Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  5

  Playing the Hard Line: Football under the Dictatorship, 1964–1986

  ‘I’m struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for equality, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player, preserving the ludic, and the joyous and the pleasurable nature of this activity’ – Sócrates.

  Brazil’s victory with the ball compares with the conquest of the moon by the Americans.

  Jornal do Brasil, 22 June 1970

  In Brazil the way you win does not matter. A very violent form of football is being practised.

  Telê Santana, 1985

  I

  Jornal do Brasil, a sober publication not given to joking, was perfectly serious when it compared Brazil’s 4–1 victory over Italy in the final of the 1970 World Cup to the Americans’ Apollo space programme. As far as the paper was concerned, it was a comparison between pinnacles of national development. The Americans had applied huge amounts of money, the immense power of their scientific and industrial strength, diamond-hard instrumental rationality and an ingenious capacity for problem-solving to the task of putting a man on the Moon: the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century remade for the space age. Brazil possessed none of these resources but it had drawn on the complex ecology of its popular cultures and the short-lived democratic civil society of the 1950 and 1960s to produce a generation of exceptional footballers. They emerged from an economy poor enough to guarantee a steady flow of aspirational and gifted talent, schooled in street football, but rich enough to mobilize and organize that talent at the highest level.

  More than that, Brazil had won the World Cup for the third time and done so in a manner that was considered, inside and outside the country, to be more than just an act of instrumental reason, more in fact than just winning. It had been an artistic performance; a celebration of the nation’s music and dance and its aesthetic standards of rhythm, beauty and poise. Yet by 1985 Telê Santana, coach of the national team and passionate advocate of the old school of attacking football, looked at the Brazilian game and despaired of its crude instrumentalism and the violence of its play. What had happened? It had been the fabulous good luck of Brazil’s generals that Mexico 1970 should happen on their watch. They took the opportunity and hitched their political project to the game. It was football’s bad luck that their rule should endure for so long and that in attempting to shape the game in their own image, the main legacy of the dictatorship was to harden and coarsen it.

  The Junta that came to power in 1964 was divided between advocates of the soft line and those of the hard line. The former argued that Brazil’s woes could be traced to the instability of democracy, the ill-discipline of populist political parties, and the demagogues and demons of the left. A short military intervention would purge the polity of these destabilizing forces and instil some much-needed discipline and direction into economic policy-making, after which the military could withdraw from power. Advocates of the hard line were far more pessimistic and paranoid, arguing that a much more thorough transformation of Brazil’s economy and society was needed, one that required a long occupation of the seats of power, the use of force against opponents and the censorship of the media.

  In 1964 the soft line held and General Castelo Branco was appointed president by his military peers. Congress was purged of leftists and other opponents; the senior civil service received the same treatment. Political parties were permitted to stand at state-level elections in 1965, but the government’s political supporters did so badly that the regime decided to dissolve all existing political parties and replace them with their own party, ARENA, and an ersatz opposition, the PMDB. While the military dealt with the polity, economics was handed over to a group of supportive technocrats and economists who began a price-stabilization programme that brought inflation under control. Football’s only place on the government’s agenda was as a source of unpaid taxes. In 1965 the newly empowered internal revenue service pursued stars like Didi, Mário Zagallo and Nilton Santos for their unpaid dues. Garrincha’s finances were in such a state of chaos, and his tax bill so large, that João Havelange, president of the CBF, fearful that the player would be imprisoned and unable to go to the 1966 World Cup, stepped in and paid up.

  Castelo Branco never revealed any personal interest in football, and in the early days of the Junta the CBF had felt it necessary to cancel a friendly at the Maracanã against the Soviet Union lest it should be seen as fraternizing with the enemy. However, once in power, the new regime realized football was impossible to ignore. Indeed, it might have its uses. Thus the following year Brazil did host the Soviet Union at the Maracanã. It certainly didn’t do the Junta’s anti-communist credentials any harm to see the Seleção outplay the visitors, albeit in a 2–2 draw, and all this in front of Bobby Kennedy, who was visiting the country at the time. The following year, the poor showing of the Brazilian national team at the 1966 World Cup, knocked out at the group stages, saw a congressional commission of inquiry established to probe the reasons for this debacle. By 1969, when Castelo Branco’s successor as president, General Costa e Silva, was dying of a stroke the highest circles in government were pondering whether they should announce his illness to the crowd at the Maracanã prior to Brazil’s last qualifying game for the 1970 World Cup, afraid as to how the news would affect both the political mood of the crowd and the performance of the team.

  From 1968 until the mid-1970s the balance between doves and hawks in the military shifted towards the latter. An outbreak of protests that included workers’ wild-cat strikes, student demonstrations in Rio, coded cultural critiques from film-makers and musicians, and a small campaign of armed resistance from tiny leftist guerrilla groups combined to provoke a massive backlash from the military. Censorship of the press, radio and television was intensified. The repressive machinery of government, both legal and institutional, was ramped up, with the national security services and police force arresting, harassing and torturing thousands of opponents. Congress was effectively closed down. The legitimacy of the regime came to rest on two pillars – supercharged economic growth and a grandiose nationalism that increasingly relied on football for its successes and its imagery.

  In late 1969 General Emílio Médici became the military’s third president. By inclination, and with the active support of the regime’s propaganda departments, he closely aligned himself with football. Within days of assuming office he started making public appearances at Flamengo games, his presence announced over the stadium PA. He also took an active interest in the composition of the squad for the 1970 World Cup and its management. After Brazil’s victory in the tournament he received the team at the presidential palace in Brasília and spoke to the nation:

  I feel profound happiness at seeing the joy of the people in this highest form of patriotism. I identify this victory won in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship with the rise of faith in our fight for national development. I identify the success of our national team with intelligence bravery, perseverance and serenity in our technical ability, in physical preparation and moral being. Above all, our players won because they know how to . . . play for the collective good.1

  Under Médici the military would use football as an exemplar of the unified and morally upstanding Brazil it convinced itself it was trying to create. The reality was often less edifying. Their own use of football was, at times, really no better than bread and circuses. In 1973 when a below-inflation rise in the minimum wage was to be announced, the Rio office of the Ministry of Labour made 15,000 free tickets available for a Flamengo–Fluminense match in Rio.

  Médici’s successor, General Ernesto Geisel, who was known to be a bookish and introverted man, never gave a domestic press conference during the six years of his presidency. Yet such was the significance of football to the regime’s public face that his appointment was announced in the press like this: ‘Gaucho from Bento Gonçalves, 64 years old, fan of Internacional in Po
rto Alegre and Botafogo in Rio, brother of two generals, married, with one daughter, Ernesto Geisel will be the 23rd President of the Republic.’2 It isn’t clear if he had ever been to a game before becoming president, but once installed he was a regular presence at new stadium openings and official receptions for the national team. At one such event, held on the eve of the 1978 World Cup, Geisel was heard to admonish the striker Reinaldo, who had been quoted in the press criticizing the rule of the army and the role of the regime in running the team. ‘You play football, don’t talk about politics, we’ll deal with the politics.’

  João Figueiredo, the last of Brazil’s generalissimos, held the presidency from 1979 to 1985. He was known to prefer jogging to football and horses to people, but it was widely touted that he was a supporter of Fluminense and Grêmio. Indeed, unlike any of his predecessors he was photographed in a football shirt while president – the blue, black and white stripes of Grêmio from the state of Rio Grande do Sul where he did his military training. His tenure as president was dominated by two issues: the return of hyperinflation in a rapidly declining Brazilian economy and the process of abertura – ‘opening’ – in which the military were steadily relinquishing power and engineering a transition to civilian rule that they could survive intact. In this context, the Junta’s strategy of using football as a public spectacular that expressed both their grandiose model of economic development and the regimented unity of the nation they hoped to fashion, had reached the end of the line. When João Havelange, now president of FIFA, tried to persuade President Figueiredo that Brazil should host the 1986 World Cup, he replied, ‘Havelange, you know the favelas in Rio? You know the dry north-east . . . You really think I am going to spend money on football stadiums?’3 Partly it was a question of money, but it was also a question of politics. For football had ceased by now to be the passive instrument of the government and the authorities. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the game had undergone a widespread process of politicization, and become one among many sites of active resistance to the dictatorship. Players were challenging the authority of coaches and directors, stadiums were hosting union rallies, and women, long excluded from the ultra-masculine worlds of Brazilian football and public life, were staking a claim on both.

  The disastrous state of Brazil’s economy in the early 1980s ensured that the military would stay true to their promise and finally depart. Congress, long emasculated, finally found enough nerve to elect Brazil’s first civilian president for over twenty years. Tancredo Neves, previously governor of Minas Gerais, was the ultimate centrist, a long-time survivor and pragmatic builder of alliances. He was a known supporter of Atlético Mineiro but made it clear that he also held the other teams of the city of Belo Horizonte in his affections. Neves died, suddenly and painfully, just days before his inauguration, leaving the transition to democracy in the hands of his running-mate José Sarney, an old-school politician of the north-east, who was used to giving orders and dispensing patronage. Managing a complex economic reboot of the Brazilian economy was another matter. In his first year in office Sarney was beset by the unstoppable forces of hyper-inflation that he and his technocrats couldn’t bring to heel. In the spring of 1986 Sarney insisted that the Seleção must improve and win the World Cup that year. But Brazilian football had changed. The team that went to the 1986 World Cup was never going to win it and no politician could ordain it.

  II

  To be fair to the dictatorship there were signs of change and fragmentation in Brazilian football before they began their long occupation of power, but their presence only seemed to magnify them. The individual players and great clubs of the era were reaching the inevitable downward turn of their cycle of age and form; the arrival of television began its transformation of the game; youth groups challenged the authority of the first generation of torcidas; and the propensity of the game for violence and aggression was on the rise.

  The Seleção that went to the 1966 World Cup in England retained many of the team that had won the previous two World Cups. Pelé and Garrincha were not on the margins this time but seasoned champions at their peak. Brazil won their opening game against Bulgaria but were then soundly beaten by Hungary and Portugal in rough physical matches, where they were fouled and harried out of the game. It was Garrincha’s last World Cup. He returned from England already sold on from Botafogo to Corinthians. Both club and player were past their best. Garrincha’s knees, subject to unbelievable levels of torsion, had been held together with splints and painkillers. When he did have surgery it was too late. His knees and his game were never the same again. Worse, after a car crash which he survived but which killed his mother-in-law, he descended into a deep depression, exacerbated by his heavy drinking. What little inclination he had for training and timekeeping collapsed, and he disappeared without a trace for over a decade.

  Brazilian football was used to explosive tempers, fisticuffs and stand-offs, but in the mid-1960s their frequency increased and their mania intensified. In the decisive game of the 1964 Rio–São Paulo tournament Botafogo played Santos. A fight started that quickly spread among all the players on the field. Even the normally unflappable Pelé was involved and sent off with two others. In 1965 Santos’s Zezinho punched Vasco’s Lima, who hit him back and initiated a fight that saw seven players dismissed. In 1966, in the last match of the Rio Championships, Bangu beat Flamengo 3–0, but not before five of the Flamengo team and four of the Bangu team had been sent off. Finally, in 1967, a game between América and Olaria was abandoned when all twenty-two players were dismissed after eighty minutes; a feat almost matched the same season by Vasco and Fluminense who managed to lose twenty-one. At the same time as the Brazilian security services were conducting huge dragnet operations, pulling in thousands of suspects in their violent attempts to subdue student radicals and urban guerrillas, the football field became increasingly volatile. In 1969 Brazil were 2–1 down to Peru at the Maracanã when Tostão brutally kicked the Peruvian player de la Torre. The ensuing fight lasted forty minutes and required a huge police presence on the pitch; João Havelange was forced to plead with the Peruvians to restart the game.

  Santos too were on the slide. The decision of the CBF to withdraw Brazilian clubs from the Copa Libertadores meant there would be no more continental triumphs, and though domestic trophies were won in the late 1960s, the side ceased to be the dominant force in football nationally or even in São Paulo. Instead the club went on tour. In 1967 alone Santos played in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Gabon, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Germany and Italy. The following year saw them again in Europe, South, Central and North America. Knowing that Pelé’s contract was up in 1972, the management turned on the taps one more time, taking the club to Hong Kong, Bolivia, El Salvador, Martinique, Jamaica, Colombia and Haiti. It was a final payday, but there was precious little evidence of the money earned. The directors did manage to build a fabulous clubhouse for members – the Parque Balneário – but blew a fortune on a failed casino development and left the Vila Belmiro stadium, already ageing, to rot.

  Santos may have held Pelé’s playing licence, but he had escaped their orbit and established himself as an attraction in his own right. In mid-1969 the press became gripped by the approach of Pelé’s 1,000th goal in professional football – a landmark generated by an accounting exercise that remains at best flawed. Statistical precision was not the point. In keeping with the new tenor of the Brazilian media, this was a made-for-TV spectacular. From around goal 990 the Brazilian media worked themselves into a logistical and emotional frenzy. With the tally standing at 998, the number of photographers behind the goal in Salvador reached critical proportions as the mob tumbled on to the pitch. On 999 Vasco’s Argentinian goalkeeper, Andrada, was booed for saving a shot from Pelé. The 1,000th goal when it came was a penalty. Pelé made it look easy. After scoring he ran to pick the ball out of the net and in seconds was surrounded, then engulfed, by a horde of photographers and reporters. When he finally emerged from the s
crum, it was a schmaltzfest. Pelé dedicated the goal to the children of Brazil and took an endless lap of honour in a specially prepared 1,000 shirt. A senator in Congress wrote a poem to Pelé and read it out on the floor of the house. Everywhere else in the world the newspapers led with the Moon-landing of the Apollo 12 space mission. In Brazil they split the front page. Pelé was flown to Brasília where he was paraded through the city in an open-topped car. At the presidential palace he was received by the newly installed President Médici, who awarded him the Order of National Merit. Commemorative busts were commissioned, plaques fixed to walls and stamps issued by the Brazilian Post Office. Above all, in a month when guerrillas had kidnapped the American ambassador and the newly sworn-in President Médici was finding his feet, the story dominated every TV news bulletin for days.

  From the early 1930s until the mid-1960s, radio had been the main way in which Brazilians had consumed football. Indeed, outside of the small circle of newspaper readers, radio was for most of the country the key source of news, drama and entertainment. The years of the dictatorship, by contrast, were synonymous with the rise of television. In 1960 there were just 600,000 sets in the whole country. By 1986, as the generals withdrew to their barracks, there were 26.5 million, a phenomenal forty-four-fold increase that had been underwritten by government-subsidized instalment plans for buying sets.

  Having got the country’s attention, the military regime focused theirs on who was allowed to broadcast to it. Through its power to award and revoke channel licences, the government had created a pliant industry in which the most important corporation was Globo, the newspaper and radio empire of Roberto Marinho. Initially a joint venture with US media giant Time-Life, Globo soon outgrew its US partner. The company’s access to credit, facilities and buildings, technology imports and broadcast licences was actively supported by the government. In return, the most dynamic, professional and innovative media group in the country was an unfailingly stout ally and friend. Its TV station Rede Globo was launched in 1965, just a year after the coup which had initiated the era of military rule, and for the next twenty years Rede Globo would become the single most powerful cultural institution in Brazil, its mix of news, celebrities, game shows and telenovelas dominating the ratings. The football industry, however, remained deeply suspicious of the medium, refusing to sell live broadcast rights for fear of hurting ticket sales. But Globo went ahead and broadcast delayed games and most importantly live transmissions of the Seleção at the World Cup.