Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  Although corruption in Brazilian football had been widespread, it was mainly confined to financial matters – self-enrichment, embezzlement, tax-dodging. Match-fixing and cheating, although not unknown, were relatively rare. Whereas in some football cultures, like Italy, relegation was avoided by ensuring that results on the last day of the season went a team’s way, in Brazil it was traditionally avoided by post-season adjustments to points totals or league structures. However, the creation of online betting in the twenty-first century meant that a new breed of match-fixer emerged. In 2005 the Escândalo do Apito (‘Whistle Scandal’) broke. Two São Paulo referees, Edílson Pereira de Carvalho and José Danelon, were accused of fixing at least seventeen matches earlier in the season – eleven in the Brasileiro, two in the Paulistas, and four in the second division of the national championships. It transpired that an organized group of São Paulo criminals, aware of Pereira’s large personal debts, were paying him around $5,000 a game to ensure the right results – results that were winning them millions of reais from bets with online bookmakers. Brazil’s Supreme Sports Court insisted that the eleven Brasileiro games be replayed, despite endless challenges in other courts from affected clubs. The replayed games saw Internacional lose the title they thought they had won and Corinthians claim a title they thought they had lost.

  In 2009 the problem surfaced again when referee Gutenberg Paula Fonseca accused Sérgio Corrêa, head of the CBF’s refereeing panel, of running a system of rewards and punishments for referees (like access to prestigious domestic and international games, demotion to lower league football) which he used to favour some teams over others when required. Corrêa himself was not dislodged by this accusation, but previously invulnerable administrators were finally displaced. Eduardo Viana, nicknamed ‘the Water Tank’, had run the Rio State Football Federation with an iron fist for eighteen years. He had been indicted on corruption charges three times in his football career and on each occasion managed to elude conviction. In 2004 he and five others working for the Rio Federation were arrested and charged with embezzlement, specifically the disappearance of nearly $300,000 of Maracanã ticket receipts. The court dismissed his defence and he went on immediate sick leave, dying of a heart attack before the case could be concluded.

  Racism is another issue football – and the country generally – has had to face. The Cardoso governments had, to their credit, called time on any official notion that Brazil was a racial democracy. They and the Lula governments acknowledged the deep-rooted and pervasive racism of Brazilian society, appointed Afro-Brazilians to important state positions (under Lula this included the first black judge at the Supreme Court) and introduced affirmative action policies in the foreign ministry, in the wider civil service and in university entrance procedures. Significant progress in these realms must be set against the country’s enduring racial inequalities that leave Afro-Brazilians – at least half the population – overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorest classes, and underrepresented in the ranks of nearly all elite occupations. Precisely who is black, or Afro-Brazilian, remains an open question in the country’s unspoken and complex racial codes where one’s position is only partly determined by skin colour or genetics. When Ronaldo, clearly a man of mixed African and European heritage, was asked what he thought of racism in Brazilian football, he acknowledged its existence but replied, ‘I’m white, so I am really ignorant of these matters.’ This was the same Ronaldo whose black mother was denied access to the residents’ lift and directed to the service lift in her son’s exclusive apartment block.

  Brazilian football and its media have long been sensitive to racist abuse by foreigners against Brazilians, dating back to the infamous Brazil–Argentina game of 1937 when the Argentinian crowd howled racist insults. Similarly, the press has been quick to cover the many incidents of racism in contemporary European football towards Afro-Brazilians. It has, however, been rather slower off the mark in exposing the same kind of behaviour at home. In this regard at least there has been progress recently. The long-standing use of racial epithets by players and racial abuse from the crowd were exposed by a number of incidents in which the authorities actually prosecuted perpetrators: Juventude supporters were barred from their ground after racially abusing Internacional’s Tinga in 2005; the club’s defender Zago was given a long suspension after being caught on camera making monkey gestures to Grêmio’s Jeovânio; Danilo of Palmeiras was actually sentenced to a year in prison for abusing Atlético Paranaense’s defender Manoel – though this was later reduced to a fine.

  Despite the massive presence of Afro-Brazilian players, and the game’s long association with the struggle against social and racial exclusion, there have been precious few black coaches and even fewer club directors or football administrators. Didi, star of the 1958 and 1962 World Cup sides, prospered as a coach only when he left the country for Peru. Of the black players in the great 1970 World Cup team just Carlos Alberto went into management. Again, the Lula years have seen advances and retreats. In 2009 Flamengo won their first national championship for seventeen years and they did it under a black coach, Jorge Luís Andrade. Television pundit Telmo Zanini said, ‘Hopefully this will become a symbolic day for Brazilian football and help to open doors for black coaches.’ Andrade’s reward, for what was a footballing miracle, was to be made the scapegoat for the next season’s disappointments and fired, leaving the Brasileiro without a single black coach.6

  The collapse of organized women’s football in Brazil in the late 1980s and early 1990s began to be repaired in the 2000s. Football clubs started up women’s teams and the CBF, against its own instincts, found itself locked into global and regional women’s international tournaments that necessitated creating a minimal programme of national women’s teams. There was no shortage of players to staff them. A whole generation of dedicated and talented women had emerged, scrapping it out in the male worlds of the street, the pelada, and the five-a-side pickup game. What there was, however, was a simply remarkable level of sexism, in which the women’s game was consistently framed in terms of men’s erotic interests and TV advertising revenue. This was all clearly expressed in 2001 when the São Paulo Football Federation put on its own women’s competition – the Paulistina – promising a ‘good and beautiful championship’ that would unite ‘femininity and football’. Rather than recruiting from existing clubs and sides, the federation chose the participants at huge trials. In practice players with cropped hair were banned, blonde players were given preference and all had to be less than twenty-three years old. One player who had attended the try-outs recalled, ‘Everything is because they wanted to sell the image of the championship on TV; they didn’t want to see a toothless girl on TV, they wanted to see the blonde girl . . . It was an appearance championship and this made me very mad.’7

  Despite the unrepentant sexism of Brazilian men’s football and the callous disregard of the women’s game by the CBF, the number and quality of women football players grew and they were good enough to take two silvers at the Athens and Beijing Olympics, and to win the Pan-American games in Rio in 2007. Marta, the team’s leading striker, was FIFA’s female player of the year five times in a row, a feat no man has correspondingly managed. Brazil rewarded her prowess by making Marta one of the official ambassadors for the 2014 World Cup, but typically among the leading women players, it was Sweden and the United States that allowed her to earn a small living from the game. No one was expecting parity with the men’s game, but having finally established themselves as part of the futebol nation, women players were asking, like so many of Brazil’s citizens, not just for membership, but for dignity. As one international, who continued to play club football in Brazil, pointed out: ‘I know that men’s soccer is involved in a network of corruption that it is hard to understand or escape from, we don’t want that, we simply want to play our soccer with dignity. We don’t want to earn millions, but we also can’t live earning so little, in poverty, like so many players who continue to work as cleaning wom
en to be able to support themselves.’8

  V

  In May 2006, in a string of incidents orchestrated by the leaders of the criminal gangs who ran São Paulo’s bursting prisons, thirteen banks were attacked, fifty-six buses torched and revolts broke out in seventy-three of the 144 prisons in the state. The police counter-attack saw over 100 people killed on the streets of the city and in the jails. Among the demands of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the leading criminal gang, was one for sixty televisions to ensure that they could watch the Seleção at the upcoming World Cup in Germany. The football nation now included almost half a million in prisons designed for half or a third of this capacity, most in connection with organized crime and drug trafficking. Kidnapping was one of the main growth industries and 2004 saw four high-profile footballers’ families targeted. The mother of Santos star Robinho drove her new Mercedes to a barbecue with old friends in a notoriously troublesome district. She was held for forty days. Campinas, a small and wealthy town north-west of São Paulo, became the centre of a small crime wave with the kidnapping of the mothers of São Paulo forward Grafite and Portugal-based Luís Fabiano and Rogério. All were resolved by paying the ransom rather than bloodshed. In 2008 Pelé was robbed at gunpoint. He told the gang who he was but they took his phone and his jewellery anyway. Although there were falls in the statistics for violent crime and murder at the peak of the Lula boom, crime rates remained worrying, harsh narcotics laws ensured that the already high level of incarceration was unchanged, and much of the day-to-day policing of Brazil’s cities was still brutal in its execution.

  The incidence of violence in Brazilian football itself, already high in the 1990s, took another step upwards. More than 100 people died in football-related incidents in the decade that followed. Lance! estimated that the total number of deaths in Brazilian football since 1988 had risen to 234. Between May 2011 and May 2012 at least eleven fans were killed in a gang war between Goiás and Vila Nova in the western city of Goiânia. Multiple incidents of disorder would break out on many weekends, particularly towards the end of the season. In December 2004 Botafogo fans stormed the pitch and attacked the referee as their team were defeated by Corinthians. The match was concluded while truncheon-wielding police fought their way into the stands and torcidas attempted to tear down the fences and netting behind the goals. Ticket-holding Atlético Paranaense fans were denied entry to Vasco da Gama’s stadium after a twelve-hour journey; they were reported to have fought police with bottles and stones. Palmeiras players were spared humiliation when police confiscated thousands of flip-flops that the Mancha Verde planned to pelt them with during their game against Criciúma. Guarani, relegated after being beaten by Paysandu, had their clubhouse stoned so badly that the last home game of the season was rescheduled to an out-of-town venue.

  Alongside the run-of-the-mill disturbances there were exceptional moments of mass disorder. In 2006 at the Porto Alegre derby between Grêmio and Internacional fans threw dozens of portable toilets into the stadium moat, set them ablaze and pelted the firefighters attempting to put out the conflagration. In March 2012 about 500 Palmeiras and Corinthians fans took part in a prearranged brawl on São Paulo’s Avenida Inajar de Souza, leaving two Palmeiras fans dead. Violence also spilled over into the previously tranquil world of futsal, the indoor game. In 2008 a Palmeiras versus Corinthians match descended into on-court brawling which led to nine arrests.

  Fans were not the only protagonists in these disturbances. On one occasion Vasco’s coach Antônio Lopes threw a ball at an injured player sparking a pitch-wide fight among coaches, officials, players and police. In 2012 Fluminense’s kitman received a twelve-match ban for running on to the pitch and attacking a linesman so violently that he had to be restrained by the police. In 2013 the club masseur of Série D side Tupi ran on to the field to make a last-minute goal-line save before being chased by the enraged opposition and grabbed by the police for his own protection. Meanwhile, attacks by torcidas on their own players and directors intensified. In 2012, after a defeat to Botafogo, fighting broke out amongst Palmeiras fans and players, death threats were issued to the club president and a director’s restaurant attacked. Hernán Barcos, the club’s Argentinian striker, despaired: ‘If it is to live like this, driving an armoured car and with a gun in hand, I would rather go home.’9 The following year the players were attacked by fans at the airport in Buenos Aires after losing a game to Tigre 1–0. The trend towards exporting violence had begun a month beforehand when Corinthians were playing San José in Oruro, Bolivia, in the Copa Libertadores. A naval flare launched at the Bolivian crowd struck and killed a fourteen-year-old boy, and a seventeen-year-old scapegoat was offered to the police by the organized torcidas who were responsible.

  On the 30 June 2013, in the small town of Pio XII in the state of Maranhão, referee Otávio Jordão da Silva Cantanhede showed a player and sometime friend, Josemir Santos Abreu, a red card. Abreu refused to leave the pitch and in the ensuing argument Cantanhede pulled out a knife and stabbed him twice. Abreu died before reaching hospital. An angry and intoxicated mob then stormed the field, beat Cantanhede with a wooden pole, smashed a bottle of cachaça in his face, and drove a motorcycle repeatedly over his body, before he was finally decapitated and quartered.10

  Football provides the stage on which the desperate conditions and self-destructive energies of Brazil’s poor can be played out. Accustomed to a world in which violence is pervasive, life is cheap and the public authorities – police and judiciary – cannot be relied upon to keep the peace or administer justice, many of Brazil’s young men go armed and ready to use their weapons. Moreover, in a world that constantly strips them of economic dignity and offers them little but enduring marginalization, humiliation in public becomes simply intolerable. It is the same rage and embarrassment that fuel pitch invasions when a team is losing or attacks on players who have let them down. From acts of grotesque rural revenge to the urban riots of the national championships, unchecked by the police and ignored by the sport’s authorities, Brazilian football has been a conduit for the mental and emotional pathologies of a still brutalized society.

  8

  Copa das Manifestações: Civil War in the Futebol Nation, 2013–2014

  The spectacle and the counter-spectacle – Brasília, June 2013.

  Let’s forget all this commotion happening in Brazil, all these protests, and let’s remember how the Seleção is our country and our blood.

  Pelé

  If Pelé is the King, then I am a Jacobin.

  Protestors’ placard, Rio de Janeiro

  I

  Pelé, like the rest of the Brazilian establishment, simply could not believe his eyes: the citizens of the futebol nation were in revolt, and football, long a source of unity, had come to be at the heart of the country’s intersecting problems. The events of June 2013 in Brazil constituted one of the largest waves of social protest the country had ever seen. Easily bigger than the crowd of 100,000 students that took to the streets of Rio in 1968, they were also cumulatively larger than the two key demonstrations of the mid-1980s at the end of military rule, and the crowds that demanded Collor’s impeachment in 1992. At least six of the marches that took place in São Paulo, Rio, Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza in 2013 were 100,000 strong. The very largest gathered somewhere between 300,000 and half a million. While the earlier protests had a backbone of predictable political organization and singular focus, and were concentrated as one-offs in a few big cities, these newer protests were protean, complex and diverse. Consequently they had a much bigger geographical spread than their predecessors. On the night of 20 June protestors gathered in over 120 Brazilian cities – testament to the explosive wave of urbanization that the country had undergone in the last two decades and the new digital connectedness of the previously isolated provinces.

  The protestors’ demands were remarkably heterogeneous. From what appeared to begin as a protest over a rise in bus fares in São Paulo in early June, the demonstrators, with t
heir tens of thousands of handmade placards, were concerned with a huge range of grievances: the state of the public-health and the public-education systems; the passage of federal legislation, sponsored by Protestant evangelical groups, that would make homosexuality a treatable psychological disease; legislation that would reduce the powers of the federal police to investigate politicians; and a more general revulsion against the systematic corruption of business and political elites and the brutality of many police forces.

  The forces that lay behind these events derived from the tremendous economic boom that Brazil had enjoyed. This had principally benefited two key groups. The very rich and powerful had enjoyed a massive surge in their wealth. The very poor, especially in the most undeveloped zones of the north-east and the interior, had benefited from the Bolsa Família – the centrepiece of Lula’s eight-year presidency. Neither of these groups was present in any number at the demonstrations. A few organized bodies from the favelas who were actively opposing housing relocation were present, youths from the peripheries took part in some demonstrations, and a few tiny right-wing groups and evangelicals tried to join the protests, but the crowds were overwhelmingly made up of the urban middle classes, a category that stretches from downtown junior office workers to university professors. As a class they had swelled under Lula and then Rousseff, especially as enrolment in higher education had expanded, but their circumstances only inched forward. They were paying, in their own words, ‘European taxes to get Mozambican services’. They took their own toilet paper and blankets to public hospitals and went into debt to get some private health cover. Deep-seated resentments were multiplied by the contemptuous manner in which Brazil’s elites treated the rule of law and indeed the other classes.