Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  I’m off to Italy, I’m tired of being an amateur in football when such a condition has stopped existing a long time ago, masked by a hypocritical system of tips which clubs give to their players while keeping most of the income for themselves. For 20 years I have offered my modest services to Brazilian football. What has happened? The clubs got rich and I have nothing. I am going to the country that knows how to pay for the players’ skill.11

  The São Paulo press was generally sympathetic to their position, one writer arguing that the public should not be concerned about the views of ‘half a dozen football magnates, who live almost exclusively from the exertions of these players’.12

  No Italian club came knocking at the door of the new generation of black Brazilian stars, but they found their way to the money anyway. When Vasco da Gama went on a tour of Iberia in 1930, Fausto and Jaguaré got off the bus at Barcelona and on to the payroll. The threat from Italian clubs had forced the pace of commercialism in both Uruguay and Argentina, and as legal professionalism inevitably approached, the wage rates available to the best began to climb. In 1932 the two leading Brazilian black players of the day, Leônidas da Silva and Domingos da Guia, headed for Uruguay to rivals Peñarol and Nacional respectively. Ideological and moral appeals were useless; not only was the model of elite amateurism impossible to sustain, but it was common knowledge that all the old elite clubs were now in on the act themselves. Antônio Gomes de Avelar, president of América in Rio, broke the silence in 1932 by admitting that he paid their players. He called for everyone else to come clean and go professional. In 1933 both the Carioca and the Paulista Championships were openly professional; they would soon be followed by the emerging regional football centres of Minas Gerais, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul.

  The decisive break with the Old Republic in politics would require more than just external pressure and coming clean. Opposition to the centralizing and authoritarian nationalism of Vargas’s coalition was strongest in São Paulo, and in July 1932 the state was in armed rebellion against the government in Rio. São Paulo mobilized for war, built its own ramshackle arms industry and sent Arthur Friedenreich and a hundred other football players to the front. Nicolau Tuma, the pioneer football commentator on the city’s radio stations, swapped the press box for a foxhole and reported on the battle for the city; it barely made it to halftime. São Paulo was outgunned and outnumbered, and surrendered to Vargas, who was as generous a victor as he was ruthless an opponent. He disarmed the city but did not destroy it. So gentle was the occupation that the Paulista Championship, rudely interrupted by this short-lived conflict, was resumed and concluded before Christmas. Better still, in the opening game of the following season, the first openly professional game in Brazilian football’s history, Friedenreich helped São Paulo beat Santos 5–1 at the grand old age of thirty-eight.

  3

  Brasilidade: Football and the New Order, 1932–1950

  Brazilian dreamtime: the nationalist surrealism of Cândido Portinari’s Futebol.

  Flamengo’s Tricampeonato is more important to the people of Brazil than the battle of Stalingrad.

  José Lins do Rego, 1943

  I

  José Lins do Rego, one of the leading Brazilian novelists of the 1940s, was prone to controversy in his newspaper writings, but in the early months of 1943 as the Carioca Championship headed towards its conclusion, few in Brazil would have disagreed with him. Secluded from the firestorm, by distance and neutrality, for the first four years of the Second World War, and barely touched by it for the few years in which it was part of the grand alliance, Brazil spent much of the 1930s and 1940s tending to itself. These were two decades during which the unfinished business of the Old Republic could be settled: the incorporation of the new popular classes into politics, and the creation of a sense of Brazilian national identity more plausible than the narrow European elite model of the early twentieth century. Football would play a key role in both of these.

  Getúlio Vargas, who had come to power in the coup of 1930 and won the short civil war with São Paulo in 1932, ruled for another two years by endlessly extending the duration of the country’s emergency laws while a constitutional convention drew up a new plan for the polity. In 1933 it completed its work. The constitution was agreed, women acquired the vote and Congress made Vargas president for the next four years, after which elections would be held.

  Having dealt with the regionalist threat to the Brazilian nation-state, Vargas now saw off challenges from the left and the right. For three years the communists and their allies in the Aliança Nacional Libertadora fought a propaganda war and street battles with Brazil’s very own uniformed fascist party, the Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB) led by Plínio Salgado, and both looked to directly challenge the federal government. In 1935 Communist Party cells in the army launched a revolt in three barracks, all of which were sharply put down. Vargas took the opportunity to ban the party. Then, in 1937, with the prospect of elections in 1938 which Vargas was constitutionally debarred from contesting, he and his military allies launched a pre-emptive coup. Loyal troops surrounded the Congress building and Vargas announced on the radio the establishment of the Estado Novo – the New State. There was remarkably little organized resistance to the move. The following spring Plínio Salgado and a small group of his armed supporters launched an assault on Vargas and the presidential palace in Catete but were easily defeated. Salgado’s movement, like the communists, was dissolved. Civil rights were curtailed and political parties were banned. Federal officials publicly burned the flags of every state in Brazil before consigning their ashes to an urn at the Museu Histórico. Elected state governors and city mayors were all replaced by interventores (‘inspectors’) appointed and controlled from Rio. Centralized executive power was fused with a semi-corporatist model of society that owed much to Mussolini’s early attempts to control working-class power through state-sponsored unions.

  Coercion was the foundation of Vargas’s Estado Novo, but it relied most of the time on surveillance and co-option. Serious political opponents went into exile or retired from public life, and all were kept under close watch. Under the beady eyes of the DIP, the Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda, control of the press was very close and reporting of Vargas himself generous to the point of obsequious. Politically, Vargas left the north-east and the countryside to their own devices on condition of total loyalty from the local oligarchs. In the cities he sought to build a new popular coalition of the federal state and the new working class. This unlikely combination of social forces was held together by the quiet but brilliantly effective negotiating skills of Vargas and a diffuse but palpable sense of Brazilian nationalism. In the realm of economic policy this took the form of protectionism and tariff barriers to encourage domestic growth; state-led industrialization through the creation of nationalized companies (like steel and petrochemicals) and government-funded infrastructural development; and a package of social welfare reforms that included the minimum wage in exchange for government control of workers and their unions. In cultural policy, given that Vargas was not the material out of which any kind of personality cult could be fashioned, the Estado Novo searched for expressions of Brasilidade – the Brazilian way – and thus attempted to mobilize and shape the nation’s popular cultures for nationalistic ends. This was a task made easier by the active participation of the country’s intelligentsia and artistic communities in precisely this debate.

  Portuguese was made compulsory in the press and the radio; schools that taught in a foreign language either shifted or were closed down. New federal agencies were created which actively censored and subtly manipulated key areas of cultural production: the Instituto Nacional do Livro regulated publishing, while the Instituto Nacional do Cinema Educativo both controlled the film industry and sought to shape its agenda. Music was a special concern of the DIP; no sheet music could be published or record released without its stamp and its censors paid careful attention to their lyrical content. In all of thes
e areas, the blunt tools of control were married with subtle strategies of incorporation. All of these ministries offered artists, publishing houses and film and record companies a mixture of sponsorship, subsidies, prizes and, for the music business, access to the airwaves.

  In a country where still less than half the population could read, and cinemas were rare outside the big cities, radio was the single most important means of communication of the Vargas era. The small, virtually amateur radio stations that had popped up in the 1920s disappeared. The federal government permitted advertising and sponsorship, and nurtured the emergence of a nationwide network of private radio stations, all of which owed their existence to the government. The compulsory broadcasting of Hora do Brasil – a centrally produced hour-long mix of news, music and educationally improving talks – was the closest that Brazil came to a national conversation. To ensure that everyone could listen in, the regime erected speakers in the public spaces of the small towns in the interior of the country where domestic radio sets were few and far between.

  The control and use of football fell into a similar pattern. The universal imposition of Portuguese, and – once Brazil had joined the Allies in the Second World War – the new opprobrium in which Germany and Italy were held, saw an end to the old ethnically identifiable clubs – or their names at any rate. In São Paulo, Palestra Itália became Palmeiras and SC Germânia became Pinheiros; Palestra’s namesake in Belo Horizonte became Cruzeiro, the ‘southern star’; and Curitiba FC took the Portuguese spelling Coritiba. Clubs that still used the language of their homeland in internal documents desisted.

  In 1941 the federal government reorganized the CBD and created a National Sports Council. This body was staffed by three handpicked civilians, a general and an air force marshal, and given the authority to determine policy in all areas of Brazilian sport. This included stamping out any lingering conflicts between the sports federations of the large states which had plagued Brazilian football in the 1920s and early 1930s; and banning women’s football on the grounds that it was morally, physically and eugenically damaging to the nation’s health. The CBD had long been run by Vargas’s placeman, Luiz Aranha. A director of Botafogo and active supporter of Vargas during the 1930 coup, Aranha had been made CBD president in 1936. It probably helped that his brother Oswaldo was Vargas’s finance minister and that another brother, Citro, was the president of Vasco da Gama; all three came from Vargas’s home state of Rio Grande do Sul. As with so many facets of the Estado Novo, a tiny group of very conservative men, connected by familial and personal networks, ruled in alliance with the military and the upper reaches of the state civil service.

  Alongside these administrative changes, the regime began to use football stadiums as stages, even crucibles of Brasilidade – the nation’s new culture. In 1935 Brazil’s First National Congress of Education was held at the São Januário with Gustavo Capanema, the minister of education, and President Vargas in attendance alongside thousands of teachers and students. Billed as a discussion about the direction of national education, it was light on detail and big on showpieces, more a social-policy spectacular than an earnest colloquium. The great composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, one of the participants at São Paulo’s Modern Art Week, devoted much of the 1930s to a nationwide musical-education programme, staging huge popular concerts with schoolchildren and local choirs. In 1940, on Independence Day, the São Januário hosted his largest concert yet, with 40,000 students and over 1,000 musicians performing a variety of works, including his own melding of European classical and indigenous Brazilian music. The poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade was moved to write:

  It was so beautiful and overwhelming, that for many there was no choice but to weep tears of pure joy. Through the curtain of tears emerged the foggy figure of the conductor, who had captured the musical essence of our people, Indians, blacks, workers, mestizos, seresteiros, the suburbs, who joined the echoes and hints of rivers, hills, caves, crops, kids’ games, whistles and laughter.1

  If football stadiums could serve as the stage for state spectaculars and the crucible of collective national experiences, they could also be used to corral and control popular energies. Rio’s carnival and the samba schools of the city were subject to the regime’s wider politics of cultural regulation. In 1943 and 1945 the samba parade was redirected to the São Januário. Here, the First Lady, Darcy Vargas, presided over a decidedly more regimented version of carnival’s street samba than usual, its themes and motifs, like ‘Glorious Brazil’, set by the state.

  The Vargas regime cultivated nationalist educators and musicians, but its main political constituency in the cities was the workers. The Estádio São Januário served as the primary theatre of Vargas’s Brazilian version of corporatism. In a move designed to undercut and exclude the remnants of the radical left and free trade unions, Labour Day on 1 May became the key symbolic moment conjoining the regime, its unions and the urban working classes. In 1940 free public transport helped ensure that more than 40,000 packed into the São Januário to watch Vargas arrive and circle the football pitch in a magnificent open-topped car, announcing to the crowd the latest consolidation of the regime’s labour laws. Radio star Carlos Galhardo sang a specially composed ‘workers’ song’ and then the president signed the decree that would establish a minimum wage. Labour Day in 1941 was similar except that this time the establishment of the new labour courts was being celebrated. Matters began with a parade of worker-athletes, organized by occupation, dressed in a mix of sports and working clothes; then there were athletic displays by military units and a patriotic dance performance from the Municipal Theatre. The day concluded with two Rio select XIs playing an exhibition game, the Zona Sul beating the Zona Norte 6–5.

  Until this point, the Zona Sul had held on to the national team, with their games being played at Fluminense’s Laranjeiras or Flamengo’s Gávea stadium, but from 1939 the national team played its games at the São Januário, including the 1945 Copa Roca (an irregularly contested clash with Argentina) and the 1949 Copa América, both of which Brazil won. While none of these tournaments had quite the nation-building impact of the South American Championships of the previous decades, they did serve to cement the relationship between football and the nation, and suggested that in the new Brazil the centre of gravity of both had switched, in Rio at any rate, from south to north, from the oceanside mansions to the dusty suburbs. However, São Januário was just one stadium, Vasco was just one club and Rio just one city. If football was to serve the truly nationalist agenda of the Estado Novo it would need to include others, and for that it would turn to Flamengo and build the Estádio do Pacaembu in São Paulo.

  II

  The truly national ambitions of Vargas’s regime sat uneasily with the idea that only one stadium in one city could embody the nation or host its Labour Day parades. Something had to be done in São Paulo, but its club stadiums were all small. So in the mid-1930s the local municipality began to plan a new stadium for what was fast becoming Brazil’s biggest city. In keeping with the generous peace terms after the 1932 civil war, when the federal government had assumed half of São Paulo’s war debt, the city was allowed to create its first public university, and its stadium project now received significant government support.

  Work on the Estádio do Pacaembu began in 1936. It was situated in a long hollow between gently rolling hills on what were then the outskirts of the city. The complex was approached by an open, ceremonial space, more oblong than square – Praça Charles Miller – at the end of which sat the rounded end of a vast horseshoe of stands. The Pacaembu was almost double the size of Vasco’s São Januário. Whereas the São Januário was ornate and baroque, the façade of the Pacaembu was clean and simple and geometrically proportioned, its detailing reflecting the lines of the era’s sleek ships, touring cars and aeroplanes. Its signage employed sans serif fonts that were elegant, uncluttered and modern. More than just a stadium, the complex also incorporated a gymnasium and facilities for many other sports, open to the
public.

  The scale of the opening day festivities in late 1940 was also a good measure of the political meaning that had come to be invested in the new stadium. To the sound of a blast of trumpets, a special police detail entered the ground carrying an Olympic flag brought from the Rio club Fluminense. It was a rather heavy-handed symbol but made clear that the locus of Brazilian national sport, and perhaps national identity too, had moved from the private and elite surroundings of Laranjeiras to the municipal and demotic Pacaembu. There followed a parade of over 12,000 athletes from the city’s sporting institutions, all of whom were instructed to make sure that they wore only white shoes, official club colours and no head coverings of any kind. While the athletes’ parade that had greeted King Albert of Belgium in 1920 in Laranjeiras had been headed by the elite clubs of Rio, the Pacaembu’s parade began with the teams of the masses: Corinthians and Palestra Itália. However, it was São Paulo FC who got the biggest cheers. This was surprising given that the club had been formed only five years beforehand from the remnants of elite clubs CA Paulistano and AA Palmeiras, who had turned their backs on professional football. São Paulo was now a fully professional side, but it retained its identity as the team of the city’s elites. However, its name and badge offered the opportunity to the crowd to make their Paulista identity public. Indeed, it seemed clear to observers that the acclaim with which the club’s colours were met was directed at President Vargas, a public reminder of the city’s pride and desire for autonomy.