The football-wage differentials between Brazil and Europe, and increasingly between Brazil and the richer parts of Asia, had been driving an exodus of players since the late 1980s. As recently as 2010, 60 per cent of Brazilian professional football players earned the minimum wage. Even those that were being paid a more substantial salary didn’t always see it – throughout this period Brazilian clubs were notoriously late payers, and sometimes non-payers, of wages. The Bosman ruling in European football, the classification of all European Union players as home players and the arrival of transcontinental scouting networks all contributed to the creation of a large and liquid global labour market. Official data includes only players over the age of sixteen – there is considerable evidence of players being bought and sold much younger than that – but even so the figures are huge. In the late 1990s annual player exports were running at about 200 a year with a significant number returning. The CBF’s figures show that around 800 players made the trip abroad in 2005 with a net exodus of over 500 players. In 2008, the peak year for football exports before the European economic crisis put the brake on the football boom, just under 1,200 players were exported from Brazil with a net loss of over 700. According to the Bank of Brazil, this brought in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to the sellers.
The geography of this exodus was complex and multilayered. The majority of players headed for Europe, but there were also significant numbers in Asia, especially South Korea and Japan, and in Latin America. Within Europe, the largest contingent by far, over 100 players a season, were going to Portugal. While some settled there, for many it was a waystation, either upwards into the top European leagues or downwards into the small leagues of Cyprus, Azerbaijan and Moldova, whose wages, though lower, were still far higher than could be expected at home. In fact Brazilians were tempted to the very furthest reaches of the football world, with players going to Qatar, Vietnam, the Faroe Islands and Australia.
The very best Brazilian players were concentrated in the top five leagues in Europe and, within those leagues, at the top clubs. On a regular basis there were more Brazilians playing in European Champions League squads than there were any nationalities other than Italians and most of them were playing for the Italian clubs. Almost none of them stayed and settled in Europe – Leonardo, who became a director at Milan, was a rare exception. However, some Brazilians took up foreign citizenship to allow them to play for other national teams. Marco became Mehmet Aurélio and played for Turkey, Alex and Eduardo became Japanese and Croatian respectively, Pepe and Deco became Portuguese. Roger Guerreiro was a Pole, Egmar Gonçalves was Singaporean, Emerson a Qatari and Lúcio Wagner a Bulgarian.
In the 1980s and 1990s the complex web of transfers was arranged by clubs and agents, but in the twenty-first century a number of outsiders came into the market. Traffic began as a small company in the 1980s selling advertising space in Brazilian football stadiums. In the 1990s it progressed to buying and selling media rights and offering sports marketing services. In the 2000s it began buying and selling players with a mix of its own money and that of outside investors. As the company’s president put it, ‘Instead of investing in the stock market or real estate these people are investing in buying the economic rights to football players.’2 What that meant in practice was that the company bought up the contracts of Brazilian players they were interested in and then lent them to clubs who would both pay their salary and showcase them to the world. Palmeiras were Traffic’s main partners, with up to twelve of the company’s players in the squad at any one time. In the event that the players were sold on, Traffic and its investors received the lion’s share of the fee. FIFA banned third-party ownership of players in 2007 but Traffic and the other companies got round this by creating or buying their own clubs – like Desportivo Brasil and Ituano – and signing their players to them. This made their subsequent loan periods and sales a notional club-to-club deal. It also meant that an increasing number of teams playing in the lower divisions and in the state championships were in effect ghost clubs, without fans or any intention of winning championships, but hugely effective shop windows. Traffic was not alone. Grupo Sonda, one of Brazil’s largest supermarket chains, created its own football investment department, spending up to $10 million a year and in the late 2000s delivering rates of return of up to 150 per cent.
While Traffic and Sonda have been pioneering a relatively high-investment, high-profit model of player development and commodification, some of Brazil’s football clubs have been pursuing an alternative sweatshop model. The many reports of poor conditions in the training camps established by clubs all over the country were confirmed in 2012 by the death of fourteen-year-old Wendel Venâncio da Silva while on a five-day trial at Vasco da Gama’s Itaguai youth training centre. The investigation that followed revealed that boys were being kept in dangerously insanitary conditions in buildings with broken toilets and leaking roofs. Players who lived outside of the state were only covered for one journey home a year and had to use their own phones exclusively. Those who wanted water found it rationed. Those who wanted medical treatment had to pay for it, if in fact there were any medical staff around. On the day Venâncio collapsed there were none present. The judge, who ordered the closure of the facility, described the conditions which the children were exposed to as slave-like.3 With depressing familiarity, the CBF’s response to the scandal, and the outstanding allegations against Flamengo, Fluminense and Botafogo, was to remain completely silent.
Given the long-term weakness of the Brazilian football economy as well as the contemporary pressures the clubs were under, it was clear that their finances were in a parlous state, but so opaque and arcane were the accounting practices of the game that no one knew quite how bad they were. This changed in 2007 with the arrival of the Timemania lottery and its insistence on the publication of transparent accounts by participating clubs. The new data showed that in terms of revenues, and even attendances, Brazilian football was in a reasonably healthy state; certainly revenues were increasing and average gates had crept upwards from their nadir at the turn of the century. But these signs of growth needed to be set against the fact that all of the leading clubs were mired in huge accumulated debts and remained, for the most part, loss-making institutions. In 2007 eleven out of the fifteen top clubs lost money, the largest of which were losses of €22.7 million (£18m) at Flamengo and €53 million (£42.5m) at Fluminense. The following year twelve out of fifteen were in the red.
Brazilian football clubs were locked into an impossible business model. Up to a third of their income came from profits from player sales. This money kept sides afloat, but led to the diminishing quality of football on offer. Match-day sales were bringing in only 10 per cent of the clubs’ income, and they were reluctant to deal with the problems of crumbling stadiums, pervasive violence and disastrous scheduling. For the first they lacked money or access to credit; the second would require them to take on both the police and their own torcidas, neither of which they wished to do; the third would have required them to take on Globo. Despite the emergence of new stations and serious competitors, like the evangelical network TV Record, and the efforts of the clubs to extricate themselves from the company’s clutches, Globo retained a monopoly over televised Brazilian football. The channel’s trump card was that many of the clubs were in debt to them, as advance TV payments covered their immediate cash-flow problems. In such a compromised situation they were unlikely to start voting for an alternative.
One way in which the clubs have tried to respond to their predicament is to make better use of returnees, devising innovative sponsorship packages to cover the cost of homesick but expensive players. Some, with a reasonably well-heeled fan base, went down the route of gentrification, significantly raising the cost of tickets in an effort to price out the troublemakers and bring in a bigger slice of income. Across the country the cost of going to watch football rose by around 300 per cent. There is no sign as yet though that these strategies can staunch the flow. São P
aulo remains the only club in the country that consistently breaks even. In 2009 the cumulative debt of the leading fifteen clubs stood at €1.15 billion (£920m), half of which was owed to the government, and the debt mountain was growing. Vasco da Gama, at €145 million (£116m), were the most indebted, though Flamengo’s €128 million and Fluminense’s €123 million (£103m and £98m) ran them close. Flamengo’s president exclaimed, ‘Even if we sold our boats and even the photographs of former presidents, we would still owe money.’4 Yet none of them ceased to operate nor were they threatened with bankruptcy. Brazil remained enough of a futebol nation that its football clubs could continue to defy economic reality.
IV
Brazilian football may have been broke and badly governed, but it retained its enduring place in Brazilian cultural life; an encounter that sometimes suggested the emergence of more plural and even critical artistic intelligentsia. The leading football clubs continued to be markers of regional and urban identities, and the game as a whole served as a well-calibrated barometer of the state of social relationships, from the prevalence of corruption to the position of women. The often circuitous revival in interest in the late 1990s in football as a subject for other art forms continued through the Lula years. Novelist João Ubaldo Ribeiro wrote on the game; José Miguel Wisnik, musician and composer, published widely on football, both in crônica format and in his 2008 book Veneno Remédio (‘Poison Remedy’), a renewal of Gilberto Freyre’s interpretation of Brazilian football. Yet these were voices forged in an earlier era; among the pieces by the twenty new Brazilian writers selected by Granta magazine in 2012, there was barely a mention of the game.
Football continued to play its part in the wider samba culture. Torcidas organizadas supported samba schools, carnivals took occasional football themes, and bacchanalian players like Ronaldinho lent their presence to the parades. However, the most popular football songs of the era were not samba tunes at all, but the rock-reggae of Skank’s ‘It’s a Football Match’, the Brazilian metal of Dr Sin’s ‘Football, Women and Rock ’n’ Roll’ or the work of the mangue beat artists from Recife. Mundo Livre’s ‘Meu Esquema’ (‘My Scheme’), compared a lover’s presence to the ecstasy of scoring: ‘She’s what the doctor ordered, a fabulous Rivaldo goal’, and then in the notes accompanying the CD issued a call for a football- and music-based uprising; even if made in jest it was an almost unique popular call to link the solidarities of football with radical leftist politics:
The recently founded AR-28 – the Revolutionary Alliance of October 28th – has the objective of creating a National Football and Samba Conference . . . The NFSC aims to bring together as members and activists all Brazilians who really believe in the power of Brazil. Supporters of Palmeiras, São Paulo, Vasco, Cruzeiro, Atlético, Sport, Bahia and in the end all clubs . . . We will expel the leeches from power . . . the consortia and the international and multinational financial institutions who for almost four decades have done nothing but lie and conspire, and take our sweat to pay immoral, illegitimate and unpayable debts.5
There was also room for nostalgia. From the north-eastern state of Maranhão, singer Zeca Baleiro teamed up with the noted poet Celso Borges to write a sweet ode to Canhoteiro – an unsung hero of the golden era, born in Maranhão too, but like so many forced to make his career in exile in São Paulo. The decline of samba was confirmed in 2004 when Placar magazine released a CD of the leading clubs’ official hymns, as they are known, rerecorded by major musical artists who were also fans of the teams. Only two out of the seventeen – Zeca Pagodinho for Botafogo and Paulinho da Viola for Vasco – could be considered samba versions. The other fifteen featured an eclectic array of rock, punk, reggae, funk, mainstream MPB, backcountry sertanejo and inner-city hip-hop, reflecting the increasing diversity of Brazil’s musical culture. More recently Brazilian hip-hop artists like Rashid located football in the grinding life of the poor urban peripheries, while the funk star MC Guimê released ‘País do Futebol’ (‘Country of Football’), a song of praise for striker Neymar.
A more critical sensibility was on display in the sculptures of Nelson Leirner, who produced a series of football pitches populated by neatly arranged crowds of plastic figures, from Star Wars troopers to massed ranks of toy soldiers and Disney characters. These strange static tableaux evoked an air of regimented ritual and deracinated play. However, for a really critical voice, Brazilian football could turn to Juca Kfouri, a product of the ’68 generation of Brazilian student politics and an active Trotskyist in his youth. His columns and his show on ESPN rained down articulate and informed criticism on the Brazilian football establishment. He coined the term ‘House of Bandits’ for the CBF and Ricardo Teixeira’s near-fifty law suits against him were not enough to staunch the flow of comment. In this enterprise he was joined by others, as ESPN was one of several that provided a platform for more reflective thinking on the state of the game; Daniela Pinheiro’s portrait of Teixeira in the leftist monthly Piauí was simply the most devastating piece of reporting on football politics of the era. These were of course marginal voices, accessed by a tiny fragment of the public and drowned in the great oceans of hysteria and hair-splitting that occupied much of the football press, but they represented progress nonetheless.
Eduardo Campos, governor of Pernambuco, like many in the nordeste, worried about the region’s economic and sporting progress. Reflecting on the poor condition of football in the region outside his own state, he said, ‘We know that football is an important part of our culture. This means the presence of our supporters in the stadium. In the nordeste, only Pernambuco continues to mount strong resistance. We are in a trench and need to be an example.’ On the pitch it continued to be an uphill battle for the clubs of the north-east, with Sport Recife’s win in the Copa do Brasil in 2008 the region’s first national title since Bahia won the national championship in 1988. The long-standing structural economic inequalities between north and south in Brazil meant teams from the north had less private and public money to draw upon: poorer fans, sponsors, directors and state governments. They suffered the constant talent drain of players to the big clubs of the south who made all the money when selling them on to Europe. Television monies were inequitably distributed, with small teams in the richer states able to win large media deals even while playing in a lower division than north-eastern teams. When the north’s best teams have made it to Série A of the Brasileiro, their stays have been short. All of Recife’s teams – Santa Cruz, Sport and Náutico – as well as Fortaleza, Ceará and América from Rio Grande do Norte, have suffered repeated relegations.
On the other hand, the north-east does have soul. As Governor Campos suggested, the state’s clubs were ensuring the region’s presence in the game. At Santa Cruz in particular but also at Sampaio Corrêa, from São Luís in Maranhão, a fan culture has been created which is truly loyal through thick and thin. While many of Brazil’s biggest clubs have a very fickle fan base, even after three relegations Santa Cruz were able to count on home crowds of more than 50,000 – making them the best-supported fourth-divison team in the world – and away support almost as large on occasions.
If a decade of the PT in government had left the balance of football power between north and south unchanged, in the south itself there were recent signs of it tilting away from the central Rio–São Paulo axis. In 2013 the two leading teams in Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais, Cruzeiro and Atlético Mineiro, were the stars of the season. Cruzeiro dominated the Brasileiro, claiming the title with over a month of the season still to go, while Atlético Mineiro, having attracted Ronaldinho for a final season or two, won the Copa Libertadores.
For the most part, however, the Lula years were dominated by teams from his political hometown – São Paulo. Santos, who had never quite recovered from Pelé’s departure in the 1970s, were reborn in 2002 with a young squad starring teenage sensation Robinho which won the national championship. It was a shortlived revival though, as Robinho, inevitably, was sold on to Real
Madrid and the promised retooling of the team and the renovation of their dilapidated stadium never quite happened. The same process was repeated between 2009 and 2011 as the latest Brazilian star Neymar was paired with a repatriated Robinho in a team that won the 2011 Copa Libertadores before he was flogged off to Barcelona. São Paulo FC turned their unique financial strength and stability into an equally solid, unadventurous, but successful team in the mid-2000s that won the Copa Libertadores and the Club World Cup. Under coach Muricy Ramalho they won three consecutive Brasileiros between 2006 and 2008. Ramalho defended his team’s pedestrian qualities in a distinct Paulista dialect: ‘If you want to see a spectacle go to the theatre.’ Corinthians, long the symbolic representatives of the city’s working classes and the team of outsiders, now became the team of the insiders. The early Lula years saw them winning titles, including the national championships, before an ill-fated relationship with the enigmatic international sports company MSI turned so sour that the team were relegated to the second division. In the last years of Lula’s administration they returned to the top division under the presidency of Andrés Sánchez, a businessman and PT insider. They went on to win the 2011 Brasileiro, followed by the Copa Libertadores and Club World Cup in 2012. A mark of the changing nature and wealth of the team’s support was that a self-conscious reprise of the Corinthians invasion of Rio in 1976 could now be conducted in Tokyo.
Rio’s football clubs fared less well than São Paulo’s. Vasco won almost nothing in the years after the infamous São Januário final of 2000. Eurico Miranda was forced out of Congress and then out of the presidency of the club. His successor, Vasco’s much-loved striker Roberto Dinamite, has proved a well-tanned but hopeless replacement. Fluminense and especially Flamengo have remained the most publicly fractious, disputatious and chaotically run of all clubs. Fluminense managed to win the Brasileiro twice – 2010 and 2012 – only to decline so badly afterwards that they were relegated in 2013; but their status as the most politically connected club in the country was secured when they got their relegation overturned by post-season decision-making at the CBF. Portuguesa were punished for fielding an ineligible player for fifteen minutes in a game of no importance. Their punishment, although permissible, was the severest possible, ensuring their relegation and Fluminense’s survival. Flamengo, who managed a single national title in 2009, sacked the successful coach and have won nothing of consequence since.
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