Attendance at football matches, especially the big games, held up well through the early years of the dictatorship but the crowd itself was beginning to change. Jaime de Carvalho, for the first time in forty years, began to miss games at Flamengo as his high blood pressure and diabetes kept him at home or in hospital. In the power vacuum created in the stands a group of much younger supporters broke away and would become Torcida Jovem do Flamengo. They introduced a whole new style of aggressive and oppositional support, learned in part from studying the games of the 1966 England World Cup on television. In contrast to the old charanga and their supporters, the Torcida Jovem would boo their own team, gather behind the net and more actively taunt their opponents. Now dying of cancer, Carvalho wrote from his hospital bed to the papers decrying the new turn in fandom and reminding the public that ‘Flamengo teaches us to love Brazil above all things.’ With his death the original charanga retired from the stands and played only at private social functions. A similar generational struggle went on at all of the Rio clubs in the late 1960s, with Dulce Rosalina actually being forced out of the leadership of the TOV at Vasco and her group replaced as the leading torcida by Força Jovem do Vasco. The same process was at work in São Paulo where similar youth groups broke with the old, like the Hawks and Camisa 12 at Corinthians and Tricolore at São Paulo. In time they would cease to be the breakaways, for they would command the stands.
Cinema Novo which had blossomed in the early 1960s did not fare well under the military, nor did football movies of any genre. The mini-epics of the Canal 100 cinema shorts aside, the only football film made prior to the 1970 World Cup was a stitched-together biography, Tostão – A Fera de Ouro. After Mexico 1970, however, there was a flood of money for celebratory football movies. The documentaries that were made about the tricampeonato were undistinguished remakes, and in some case literally recuts, of the same films and the same stories made for 1958 and 1962, on to which 1970 was uncritically tagged: Carlos Niemeyer’s Brasil Bom de Bola, Oswaldo Caldeira’s Futebol Total, Hugo Schlesinger’s Parabéns, Gigantes da Copa and Rogério Martins’s Brasil – Tricampeão – Copa 70 all fall into this dismal category. Luiz Carlos Barreto’s Isto é Pelé, released in 1974 on the eve of the great man’s departure to America, was just the latest in the long line of moral biographies of the king, only this time in colour. Meanwhile actor, singer and comedian Grande Otelo was still making a good living, playing the dumb back-country hick, only in O Barão Otelo no Barato dos Bilhões the twist was that he won the football lottery. Once a millionaire though, he discovers that fame and wealth are not for the likes of him. It is this kind of dismal racism that makes one almost forgive the 1979 movie Os Trombadinhas in which Pelé stars as himself. A thriller with a moral message and characters of the flimsiest cardboard, the film sees Pelé enlisted by a São Paulo tycoon to solve the child-pickpocket problem through football and fighting. Pelé is among the world’s worst actors, but he was as comfortable and at ease with fame and money as any member of Brazil’s otherwise white elite.
Music’s relationship with football fared better than cinema’s. Though no World Cup would ever attract the outpouring of musical invention that accompanied 1958 and 1962, and no players would ever garner as many songs as Pelé, the new generation of Brazilian musicians did engage with football. Indeed, as the worlds of literature and poetry began to disengage from the game in the 1970s and 1980s, popular music remained the main cultural tradition in which football as a joyful popular art was still celebrated. The two key figures in the Tropicália movement of the mid-1960s – Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil – both recorded a number of football songs. Their fusion of Brazilian and African music with Western pop and rock had seemed so threatening to the authorities that they were forced into exile – a fact that encouraged political readings of their football songs. Gil wrote ‘Meio de Campo’ in support of the player Afonsinho who was struggling against the feudal control of players by clubs in the early 1970s. Jorge Ben’s album Umbabarauma was the most pointed reminder since Freyre of the central importance of black Brazil in shaping the nation’s game. And as late as 1989, Chico Buarque could compare the art of the musician and the composer to Pelé, and Pelé to the greatest artists and painters:
A painter measuring exactly
To hang in a gallery, no
brushstrokes more perfect
Than a goal shot
Crisp
As an arrow or a dry leaf.
These notions, at least, would survive two decades of the Brazilian military. Not much else about Brazilian football would.
III
For Médici’s government money was no object in the preparations of the team for the 1970 World Cup. Army captain Cláudio Coutinho was made the squad’s physical fitness trainer and dispatched to NASA to learn the secrets of the US space programme. The coach, João Saldanha, whose communist sympathies had always rankled with the government, was fired after his public criticisms of Pelé and an incident in which he took a loaded gun to a Rio hotel lobby where he was due to meet one of his press critics. The CBF relieved him of his duties on the grounds of emotional instability and installed their own man, Mário Zagallo.
The 1970 World Cup was the first to be broadcast in colour and that gives it, for those who saw it, a kind of chromatic magic. Brazil’s yellow shirts shimmered and sparkled in the blistering white sunlight of the Mexican noon – the appointed time of kick-offs to suit European TV schedules. Yet those that saw them in black and white, the vast majority, were no less dazzled. Brazil played six games in the tournament and scored nineteen goals, an unambiguous record of adventure and positive play. They had the decency to keep only one clean sheet, giving the opposition just enough hope to resist – often very entertainingly. To this they added sublime moments of invention: Pelé’s attempt on goal from the halfway line and his immaculate layoff to find the only space available in England’s otherwise watertight defence. In the final, the Italians held them to 1–1 for two-thirds of the game before a final twenty minutes of exquisite team play brought three goals and victory. Even the most implacable left-wing opponents of the regime, who had sworn not to support the Seleção, melted.
Critical consciousness failed to resist our first successful attack. Each victory for the Canarinhos was a spontaneous carnival in the streets of the big cities and when Brazil became three times world champion the entire country took to revelry, took over the squares, the streets, the alleys, for wild celebrations of the championship.4
The squad were flown direct to Brasília from Mexico City and carried from the airport to the presidential palace on a municipal fire engine, just like the one they had travelled on in 1958 through the streets of Rio. The normally empty squares and bleak highways of the federal capital were thronged with people who had gathered to see the team. Outside the palace, tens of thousands assembled to cheer each player individually before they joined President Médici on a public balcony and then joined the cabinet for lunch. For the first and only time in the more than twenty years that they ruled Brazil, the military government opened the palace to the people.
The unambiguously upbeat march ‘Pra Frente, Brasil’ (‘Forward, Brazil’) had been the theme tune of the tournament. The song’s lyrics imagined 90 million Brazilians all moving together, the national team and everyone else, in harmony. Now it was adopted by the government as their theme tune and combined with football imagery and its own unabashed sloganeering in print and television advertising. Players and coaches were expected to learn their lines. Interviewed by the sports press in Montevideo in 1972, while thousands of the regime’s opponents languished in jail or sat in exile, Pelé was reported as saying, ‘There is no dictatorship in Brazil. Brazil is a liberal country, a land of happiness. We are a free people. Our leaders know what is best for us and govern us with tolerance and patriotism.’5 Pelé’s image was thrown up on gigantic billboards in the major cities, accompanied by the words ‘Ninguém mais segura este país’ – ‘Nobody can stop this
country now’, or ‘Brazil, love it or leave it’.
It was the kind of confidence that a third victory in the World Cup can deliver, but the military ebullience was based on more than that. For six years, between 1968 and 1974, the Brazilian economy grew at an incredible 10 per cent a year. The steady migration of the very poor from the north to the south kept wages down and the trade unions were crushed. Brazil’s generals increasingly talked not just of Brazil but of O Grande Brasil – ‘The Great Brazil’ – a power of continental proportions and international ambitions. With a solid international credit rating, Brazil’s government started borrowing and building, creating a nation and football culture in its own image.
Having left football to administer itself during the 1960s, the military applied a much firmer hand to the sport in the 1970s. João Havelange remained untouchable at the head of the CBF, but with his ascent to the presidency of FIFA in 1974 the regime swiftly installed one of their own. Admiral Heleno Nunes, moonlighting from his job as the head of the Rio state branch of the government political party ARENA, took charge. When not campaigning for the return of Flamengo’s Roberto to the national side, he orchestrated the Seleção’s qualifying campaign for the 1978 World Cup. Each game was accompanied by the presentation of ARENA politicians on the pitch with the players, much flag waving and generous quantities of political literature, in a thinly disguised campaign rally. Moving in the other direction, Laudo Natel, the president of São Paulo FC and the Bradesco banking cartel, brokered his football connections into political capital and became the ARENA governor of São Paulo state.
After securing control of political institutions, and repressing subversives, the military’s greatest energies were reserved for grand infrastructure projects, the steel and concrete sinews of O Grande Brasil. In the early 1970s the country embarked on three vast projects: the building of the Trans-Amazonian Highway over 2,000 miles across the continent; the construction of the Itaipu Dam on the Paraguayan border, intended to be the largest hydroelectric complex in South America; and the creation of an atomic energy industry. Part industrial policy, part political spectacular, these projects were matched in the realm of football by a massive burst of government spending on the building of new football stadiums. The aesthetics of the project are best revealed in the closing sequence of the 1970 movie Tostão – A Fera de Ouro. The film is for the most part a conventional and rather poorly made hagiography of the great striker, then playing at Cruzeiro, but in the final minutes it seems to switch gear. The camera slowly moves through the empty streets of Belo Horizonte. Not a single car is moving, not a single person is on the pavements. Milton Nascimento’s ‘Here is the Country of Football’ starts to play: ‘Brazil is empty on a Sunday afternoon, right? Look, sambão, here is the country of football.’ The film then cuts to a series of sweeping helicopter shots over and around the recently completed Estádio Mineirão: a deep-angled concrete bowl, set off with a flat roof through which the giant angular cantilevers and buttresses of the stadium walls were set. It was unambiguously large, industrial and brutish – a machine for staging football, the players tiny figures on the vast green swathe, the whole set against a vast flat car park, full to brimming with the Volkswagens and Mercedes coming off the production lines of Brazil’s new and explosively growing car industry.
The building of the football wing of O Grande Brasil began in the north-east of the country where these immense concrete structures were compensations for the region’s enduringly low growth rates and were a political prize for local elites. Estádio Rei Pelé was opened in Maceió, capital of Alagoas, in 1970; the huge Machadão in Natal followed in 1972; and the Castelão in Fortaleza was bigger still. Even Teresina, the tiny state capital of Piauí, acquired the Albertão in 1973, holding a crowd of 60,000. The imposing Estádio Governador João Castelo in São Luís, Maranhão, also known as the Castelão, was the biggest of all, its vast sunken concrete stands holding up to 100,000. All of these stadiums took their architectural cues from the Mineirão – huge circular concrete bowls, ribbed and prefabricated, they nonetheless retained a bulky elegance, though in tropical conditions they did not age well, succumbing to the moisture of the climate and to neglect. The central highlands and the Amazon also built stadiums: the 50,000 capacity Vivaldão in Manaus, deep in the heart of the rainforest, was finally finished in 1970, twelve years after its construction began. In 1975, the Estádio Serra Dourada was opened in Goiânia and the Mangueirão was inaugurated in Belém. Close to the banks of the Amazon itself, it held 70,000, though the state government of Pará had originally planned for 120,000. In a singular act of independence and autonomy, Santa Cruz FC, the smallest and poorest professional team in Recife, opened a stadium that they had built themselves. Estádio do Arruda had been started in 1958; built virtually brick by brick with donations of materials and labour from the club’s members and supporters, it opened in 1970.
In the 1960s the long-established but highly illegal numbers games that were played in Brazil’s cities were popular – and untaxed. At the end of the decade the military authorities decided to take over the racket by creating their own national lottery. Rather than going just with numbers, they gave the lottery a football theme with competitors guessing the scores of upcoming fixtures in the big cities. It was also intended as an exercise in national consciousness-raising, requiring the huge uneducated pool of Brazilians to think about Brazil’s geography. Launched in 1970, the lottery proved to be instantly popular. In his short story ‘Opening Act’ Edilberto Coutinho depicts the lottery as being at the centre of working life.
The comments on last week’s game will still be made on Tuesday or Wednesday, Thursday is a day of great concentration, every mind in the office working on it, let’s fill in the blanks on the Soccer Lotto ticket . . . Friday and Saturday are the days of great anxiety, for anybody can wake up a millionaire on Sunday.6
Encouraged by the nation-building efforts of the national lottery and hungry for more games in the season and therefore more income, the government pressured the football authorities to establish a fully fledged national championship. Extraordinarily, football was still predominantly played at the state level. From 1950 a Rio–São Paulo tournament had been held among the leading clubs and from 1967 clubs from the biggest cities of southern and south-eastern Brazil – Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba – were invited to join. Four years later, and with just enough internal air traffic to support the fixture list, the Campeonato Brasileiro was launched. It had twenty teams, including clubs from Recife and Fortaleza for the first time, and it was a marathon. A twenty-team league was followed by two leagues of four for the top eight, and then a final round robin of three teams. This was a taste of things to come. The tendency under the military for projects to balloon out of control, driven by unchecked grandiose ambitions, was exemplified by the football championship. In 1973 there were fifty teams in the competition and the format had already changed twice. In 1975 a new sports law, passed by the government, insisted on equal votes for all state federations in any national-level sporting body. Consequently inside the CBF the votes of Mato Grosso, with a population of 1 million, and São Paulo, with perhaps twenty times that, were electorally equal. This opened the door to vote-buying, politicking and horse-trading, and a place in the national championships was certainly something worth trading. It became a commonplace of political conversation that when ‘things are bad for ARENA another team gets in the Brasileiro’. In 1976 there were fifty-four teams and with more added every year the competition peaked in 1979 with ninety-four participants. Formats and rules were changeable and on occasions byzantine. Some years there were relegation and promotion, some years there weren’t. One season was played with extra points awarded for victories by two clear goals, in other years ticket sales were included in a team’s points total. With an already busy schedule of state championships and cup tournaments, the Brasileiro’s relentless expansion filled the calendar. At one point in the mid-1970s Santos, returning fro
m a foreign tour, had less than a week scheduled between the end of one season and the beginning of the next. The strain on players’ bodies and well-being was immense, but predictably this was entirely disregarded by the football authorities.
In a deliberate echo of the 1922 South American Football Championship, which had celebrated both a centenary of Brazilian independence and its emergence as the futebol nation, João Havelange and the CBF put on an Independence Cup in 1972 to mark the country’s 150th anniversary. The Minicopa, as the tournament was known, was a major event with twenty teams playing in nine venues right across the country and all at the expense of the Brazilian government. It was certainly an impressive demonstration of Havelange’s organizational skills and political capital, and it gave him plenty of face time with football officials from all around the world, officials whose votes he would soon be soliciting in his bid for the FIFA presidency. The final was played between Brazil and Portugal, colony and home country, reunited after 150 years, and both ruled by conservative and occasionally violent dictatorships. As they had in 1922, Brazil won the final, but there was none of the celebrations that had marked the centennial game fifty years beforehand.
Futebol Nation Page 14
