life pension, because, after all, we were wounded in the “defence of the country”.’7

  Others worried about the impact of the game on international relations and its over importance in political life. The rancour and the violence of the games with Uruguay, in particular, alarmed some, and given Brazil’s diplomatic efforts to secure a seat at the League of Nations in preference to its small neighbour, the clashes took on a distinctly political quality. Federal Deputy Carlos Garcia actually proposed stopping international games altogether. Meanwhile, in a cartoon entitled ‘The New Ministries’, President Pessoa was shown in his office where a note announced that he would be ‘offside’ during lunch hours. His litter bin was hung with a sign reading ‘goal’. A footballer standing in his office asks: ‘Why doesn’t the government create a ministry of football? Wouldn’t it be more useful than any other?’8

  Such a ministry, such dilemmas would have been a pleasing diversion for Pessoa’s presidential successors Artur Bernardes and Washington Luís, who tried to hold the nation together over the next eight years as they dealt with persistent military mutinies. The most serious was a revolt in São Paulo which saw another group of ultra-nationalist junior officers take the city before retreating into the jungle where they eluded loyal federal troops for three years. The status quo was creaking; the polity of the elites was under attack. Amateur football would be next.

  III

  One indicator of the intensity of football mania in Brazil’s biggest cities in the 1920s was the ever-growing space devoted to the sport in the press. It had steadily expanded from perhaps half or a single page to six or seven in many newspapers, often making the front page as well as the back page and forming the subject of innumerable comments, crônicas and cartoons. In keeping with the increasing popularity of the game among the urban working and middle classes, the language of the press began to change too, with many English phrases and words transmuting into Brazilian Portuguese. Most obviously football or foot-ball was becoming futebol; shoot mutated into chutar, backs became beques, rough translation turned corners into escanterios and forwards into atacantes. But in time Brazilian Portuguese would develop its own rich and complex idioms: Didi’s free kicks that dropped sharply from the peak of their trajectory became a folha seca – dry leaf.

  Brazil’s first radio transmission was broadcast during the 1922 centenary exhibition by engineers of the American firm Westinghouse. Over the next four years radio stations were established in Rio and São Paulo broadcasting an eclectic mix of opera, classical music and educational talks. It was only a matter of time before the new technology was swept up by the country’s football mania. In 1931 Nicolau Tuma of São Paulo’s Rádio Educadora Paulista broadcast the first live commentary of a football match, from Campo da Floresta. With a voice like a master of ceremonies at an exclusive dinner, Tuma welcomed the ladies and gentlemen of radioland to the game, describing in some detail, and for many for the first time, the actual laws of football.

  The expansion of the sports pages and the arrival of radio were themselves products of the rising interest of paying crowds at football, which began regularly to reach 10,000 and more for the big local derbies. Crowds like this meant money, and money and competition inevitably led to teams paying their squads to train and play. The elite clubs in São Paulo were wise to this as early as 1913, when they broke away from the Liga Paulista and created their own competition, unwilling to mix it with the proletarians and new immigrants of Corinthians and Palestra Itália. Indeed they were hard-line enough to expel fellow secessionists Scottish Wanderers in 1916, who were openly paying their players. The city reverted to a single league in 1917, but after another few years of turning a blind eye to the hidden professionalism of the game there was, in 1924, a final effort by the leading elite team, CA Paulistano, to run a real amateur league. It lasted
five years, but the crowds and the players had moved on. In 1929 the league fell apart and CA Paulistano, among the founders of football in the city, withdrew from playing the sport altogether.

  Professionalism remained illegal and, for those at the summit of Rio football, immoral. Rivadavia Meyer, the president of Flamengo and the Metropolitan Athletic Sports Association (AMEA) league, spoke for many of his class. Reflecting on Brazil’s defeat in the 1923 Copa América, with a team made up only of Rio amateurs, he said that it was better to have lost than ‘taken the Paulista mercenaries who only run after the ball for money’. Later in the decade, faced by a rising tide of professionalism in the game, he verged on the splenetic. A professional was, he said, ‘a gigolo who exploits a prostitute. The club gives him all the material necessary to play football and enjoy himself with the game and he wants to earn money as well? I will not allow this in Flamengo. Professionalism degrades the man.’

  Amateurism also retained the virtue of excluding poor Brazilians, including non-whites, from the inner sanctum of elite football, a prospect that was both socially and sportingly unappealing. Rivadavia and his ilk preferred not to mix with them, but above all not to lose to them either, and both became increasingly likely as the decade wore on. The key moment came in 1923 when Vasco da Gama fielded the best black players, played the best football, drew the biggest crowds, and won the league in Rio. The team’s stars were its four black players: Ceci, Nicolino, Bolão and Nelson da Conceição.

  Vasco were not the only club in Rio prepared to field black players and to pay them, but they were always the most likely to make it work. Founded by the small businessmen and merchants of the Portuguese community, they and their sons were eager to play sport but would never have had the free time available to the aristocrats and university students who turned out for the clubs of the Zona Sul. They had therefore always recruited players from beyond their social circle. The Portuguese community was right in the heart of the city’s burgeoning industrial sector, where Vasco’s stadium was also situated. At the ground, in the workplace and on the street, Vasco’s members rubbed shoulders with the poor. Given the intensely commercial character of their working lives, they saw no moral barrier to paying players. And with the community’s desire to make its mark on the city, they were ready to invest. From the lowest levels of the Rio league in the years after the First World War, Vasco were promoted to the top division and then won it.

  Shocked, humiliated and threatened, the grander clubs withdrew from the league, deploring the hidden professionalism of Vasco, and created their own AMEA league in 1924. However, crowds and takings were down without Vasco as the public flocked to them and the league that they had joined. América, Bangu, Botafogo, Flamengo and Fluminense were forced back to the negotiating table and asked Vasco and two of the other leading popular clubs, São Cristóvão and Andaraí, to join them. The price of re-inclusion was the introduction of the AMEA card – a document that had to be completed by hand and under supervision by every player before every game, detailing name, address, date and place of birth, as well as addresses of place of work and study. The league actually created a three-man commission to ensure the process was implemented. It was, like the operation of the Brazilian electoral franchise, a crude instrument to try and exclude the illiterate and thus in effect to exclude the poor and black semi-professionals. Vasco responded by sending theirs to night school.

  The league then started investigating players’ finances and employment status but Vasco’s directors outflanked them by giving all their stars ghost jobs and real salaries in their businesses. Vasco’s fans bought up every lottery ticket they could in a competition for a new car, all in the name of one of their star players, who ended up with the wheels. Vasco won the title again in 1929 and the authorities relented, abolishing the card but keeping professionalism hidden.

  Black players were not welcome in all clubs: São Paulo informally excluded them until the late 1920s. Independent black teams and leagues were reported in the city as early as 1914, but the first black versus white game was not held until 1927, when a series of matches were played on the day celebrating the abolition of slavery. Grêmio in Porto Alegre remained resolutely all-white; América in Rio saw its membership completely split over the fielding of the club’s first black player, Manteiga. Fausto was loved at Vasco, but the press would still frame him as a hungry black man when he went for the ball ‘as if it were a plate of food’.9

  The real measure of Vasco’s rise was its new stadium. The Estádio São Januário, designed by the Portuguese émigré architect Ricardo Severo, was built in just ten months, opening in April 1927. At a stroke, the centre of gravity of the city’s football moved from Fluminense’s Laranjeiras to the north. São Januário was the biggest and most modern arena in the country, with a capacity of 50,000. The stands themselves were a horseshoe of terraces with a single seated area on one side for the club’s directors and paying members (sócios). The clean and simple lines of both stands and the roof contrasted with the main external façade: it was a riot of neocolonial detailing, gables, balconies, finials and Maltese crosses, stained-glass windows and ornamental blue tiling – a suitable juxtaposition of Brazil’s European colonial past and its urban modernity. Vasco’s standing was underlined by the presence at the stadium’s opening of representatives of state, church and celebrity, including President Washington Luís and five cabinet ministers. Having recently lifted the state of siege under which Rio had been run for the previous four years, the politicians received a three-minute ovation. The stadium was blessed by Cardinal Leme, the Archbishop of Rio, and the Portuguese aviator Sarmento de Beires, who had recently flown the first night-time air crossing of the South Atlantic between Lisbon and Rio, cut a symbolic ribbon before the kick-off between Vasco and Santos. Santos won a wild game 5–3, and Waldenyr Caldas reports their centre forward claiming, ‘They build a ballroom. We put on a show!’10

  IV

  National politics, like Brazilian football, had reached an impasse by the early 1930s. The elite clubs maintained their rule over the game, still arguing that the ideology of amateurism, born in the early days of the Republic, was morally intact and that the forces of commercialism and the social challenge from below were resistible. In national politics the old order seemed to be functioning as ever when in March 1930 Júlio Prestes, the establishment candidate for the presidency, was elected and planned to spend what little public money he had shoring up the coffee oligarchs as they struggled with a fall in global prices rather than attend to the economic pain elsewhere. Since the Wall Street crash of the previous year Brazil’s economy had shrunk by almost 5 per cent, as it would again the following year. Despite mobilizing a broad coalition of the south and the north-east against São Paulo, the challenger Getúlio Vargas, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, found that the coffee lobby’s control of the presidency was immovable.

  In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Brazilian national team, supported by government money, made the journey in July 1930 to Montevideo to play in the inaugural World Cup. Once again it was an all-white team representing Brazil and they were shocked by an opening defeat to Yugoslavia. Brazil did thrash the Bolivians 3–0 but they went home from the tournament empty handed.

  Vargas and his allies had been expecting defeat in the election, and had ceased to place any legitimacy on the now notoriously corrupt electoral system. Vargas was not alone in thinking this. The nation’s jurists, lawyers, artists and intellectuals had, for the most part, abandoned any defence of the polity, increasingly rejecting its implausible sense of national identity, and had set about exposing its many limitations. As the succession of military revolts and mutinies demonstrated, the very institution which had created the Republic in the first place now had enlisted men who would not fight for it and officers who were no longer convinced of its value. The Old Republic stood on increasingly unstable foundations.

  Vargas had contemplated organizing a coup immediately after the election but
had chosen to wait his moment. When his running mate, Pessoa, was assassinated, in what was in actual fact the consequence of a romantic entanglement, Vargas took his chance along with a number of sympathetic state governors who mobilized their militias and persuaded some federal army units to join them. They marched on Rio in October 1930. Incumbent president Washington Luís was persuaded to stand down by the high command of the military units in Rio. They held the city for a few days and even imagined themselves the government for one or two of them, but on Vargas’s arrival they handed the presidency to him. Over the next two years Vargas began the process of centralizing and concentrating power in the Brazilian federal state that would characterize the next decade and a half of his rule. He dissolved Congress, retired lukewarm supporters and regionalists from the upper echelons of the army, ruled for the most part using emergency law and removed all but one elected state governor, replacing them with administrators whose first loyalties lay with him.

  The Old Republic fell for three key reasons: the external economic pressures exerted by a changing global economy; the destruction of any shred of ideological coherence or legitimacy; and finally a decisive set of reforming actions from a new group of elites. The fall of amateurism and the end of Brazilian elite football can be traced to a similar mix of circumstances. The global pressure came in the form of competition for players from increasingly wealthy and openly commercial foreign football cultures. The process began in 1925 when Enrico Marone Cinzano, the Italian industrialist and owner of the Cinzano drinks company and Torino football club, went on a business trip to Buenos Aires. While there he saw striker Julio Libonatti play for Newell’s Old Boys and signed him on the spot. In 1928 the all-South American final of the Amsterdam Olympic football tournament made the depth of talent on that continent apparent across Europe: offers of signing-on fees, cars, flats and fabulous salaries proved irresistible. Players of Italian descent were particularly welcomed by both the clubs and the Italian Fascist authorities who intended that they represent the mother country. In 1930 Amílcar, the great striker at Palestra Itália, and the Fantoni brothers had left São Paulo to play for Lazio in Rome. In 1931 Italian agents came looking again in Brazil and in particular to São Paulo, where the vast majority of Italian immigrants had settled. In one sweep they took nine of the best players from Corinthians and Palestra Itália. For some it was about more than money, it was about pride and respect. One of the players, Rizetti, argued, ‘Aren’t theatre artists esteemed and applauded? Well, I’ll also be an artist of the feet.’ Amílcar was in no doubt what he was going to do and why: