Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  Just as the war meant Vargas had to go and democratic elections had to be held, so too an alliance with the Soviet Union made it impossible to maintain the ban on the Brazilian Communist Party. The party was legalized in 1945 and underwent a short boom, benefiting from pro-Soviet attitudes developed during the war and hopes for a more radical social policy. Intellectuals – from Graciliano Ramos to Oscar Niemeyer – and workers flooded into the party. Rather than just concentrating on industrial organization, the party, under the charismatic leadership of Luís Prestes, engaged with popular culture. The PCB supported and recruited among samba schools, held its own alternative carnival competitions and found backers among many musicians and artists. Similarly, the party took note of football, and, taking a leaf out of Vargas’s book, began holding rallies in the country’s major stadiums. Prestes’s first significant engagement after being released from prison was to speak to a huge audience at Vasco’s São Januário. Later in the year a fundraiser was held at the Pacaembu for the communist trade unions of São Paulo. The evening opened with two union teams playing and was followed by an exhibition match between Corinthians and Palmeiras. This rare coalition of football and the radical end of leftist politics in Brazil, however, had little time to develop. Emboldened by the direction of the new Cold War, and deeply distrustful of the communists, Dutra banned them again in 1947 – and this despite an electoral mandate that saw fourteen communist senators elected.

  A more moderate but critical political voice could still be heard in Brazilian football, for the preparations for the World Cup under Dutra served as both a practical problem and a proxy debate about Brazil’s economic development. Despite the advances of the Vargas era, Brazil suffered from a chronic lack of energy and transport infrastructure. Mário Filho led the charge of the football developmentalists who were calling for the construction of football’s equivalent, a new stadium in Rio that would provide a proper stage for the World Cup and, in its scale and styling, speak to the country’s footballing prowess and urban modernity: ‘The stadium,’ he said, ‘will be a gift from this generation to the next, strengthening the human wealth of Brazil. This stadium will be a gift from all of us.’ Critics argued that scarce capital should be spent on hospitals and schools, but Vargas Neto, president of the Rio Football Federation, responded in Jornal dos Sports: ‘I’m not against your request! I’m in favour. But I want you to be in favour of stadiums. It could well be that hospitals will become less necessary.’15

  The city council voted to build the stadium. The land, which had once housed the elite English Derby Club, was cleared for the construction of a popular sporting temple. Under municipal control the architects Galvão, Azevedo, Bastos, Carneiro, Feldman, Ramos and Valdetaro were appointed and building began. By the time of the World Cup it was barely finished, but it was magnificent. Brazil had built the largest and most elegantly modern stadium in the world. The Maracanã was an immense double-tiered white-concrete ellipse with an official capacity of over 160,000. Its concrete 360-degree flat roof, when viewed from above, gave the irresistible appearance of an alien spaceship that had chosen to park among the vacant lots on the poor fringes of the Zona Norte. The stadium from planet modernity was built with some of the first concrete actually manufactured in Brazil. The main entrances were dramatic stepped ramps leading right up to the top of the stands, supported by two lines of simple thin cylindrical pilotis, a touch of the city in the sky. There was no hint of a classical colonnade here. The hidden steel cantilevers in the roof were a bold statement of advanced engineering and minimalist design. The Maracanã’s high internal arches and buttresses beneath the stands flanked great circular concourses that swept around the stadium and beneath the seating: a people’s sporting boulevard. The newspaper A Noite wrote, ‘Today Brazil has the biggest and most perfect stadium in the world, dignifying the competence of its people and its evolution in all branches of human activity.’16 Mário Filho thought the country had acquired a new soul, the stadium prefiguring an awakening of the slumbering giant of Brazilian potential.

  The Brazilian team’s preparations were meticulous, cloistered as it was for months in a secluded out-of-town location. Rio prepared itself too. The carnival parade on Shrove Tuesday took the World Cup as its theme. The Jules Rimet trophy was put on view in a jeweller’s shop on Avenida Rio Branco where thousands came to stare in awe. On the day of the first game the Korean War broke out but nobody in Brazil noticed. The huge crowd that assembled at the Maracanã saw 5,000 pigeons let loose and heard a 21-gun salute. English referee Arthur Ellis reported being showered by fine white plaster dust from the just-completed roof. Brazil sailed past Mexico 4–0, drew 2–2 with Switzerland in São Paulo and then secured their place in the final round robin by beating the Yugoslavs, one of whom had gashed his head on an exposed girder in the bowels of the unfinished stadium.

  Two days later the final round robin of four teams commenced. The Rio local elections were in full swing and the squad’s hotel, training camp and dressing room were all deluged with every last candidate of every party searching for a photo opportunity and the chance to make a speech. Despite the pressure of expectations Brazil seemed unleashed. Sweden were mown down 7–1. Spain were dispatched 6–1 in an atmosphere of euphoria. The crowd waved 100,000 handkerchiefs and wished the Spanish adiós. Jaime de Carvalho’s official supporters’ band struck up the insufferably jaunty carnival favourite ‘Bullfight in Madrid’, popularized at the time by Carmen Miranda’s semi-official World Cup version, and the entire crowd responded in ‘one of the largest collective demonstrations of singing ever known’.17

  The last game loomed. Uruguay were the opponents and Brazil needed only to draw to win the World Cup. Over 200,000 people, perhaps a quarter of a million, 20 per cent of Rio’s adult population, the largest crowd ever to assemble for a football game, made their way to the Maracanã. In the greatest act of sporting hubris ever the mayor of Rio spoke to the team over the stadium PA: ‘You Brazilians, whom I consider victors of the tournament . . . you players who in less than a few hours will be acclaimed champions by millions of your compatriots . . . you who are superior to every other competitor . . . you whom I already salute as conquerors . . .’18 You couldn’t have scripted it. Brazil were one up at half-time, but lost the game 2–1. A terrible silence descended upon the stadium. When the final whistle came, players, officials and members of the crowd broke down. FIFA president Jules Rimet, uncertain what to do, thrust the cup into the hands of Uruguay’s captain, Obdulio Varela, and made himself scarce.

  Brazil had been spared the real slaughter of industrialized war, preferring news of Flamengo to the battle of Stalingrad. Now football was the metaphor for exploring the consequences of defeat and devastation. Pelé, then ten years old, recalled the mood of his small home town in Minas Gerais: ‘There was a sadness so great, so profound that it seemed like the end of the war, with Brazil the loser and many people dead.’ Nelson Rodrigues would come to see the game in apocalyptic terms: ‘Everywhere has its irremediable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima. Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat to Uruguay in 1950.’19 The search for Brasilidade had led the country to football and aligned it with the nation’s fate. It was meant to reveal its strengths, which it had. Now would come the reckoning with its weaknesses.

  4

  Brasília and the Ball: Inventing the Beautiful Game, 1950–1964

  ‘The Brazilian style of football, which rounds and sweetens the game the . . . Europeans play in such an acute and angular way’ – Gilberto Freyre.

  Making Brazilian Modernity: Niemeyer’s national cathedral under construction. Brasília c.1964.

  It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve; the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.

  Oscar Niemeyer

  I

  After the Mar
acanazo (‘The Maracanã Disaster’) Brazil was sombre. The electorate looked for nostalgia and safety and elected Getúlio Vargas, for the first time, as president of Brazil. The national team didn’t play another game until 1952 and permanently abandoned the white shirts they had lost in. They kept away from the Maracanã until 1954. Investigation and recrimination followed and the main scapegoats were defenders Bigode and Juvenal, and goalkeeper Barbosa. All were condemned in the press as cowards, lacking fibre and discipline. All three were black.

  Barbosa was singled out for special treatment until his miserable poverty-stricken death fifty years later. He recalled walking into a bar where a woman said to her son, ‘Look, there is the man who made all Brazil cry.’ In 1994 he was turned away from the Seleção’s training camp in Teresópolis lest he should curse them before the World Cup. Brazil did not field another black goalkeeper until Dida in 1995. The multiracial, confident Brazil that Freyre and Filho had conjured from football was dissolved in an acid bath of racism, self-doubt and self-loathing. Footballers in general, and black footballers in particular, were cast as psychologically dysfunctional and over-emotional, lacking the self-discipline required to perform at their best.

  At the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland Brazil were beaten 4–2 in the quarter-final by the Hungarians, a game remembered for its rising tide of violence and known ever since as the Battle of Berne. Hungary’s Bozsik and Brazil’s Nilton Santos were sent off for fighting, followed by Humberto, as scuffles broke out all over the pitch. Didi had to be restrained on the touchline. As the team left the pitch, a free-for-all began which continued into the tunnel and the dressing rooms. While the popular press celebrated the hard men of the team who had defended the nation’s pride, the official report continued to cast the problem in terms of miscegenation: ‘The Brazilian players lacked what is lacking for the Brazilian people in general . . . The ills are deeper than the game’s tactical system . . . They go back to genetics itself.’

  The Brazilian squad returned from their bruising encounter to a nation whose rancour was every bit as bad as the fist fight in the players’ tunnel. Since 1950 President Vargas had pursued an increasingly populist economic course and in so doing had sufficiently unnerved enough of Brazil’s generals and key industrialists and bankers to produce an air of mutiny. By summer 1954 the plotters were ready to strike. One of Vargas’s most fearsome opponents was the right-wing newspaper editor Carlos Lacerda, who feared for his own life enough to employ an air force bodyguard. In late August the bodyguard was shot and killed in an attack on Lacerda and the trail led back to Vargas’s own bodyguard. Knowing that the end of his political career had finally arrived, Vargas shot himself through the heart in the presidential palace. In the outpouring of national grief and confusion that followed this most political act of suicide the threat of a coup receded and Brazil limped along with a series of makeshift governments until late 1955. Vargas’s legacy was a nation sufficiently developed that it stood poised between tropical agrarian lassitude and urban industrial dynamism. With the election of Juscelino Kubitschek as president in 1955 Brazil decisively opted for the latter, and with that the many pieces of Brazil’s football culture fell into place.

  Kubitschek was a hard-headed politician moulded by the pork-barrel pragmatism of Minas Gerais, but he brought with him an aura of dynamism animated by his personal charisma and his unwavering commitment to super-heated economic growth. He offered Brazil ‘Fifty years’ progress in five’ and almost accomplished it. Riding the post-Korean War boom in the global economy, Brazil’s economy grew by up to 10 per cent a year and its leading industrial sectors even faster. The military were neutralized with salary and budget increases, foreign multinationals were invited to invest in the country, and in the defining act of his presidency Kubitschek initiated the building of a new federal capital on a designated but still undeveloped bare plateau deep in the country’s interior – Brasília.

  The first constitution of the Old Republic, written in 1891, had stipulated the creation of a new capital and in 1893 the site for the city was selected in an attempt to move the government away from the coast and in so doing accelerate the process of internal colonization that remained so incomplete. Kubitschek finally made it happen. Planned by Lúcio Costa and furnished with the spectacular public buildings of Oscar Niemeyer, the city captured the imagination at home and abroad. It remains the most well-known architectural signifier of the nation, announcing a distinctive Brazilian modernity: the linearity and geometric simplicity of European Modernism, bent and rolled into the sinuous curves of Brasilidade.

  However, the city was not alone in this. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brazilian football matched Brasília’s global impact and paralleled its hybrid aesthetics. Niemeyer’s own account of his curvaceous Modernism uses precisely the same formulation that Freyre had used to contrast the angularity of European football with the rounded sweetness of Brazil’s. The architecture of the Maracanã had already established the link between urban modernity, economic progress and football, but the 1950 World Cup had left a terrible sense of doubt over the real scale of Brazil’s achievements. It had built the most modern stadium in the world, but it had failed at the final and most important hurdle. Now the promise of those years would be realized. In a few short years, Brazil won the World Cup twice and did so with the spellbinding talents of the two most cherished players of the century: Pelé and Garrincha. Any ambivalence that the country might have had about hitching the nation’s identity to football after the horror of the Maracanazo was abandoned.

  Four factors explain the ascent of Brazilian football, its global successes, and now its unambiguous place at the heart of the nation’s sense of self. First, Brazil’s uneven economic dynamism produced concentrated centres of wealth and organization that could mobilize the production line of talent that continued to emerge from among its poor and very poor. Second, the partial settlement of issues of ethnicity and nationhood achieved under Vargas opened the way for a flood of talent from every corner of Brazilian society whose diversity was now the guarantor of its Brazilian authenticity rather than a betrayal. Global success meant that ‘football as eugenics’ was finally finished as an argument. To this was added a third ingredient – a thriving urban civil society in which football clubs developed as successful social and sporting institutions, and in which the rich mix of popular cultures in Brazil’s cities could cross-fertilize, bringing dance, music, poetry, art and football into close orbit with each other. And the fourth factor was that the prosperity of the era opened up the economic and psychological space for more popular forms of urban play and leisure: Rio’s beaches embraced foot volley and beach soccer, with football fans increasingly turning games into their own pyrotechnic spectaculars. These changes also created the space for the emergence of a more critical and reflective response to football than hitherto, particularly in the the Cinema Novo movement.

  However, serious play requires serious money and serious organization. In 1958 Brazil acquired the last of these in the tall, imperious shape of João Havelange, president of the CBF and the chair of the technical commission organizing Brazil’s campaign at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden.

  II

  The 1958 World Cup campaign was funded by a significant subvention from Kubitschek’s federal government and a paying tour of Italy before the tournament. Organization was provided by João Havelange, a Rio businessman and Fluminense insider, a masterly politician and legendary networker, who had just won the presidency of the CBF by 185 votes to 19. Alongside him, representing São Paulo’s interests was a man cast in a similar mould: Paulo Machado de Carvalho, patron of São Paulo FC and owner of the city’s leading TV and radio stations. The two appointed the corpulent Vicente Feola as coach and relieved him of all responsibilities but coaching as the CBF took on psychologists and cooks, dentists, doctors, fixers and spies. A few veterans from 1954 were called up – like Nilton Santos and Didi – but for the most part the players in the squad had come of age in t
he boom – Joel, Zito, Pepe and Vavá, and two others who were initially on the fringes: the mercurial Botafogo winger Garrincha and the teenage sensation from Santos, Pelé. The squad underwent extensive medical checks at Rio’s leading hospitals, which revealed an extraordinary catalogue of disease and long-term malnutrition. Almost the entire squad had intestinal parasites, some had syphilis, others were anaemic. Over 300 teeth were extracted from the players’ mouths. Epidemiologically, Brazil ’58 was a team of the people. Planning for Sweden was meticulous, with twenty-five locations scouted before they settled on a base. Even then the Brazilians went as far as to insist that the hotel’s management replace female staff with men.

  Brazil started slowly and stiffly in the tournament, beating Austria and drawing with England. Garrincha and Pelé now came into the side, a move opposed by the team’s psychologist on the grounds of their alleged low IQ and immaturity respectively. How wrong can you be? Brazil started to move in a new way, beating the Soviet Union with some verve and then sweeping aside Wales and France in the quarter- and semi-finals, a trio of games crowned by a hat-trick from Pelé as Brazil put five past the French. In the final they faced hosts Sweden and though Brazil went a goal down early in the game, they gave an untroubled, commanding performance of attacking and inventive football that saw them win 5–2. As The Times wrote, ‘They showed football as a different conception; they killed the white skidding ball as if it were a lump of cotton wool.’1 Pelé, who scored the best and final goal in the dying minutes of the match, passed out, was revived and broke down in tears. The King of Sweden actually came down to the pitch to join the celebratory melee. The Swedish crowd, who had cheered Brazil’s performance as they played, now cheered their lap of honour. The Seleção reciprocated by carrying a giant Swedish flag between them. The team returned, via London and Lisbon, to Recife where receptions, plaudits, politicians and crowds awaited. In Rio a gigantic crowd had gathered at the airport to meet them. The squad piled on to a municipal fire engine that slowly wound its way from the airport to the vast multi-laned Avenida Brasil, heading for the presidential palace.