by Simon Kuper
Theories abound as to why he was sacked after taking Brazil through the qualifiers. Some say he was too bad-tempered and got into too many fistfights, and that Pelé disliked him. (Saldanha had considered dropping Pelé.) Others point out that Brazilian managers get sacked: it is a fact of life that requires no further explanation. The most interesting theory is that President Emilio Garrastazu Médici, Brazil’s military dictator, wanted Saldanha out. As president of Brazil from 1969 to 1973, Médici tortured lots of people, but he was also a soccer fan.
As a young man Saldanha had been a Communist, but when he was appointed manager of Brazil, Médici invited him and his team round to lunch. Saldanha declined on the grounds that the training schedule would not permit it. Not long after, an Argentine journalist asked why Dario was not in the team, and Saldanha explained that Roberto and Tostao were better players. But Dario was Médici’s favourite player, said the journalist. “I don’t choose the president’s ministry, and he can’t choose my forward line,” Saldanha replied.
He was fired just three months before the World Cup. The first two men who were asked to replace him refused: they feared that if they failed, the fans might not rest content with burning them in effigy. Finally Mario Zagalo, the “Little Ant,” took the job, recalled Dario, and led Brazil to glory in Mexico. It was the last time they won the World Cup.
While Brazil gets knocked out of World Cups, a debate rages in which the whole nation takes part. (As one Brazilian manager lamented, in an echo of Golda Meir: “I have a nation of soccer managers!”) The debate is between traditionalists and modernizers. The traditionalists, men like Saldanha, argue that great players make their own rules. The modernizers insist that Brazil has to change, and that the team of 1970 was, above all, organized. They point to Pelé’s defeat by European force in 1966, and say that the Brazilian way is charming and out of date.
Zagalo had had no time to impose his ideas in 1970. The Little Ant was a quiet man, a churchgoer, more of a Swede than a Brazilian, and at the World Cup of 1974 he revealed himself as a modern thinker. “Don’t concede goals, don’t let the other team play, and only attack when certain,” he commanded. Brazil was knocked out, and his house was stoned.
Claudio Coutinho was physical trainer of the team of 1970. Two World Cups later, in 1978, he was manager. He did not enjoy sole control. Admiral Heleno Nunes, in charge of Brazilian sport, was a prominent Rio member of ARENA, the government party, and Nunes believed that “a win in Argentina will be very important for ARENA.” To win votes in Rio, Nunes made Coutinho pick Roberto of Vasco da Gama, the city’s number one team. Coutinho agreed—he was a military man himself. A former volleyball player and army captain, he had studied the physical training of American astronauts in order to revamp P.E. teaching in the Brazilian army. Being an educated man with perfect English, he was an instinctive modernizer, who dismissed the dribble as “a waste of time and a proof of our weakness.” When he went on to praise the European tactic of overlapping, one ex-manager retorted: “Overlapping is what Garrincha does by himself.” Saldanha watched Coutinho aghast, but never lost hope: “No, no, no, I believe these guys, Zico, Rivelino, and the rest, said yes to Coutinho. In training they will run back like defenders, but on the field, in the play, I don’t believe they will obey. I hope they don’t.”
They did, of course. So dull was Brazil at the World Cup that on the very day they reached the second round, Coutinho was burned in effigy by Brazilian fans at the team’s base in Mar del Plata. Then Argentina bought Peru, Brazil went out, and the suicides rained from Rio apartments.
At every World Cup we read about Brazilian suicides and African witch doctors. The press seems to believe that when Brazil is knocked out, devoted fans jump off apartment blocks. The truth is probably different.
In the early days of a World Cup, while the Brazilian team are still winning, life in Brazil is a party. Cars honk on the streets, and everyone sings and dances. Then Brazil loses and is knocked out. The mood suddenly changes, and the people who suffer most are the nation’s manic-depressives. Carried along by the general euphoria, they cannot bear its end. Their “high” becomes a “low,” and they commit suicide.
Coutinho died in a skin diving accident before the next World Cup. Tele Santana managed Brazil in 1982 and he reproduced the beautiful game of old. To general dismay, his team lost 3-2 to Paolo Rossi’s Italy in an unforgettable match. Two years after the World Cup, Socrates, one of Brazil’s stars, remade Santana’s point: he turned down £1 million contracts with Roma and Juventus because of clauses that forbade him to make love for three days before a match. He joined Fiorentina instead. “Now we all know why Brazilian soccer is a game of beauty and passion while its Italian counterpart bores everyone to tears,” wrote that propagandist of excess, the Daily Express.
At the next World Cup, Santana’s team went down with honor again, and then the modernizers took control. The Brazilian manager in 1990, Sebastiao Lazaroni, was the sternest of all.
A mediocre goalkeeper, Lazaroni quit the game early and read a lot of soccer books. “The national team must become less playful,” he warned, and in Italy he fielded players who looked like Brazilians and wore Brazilian uniform but who played like the dourest of Eastern Europeans. With seven defenders, Brazil beat Sweden and Costa Rica by 1-0 each and Scotland by 2-1. At one point the Italian police had to step in to stop the Brazilian press from tearing Lazaroni into little bits. “This is the great danger of Lazaroni’s logic: he will only be right if Brazil win the World Cup. If we are eliminated early, only the memory of a bad team will survive,” warned Pelé. “Pelé is a sad old man,” responded the Brazilian players.
Brazil was eliminated early. Against Argentina, they played magically and all but broke down the woodwork, but the Argentines scored in the 83rd minute and won 1-0. It was a victory with a whiff of sulphur and Bilardismo: during the match, the Brazilian player Branco had called to the sidelines for water, and someone on the Argentine bench had sportingly thrown him a flask. From that moment on Branco played groggily, and he later declared that he had been slipped a Mickey Finn.
Overnight Lazaroni became Brazil’s public enemy number one. He was lucky he had a job waiting at Fiorentina, for there was no way he could go home. The nation demanded a return to old ways. “There is a sense that the way we played in 1990, that that is not Brazil,” Parreira told me. Of course he did. Parreira is an educated man, but after Lazaroni he can hardly preach “modern” soccer. Parreira’s Brazil will be more traditional than Lazaroni’s, and more modern than Pelé’s.
Soccer is never just soccer. In debating soccer, the Brazilians also debate the kind of country Brazil should be. “Maybe it’s the same for Englishmen too,” Luis Eduardo Soares, an anthropologist, suggested to me. “When our national team plays, we feel that the identity of our country is being played out on the field. Our values are being shown to the world.” Brazilians feel this more strongly than we do. To them, Coutinho, Zagalo and Lazaroni, proponents of dull soccer, were not just losers but traitors. The issue, in politics as in soccer, is whether Brazil should imitate Europe, or whether it should try to return to its own past. Brazil today is backward (try making an appointment in Rio) but it is creative: great soccer, great samba, and great cinema. The greatest foreign debt in the world, too. The modernizers, in politics as in soccer, want to turn Brazil into a second Germany.
Fernando Collor de Mello, a fluent English speaker, was elected president in 1990, with a brief to “civilize” Brazil. His mission failed. Collor championed discipline, but not for himself, and having been elected to destroy corruption, he became the most corrupt president the country could remember. In 1992, he avoided impeachment by resigning.
Collor was a Malandro. There are only a few left now, sang Chico Buarque in his Opera of the Malandro, and they are all politicians. Brazil is changing. The Malandro has left the favelas, where he has given way to the killer, and he has disappeared from soccer, which is growing ever duller. The black drib
blers are gone. There is less space to play in the cities, and so the clubs draw more players from schools and sports clubs, which means more rich kids. The stars of the 1980s, Zico, Falcao and Socrates, were white and middle class. Even capoeira is becoming a white sport, taught in fashionable Rio schools where often only the master is a black man. So greatly has Brazil changed that at the 1990 World Cup, Pelé singled out a German, Lothar Matthãus, as the one man who was playing like a Brazilian. The Brazilians are getting it the wrong way around: modern soccer, backward politics.
CHAPTER 18
CELTIC AND RANGERS, OR RANGERS AND CELTIC
CELTIC WAS PLAYING RANGERS in Glasgow, and I travelled there by way of Northern Ireland.
I spent months preparing for the game. On a train in France, I met a rare Protestant Celtic fan, who assured me that the ancient Glaswegian custom of asking passersby if their religion had fallen into disuse. He said: “Nowadays they don’t ask, ‘Prod or Catholic?’, or ‘Billy or Dan?’, they just ask, ‘Which team do you support?’ ” I always say, ‘Partick Thistle,’ and they laugh and go away.” But if I were to go about in team colors, said this man, “they’ll just back stab you without even talking to you.” I decided not to go about in team colors.
I also prepared by reading Celtic and Rangers fanzines. I read them in Moscow, in Cameroon, in the bath of the house I stayed in in Cape Town. From the bathtub you looked out onto Table Mountain. You also looked out onto the patio, from where your housemates looked back at you, so it was not the most soothing place to read fanzines. Reading them tended to remind me of the Yugoslav war anyway. The following is taken from Follow, Follow, a Rangers fanzine. Bear in mind that Rangers are Protestant, that Celtic are Catholic, that a “Prod” is a Protestant, and a “Tim” a Celtic fan, or simply any Roman Catholic.
Only one of Hitler’s main henchmen was a Prod, the foreign minister von Ribbentrop. . . . The three most distinguished non-Jewish anti-Nazi resisters, Raoul Wallenberg, Dietrich Bonnhoffer and Pastor Niemoller were all Prods. And let’s not forget that Hitler was a Tim!
Follow, Follow has a circulation of 10,000, and is quite a force in Glasgow.
Possibly Rangers and Celtic fans are the only people who live in the real world. Certainly they live in a world rather different from ours, and ours only matters to them when it connects with their rivalry. And it never matters all that much, for even as World War II raged several of their games ended in riots. An Old Firm game in 1975 inspired two attempted murders, two cleaver attacks, one axe attack, nine stabbings and 35 common assaults. On the other hand, the clubs also inspire great love. Rangers no longer allow the ashes of dead fans to be scattered on the Ibrox pitch, because, in the words of John Greig, former Rangers player and manager, “we were doing so many that we were ending up with big bald patches—even in the middle of summer.” Scarcely a Glaswegian novel fails to touch on the Old Firm game, and it is in the main thanks to Rangers and Celtic fans that Scots watch more soccer matches than do any other Europeans except Albanians. This suggests that there is less to do in Albania than in Scotland.
I say that Celtic are Catholic and Rangers are Protestant. This has to be qualified. Celtic have always fielded Protestants, and players like Bertie Peacock were even rumored to be Orangemen—members of the extreme Protestant Orange Order. It was different at Rangers.
The punk group Pope Paul and the Romans (also known as The Bollock Brothers) once sang “Why Don’t Rangers Sign a Catholic?,” and sometimes Rangers directors would reply honestly. “It is part of our tradition,” said Matt Taylor in Canada in 1967. “We were founded in 1873 as a Presbyterian Boys’ Club. To change now would lose us considerable support.” The Bush, a Presbyterian Church newspaper, raised the issue in 1978 and saw its circulation fall from 13,000 to 8,000. The paper soon folded. Today, the table tennis and snooker tables at Ibrox are still painted blue, but in 1989 the club signed the Roman Catholic striker Maurice Johnston.
Not the View, a Celtic fanzine, scooped with the news that “Rangers are to break with a 100-year tradition and in a shock move sign a good looking player.” In fact, Johnston was not the first Catholic to play for Rangers: rather, he was the first Catholic the club had knowingly signed since World War I (even if his stepfather was a Protestant and a Rangers fan). To Rangers fans, Mo Johnston was the worst Catholic of them all. He had head-butted Stuart Munro of Rangers in the 1986 Skol Cup final, and while being sent off had made the sign of the cross “at” the Rangers fans. Just before joining Rangers he had seemed on the point of signing for Celtic. When he chose otherwise, the Shankill, Belfast branch of the Rangers Supporters Club folded in protest. Meanwhile, Celtic fans nicknamed him La petite merde, in honor of his spell in France. Scotland on Sunday called Johnston “the Salman Rushdie of Scottish soccer,” for offending two sets of fundamentalists at once, and the player took Rushdie-like measures. Fearing Glasgow, he took a house in Edinburgh. It was gasoline-bombed by Celtic fans. He hired a 24-hour bodyguard. Celtic fans attacked his father.
During his time at Rangers, Follow, Follow writers debated whether he was trying his best for the team. He was certainly trying his best to please. It was soon reported that he had sung The Sash, a Protestant song, at a supporters’ dance, and also that years before he had spat on a Celtic crest. The Govan R.S.C. voted him Player of the Year after his first season, but a year after that he was gone. He never transformed Rangers into a Catholic club. “Rangers could sign Pope John Paul himself and I don’t think it would make any difference,” as William English told me.
English is a young Royal Mail worker and Ibrox regular who finds some of his fellow fans hard to explain. When I placed an advertisement in Follow, Follow he phoned me, eager to talk, and we met in a Glasgow café. He told me: “There were guys who, when Mo scored, didn’t count that goal, so if the result was 1-0 they’d count it as a 0-0 draw. I’ve seen guys almost get into fights at matches for encouraging Mo Johnston. The strange thing is that once the booing stopped, Mo got worse.” Johnston is an eccentric.
Now Mark Hateley, the Rangers center-forward, is rumored to be a Catholic. English said: “When Hateley plays, you get guys shouting, ‘Come on the Queen’s Ten!’ They won’t say ‘Queen’s Eleven’ because they don’t count Hateley.” Before, there had been doubts about Trevor Francis (said to have sent his children to a Catholic school) and Mark Falco (a Protestant with a habit of crossing himself), while even Terry Butcher (“Celtic, you hate ’em so much”) finally had to deny publicly that he was Catholic.
Hateley was accepted most of the time, said English. “But if he misses a couple of chances, they go: ‘He’s a Fenian, isn’t he?’ ” I asked, “So he can’t have three bad matches in a row?,” and English said, “I wouldn’t recommend it.” I asked how anyone knew that Hateley was a Catholic. “They say Hateley’s wife is a Catholic. I don’t know how anyone knows that.” Did English think Hateley was a Catholic? “It’s a terrible thing to say, but he doesn’t look like it.” What? “Well, Catholics, I’d say, are more likely to have jet black hair, with no tan at all, or else tight orange hair.” He pointed at a group at the other end of the café: “For instance, I don’t think those four guys are Catholics.”
“I paid for my season-ticket one week,” Danny Houston recounted to me mournfully, “and they signed Mo Johnston the next.” Houston, an honorary deputy grand master of the Orange Lodge in Glasgow and Scotland, boycotted Rangers during the Johnston era. I visited him at his house. He was dressed in a tracksuit.
The Orange Order is an Irish Protestant society founded in 1795 and is strongest in Scotland and Ulster. Every summer the Order holds Orange Marches, which often end in brawls with Catholics. “We’re working-class people who are Loyal and Royal,” as Houston defined it. “Orangemen support all sorts of teams. You get Airdrie supporters, Falkirk supporters . . .” But few of them are Parkhead regulars, and most just support Rangers. One man who walked up to an Orange March while dressed in a Celtic shirt was arrested for breach of t
he peace.
Houston insisted he had no objection to Rangers signing a foreign Catholic, but “Roman Catholicism in the West of Scotland is synonymous with Irish Republicanism.” That was his catchphrase. Real Sociedad, he said, signed only Basques, and in the German league before the war there had been a Jewish team called Maccabi, which the Nazis had banned. “So why should anyone act like the Nazis? Why does Scotland have this hang-up about Rangers being a Protestant team? There’s not a Scottish Protestant in the current Celtic team. Does anyone ever say that?”
Graeme Souness, the Rangers manager who signed Johnston, was making a point to fans like Houston. Before capturing Johnston, Souness had done his best to buy the Welsh Catholic Ian Rush from Juventus (the living person Rush would most like to meet is the Pope), and had bid for the Catholics Ray Houghton and John Sheridan. Yet the change in policy was also down to David Murray, the Rangers chairman.
Matt Taylor in 1967 was afraid of losing fans, but Murray in 1989 was more interested in luring sponsors. “Soccer is no longer a pie-and-Bovril game,” he liked to say. Fans (or some of them) want Rangers to be a Protestant club, but sponsors do not. Murray has gone for sponsors, and they have responded.
Max Weber, the German sociologist, famously observed that where Protestants and Catholics live together, the Protestants tend to be richer. There used to be a wealth divide of this kind in Glasgow, but today Rangers fans like to insist that they are just as poor as Celtic fans. That is the accepted wisdom—and yet Rangers F.C. are rich and Celtic F.C. are poor, and Bluenoses at Old Firm games chant, “You haven’t got any money.” The Kelly and White families run Celtic far more laxly than Murray does Rangers, yet it would be wrong to give Murray all the credit. He could never have done at Celtic what he did at Rangers: for most businessmen in Glasgow are Protestants, who would not buy executive boxes or pay £75 for a five-course meal at Parkhead.
