by Zirin, Dave
The social movements also suffered because Lula provided something the nation had not experienced in decades of economic upheaval and military dictatorship: stability. Brazilians’ widespread desire for stability in the 2000s cannot be ignored. As one veteran movement activist said to me:
Social movements throughout Brazil have been eviscerated under the PT, absolutely eviscerated. One of the reasons is . . . that people assumed they had a friend in power, and why would that person betray them in the way that Lula, or the PT, has? Once you assume power, you don’t need to fight anymore. And so all these long-term social structures stopped, or they were co-opted, or they were given power so now the struggle needs to go against them. But the struggle against them comes from the right. So you either go all the way back to some mixture of fascism or Marxist/Leninism, or you just conform to the increase of the power that you’ve got and your struggle’s over.
When Lula left office, the 2014 World Cup and particularly the 2016 Olympics were seen as his swan song: a signal that the world was finally granting Brazil the respect it felt it had deserved for almost a century. Tragically, the World Cup and Olympics are not symbolic successes. They walk hand in hand with graft, austerity, security crackdowns, and a set of spending priorities that would have made the young Lula blush. Yet he also had the good fortune to win the bids for these mega-events just before the end of his term of office—meaning he avoided the much more difficult task of their implementation.
The Election of Dilma
Lula’s political career brings to mind a line from the movie The Dark Knight: “Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.”42 Lula did not die, but term limits pushed him out of office before economic stagnation, scandal, or the fallout from hosting the World Cup and Olympics could be pinned directly on his legacy. That has fallen on the shoulders of his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, popularly known as Dilma. Unlike Lula, Dilma was born into the upper middle class, her father a Bulgarian entrepreneur. After the military coup of 1964, seventeen-year-old Dilma became a socialist and an urban guerrilla. She joined the militant left-wing group Colina (Comando de Libertação Nacional, the National Liberation Command). Unlike Lula, who spent one month in prison during the dictatorship, Dilma was behind bars from 1970 to 1972, where she was tortured by the very government she would someday lead.43 When Lula chose Dilma to succeed him, she was largely a political unknown, the last person standing to hold the banner of the Workers’ Party after a series of scandals struck down more obvious contenders. It was a testament to Lula’s legacy, the economic boom, and the social movements’ inability to find purchase that Lula could sell the public on electing a veritable political unknown to lead the nation. Not only did Dilma win the first election after Lula left office, but the PT also emerged as the largest political party in Congress.
While Lula was basically able to have his cake and eat it too—both neoliberalism and social programs—Dilma has been president of the post-party hangover.
The Economist, the magazine of the neoliberal consensus, now blasts its former darling Brazil for being “a stagnant economy, a bloated state” with “the world’s most burdensome tax code.” Its editors sniff that “the markets do not trust Ms. Rousseff.” Most hilariously, they tie the mass protests of 2013 to her lack of “fiscal rectitude,” comparing her unfavorably to “the pragmatic Lula.”44 They do not see that, while they may have the right diagnosis for why her approval rating has fallen from 65 percent to a low of 30 percent—that is, taxation, corruption, health care, and education—the austerity they claim as a cure would, without question, bring people back into the streets. They didn’t consider that her pledge to hold down the minimum wage and place strict boundaries on public spending might also have something to do with it.45 Or that possibly, with the economy dragging, people who have clamored for years for massive public investment in the cities aren’t pleased to see all that money getting plowed into hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. They certainly didn’t consider that maybe, just maybe, Brazilians don’t want to spend billions on new stadiums while the poor are being displaced—especially when it’s all for the benefit and service of the twenty-first-century version of the same European powers that have been stripping the country of its skin for four hundred years.46
“I used to be a fan of Dilma,” a Rio teacher said to me, adding:
But I lost respect for her when she sided with the mayor’s plan for Olympic development. There are some huge contradictions between her federal policy and the local impact of the Olympic development, which she supports. . . . Dilma is just a capitalist. And this is just capitalism, it’s all about making money. The poor are the ones who built this city. You couldn’t be here without the poor of Rio. But now, the people who built the city are being pushed out. You can’t have a positive legacy of the Games when the poor who created this city aren’t part of that legacy.
Brazil has long sought respect on the international stage. At a state dinner held in his honor in Brasília in 1982, Ronald Reagan raised his glass to toast to Brazil and instead, whether by accident or as an act of condescension, toasted “to Bolivia.”47 Those days may be done, but international respect has its price. The neoliberal price, paid by Lula and continued by Dilma, is what laid the groundwork for the explosive 2013 Confederations Cup protests.
Chapter 4
Futebol: The Journey from Daring to Fear
Brazil has the most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dances of big city slums. . . . There are no right angles in Brazilian soccer, just as there are none in the Rio Mountains.
—Eduardo Galeano1
The relationship between soccer and Brazil is not so much about sports as it is about national identity: it is the connective tissue in a country defined by different cultures crashing together in violence and beauty. This nation is Indigenous, African, German, Italian, Japanese, Lebanese, and Eastern European. When people consider what makes them “Brazilian,” soccer operates much as baseball did in the United States decades ago: as a portal to a sense of belonging and a different national identity than their ancestors.
Soccer crosses into all aspects of Brazilian life. It is inextricable from the country’s political, economic, and cultural history throughout the twentieth century. No other country is more identified with the sport that is a global obsession. Only Brazil has qualified for every World Cup since the tournament launched in 1930. Only Brazil has won the Copa five times. No other country has put its stylistic mark on the sport quite like Brazil. If you play the game in South Korea, Germany, or Zambia and you play it with flair, feints, and fakes, people will say you play in the “Brazilian style” and everyone will know exactly what that means. It was this “Brazilian style” that gave the sport its defining nickname, “the beautiful game.”
Not surprisingly, soccer has also been a mirror reflecting Brazilian society. It has been put to use by military dictators and by those who resisted military dictatorship. Today, as Brazil gets ready to host the World Cup, its new soccer stadiums have become symbols of corruption, waste, and stagnation. Likewise, the homogenization of Brazil’s beautiful game is a reflection of globalization, gentrification, and the way even a place defined by the Rio Mountains can become “flattened.” It also reflects a colonial structure in which the best soccer players are developed in-country and then sold to the massive commercial conglomerates that operate the top clubs in Europe. The best players, who used to delight crowds at the Maracanã in between World Cups, are now another export.
To know soccer in Brazil is to know how Brazil sees itself, which is critical for the goals of this book and for anyone hoping to understand the current conflicts. As with all stories, we need to start at the beginning.
Soccer Comes to Brazil’s Shores
In Brazil, futebol’s history falls into four broad periods: 1894–1904, when it remained
largely restricted to the private urban clubs of the foreign born; 1905–1933, its amateur phase, marked by great strides in popularity and rising pressures to raise the playing level by subsidizing athletes; 1933–1950, the initial period of professionalism; and the post-1950 phase of world-class recognition accompanied by elaborate commercialism and maturity as an unchallenged national asset.
—Robert Levine2
There is evidence that the elements of soccer stretch back to the Han Dynasty in China more than two thousand years ago. Different forms of the game have been seen in a variety of cultures and societies across the globe: there is something very elemental about trying to kick a ball into a goal. The modern sport as we know it today, however, was first codified in England in 1863. This was when representatives from schools and clubs across London met at the Freemasons’ Tavern to expunge any elements of rugby from the sport. Before this time, some teams had played the game with rugby rules integrated, which included legal tackling, tripping, eye-gouging, and shin-kicking as much as kicking the ball. The rugby lovers were expelled and a set of widely agreed-upon rules about everything from the degree of contact allowed on the pitch to an absolute prohibition on the use of hands were finally established. From there, the sport then set about conquering the globe.
There are differing stories about how soccer found its way to Brazil. The most often repeated, and for many the most credible, story says that it all began with a young man named Charles Miller in 1894. Miller was the upwardly mobile son of a Scottish rail engineer working in Brazil to make sure that the trains could get goods to the ships for export. Miller arrived on Brazil’s shores to work with his father. He also just happened to be an accomplished midfielder in Southampton, England. In tales that make him sound like Moses, he is said to have stepped off the boat at the port of Santos in São Paulo with two soccer balls, one in each hand: one a symbol of the game as it was in Europe, the other of what the game could become.3 If Charles Miller really, honestly, and truly walked around thinking about his future iconography, then that is more impressive than any of his other accomplishments. What we do know is that Miller, out of boredom, started organizing “kickabouts” among his fellow expatriates living in São Paulo. (The city even has a street named after him.) These kickabouts attracted attention from locals fascinated by the sport, which they saw as similar in style and energy to the dance and martial arts popular in the country. Even though both men and women were, according to accounts, drawn to the game, play was a male-only exercise then and for decades afterward.4
Another origin story names Brazilian soccer’s Prometheus as a Scottish dye worker named Thomas Donohue, who came to Brazil in 1893 to work at a textile factory in Bangu, on the outskirts of Rio. Richard McBrearty, curator of the Scottish Football Museum, contends that Donohue marked off a field near the factory and started to organize five-on-five matches in April 1894, six months before Miller’s first game in São Paulo.5 No matter whether one chooses to see soccer as having arrived on bourgeois or proletarian wings, the beautiful game arrived in Brazil as a part of that first post-emancipation wave of European migration—as industry was first expanding throughout the South American continent.
Some anthropologists argue that a form of the sport may have also existed in Indigenous culture, which gave it an air of familiarity to Brazilians. But one thing is clear beyond all shadow of a doubt: as soon as soccer reached Brazil the people made it their own, and it spread as if they had been poised and crouched, just waiting to play. Brazil’s first football club was founded in 1900. São Paulo launched its first formal league in 1902.6 Charles Miller said with wonder in 1904, “A week ago I was asked to referee in a match of small boys, twenty a side. . . . I thought, of course, the whole thing would be a muddle, but I found I was very much mistaken . . . even for this match about 1,500 people turned up. No less than 2,000 footballs have been sold here within the last twelve months; nearly every village has a club now.”7
People of African descent were excluded at first, but the thrill of the game, along with the fact that poverty was not an obstacle to play, made it irresistible. After slavery’s abolition in 1888, newly liberated Afro-Brazilians migrated in droves into the cities, creating a mass of urban poor for the first time in Brazil’s history. These cities were very much under the cultural influence of the British Empire because of the treaty made for Brazil’s independence fifty years earlier (see chapter 3). Soccer was present on fields throughout the citie, yet it did not become the “beautiful game” until Afro-Brazilians made it what we know today as “Brazilian.” Their feints, fakes, and flair were reminiscent of the slave martial art of capoeira. In addition, many have theorized that because soccer was an integrated space in a racist society, Afro-Brazilian players took great pains to make no physical contact whatsoever with their opponents, lest they risk reprisals. That meant playing with a style that people found both aesthetically pleasing and effective. The widespread embrace of the Afro-Brazilian style—and, remember, newly emancipated slaves made up roughly half of the population—gave Brazil something it had never had during its period of royal independence: a national identity. A country in which one in two people had until recently been held in slavery, ruled by an oligarchy with unthinkable wealth, a country with historic connections to Portugal but really under the economic umbrella of the British empire: soccer brought these disparate strands together to create a connective tissue and a common Brazilian experience.
The sport continued to spread through Afro-Brazilian life. People made their own soccer balls and played without shoes, toughening the soles and sides of their bare feet with calluses and scar tissue. In many neighborhoods today, little has changed. I saw young people playing soccer in the favelas with beat-up, half-deflated balls. So much of play is in the body, the hips, that the ball becomes secondary to the act. By 1910, precisely because it was embraced by Afro-Brazilians, Rio had more makeshift soccer fields than any city in South America. The debut of Brazil’s national team came in 1914, in a game against the British club Exeter City. Ten thousand spectators came out to watch Brazil beat the British club 2 to 1. Newspapers called the electric buzz in the stands “simply indescribable.”8
Rio, not coincidentally, was also the site of the first club to field Afro-Brazilian players. It was called the Bangu Athletic Club, started in 1904 by the British managers of the same textile factory where Thomas Donohue had labored a decade earlier.9 Many factories started soccer clubs in this era, another factor that brought the game to the Brazilian masses. This practice was seen in the United States as well: managers creating sports clubs in factories as a way to keep labor grievances at bay.
But if the game was flowering as a multicultural space on the public fields, racism and restriction dominated official league play. Like in the early decades of the Olympics, rules for admittance ensured that the sport remained aristocratic and white. As soccer historian Alex Bellos has written, “Football provided a justification to reconsolidate theories of white supremacy, which had been thrown into doubt by the abolition of slavery. The first nonwhite players on the big clubs tried to flatten their hair and whiten their skin. To this day, the Rio club Fluminense bears the nickname ‘Rice Powder’ because that is what opponents would chant at Carlos Alberto, the first ‘mulatto’ to play for the club.”10 These color lines and white supremacy started to wither only when integrated teams began achieving greater success. Vasco da Gama, a Rio club started by Portuguese-Brazilians, was the first league team to integrate formally. It won the championship with much fanfare in 1923, with a team made up of “three blacks, a mulatto, and seven working-class whites.”11 After Vasco won the championship, the other big Rio clubs set up a separate league excluding it. Vasco eventually journeyed back into the league and continued using black players despite rules designed to exclude them—such as requiring players to be otherwise employed and to be able to sign their names, as well as requiring each team to have its own stadium. The Portuguese community that supported Vasco found
employment for its black players and even provided remedial education for them. The players’ most lasting legacy to the sport, however, was the practice of referring to players by their first names or using nicknames; the Portuguese expats were said to have difficulty with the black players’ multisyllabic last names. This is perhaps the origin of the uniquely Brazilian tradition of calling players by a single name, like Pelé, Ronaldo, or Ronaldinho.12 This practice now extends to other sports as well: the Brazilian NBA basketball player Nenê Hilario is now known only as Nenê. It also operates in politics, as the last three presidents—FHC, Lula, and Dilma—can attest.
Once integration began in soccer, it was a tidal wave. This was quite different from the integration of sports in the United States, where twenty-five years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, Jim Crow laws were still in effect and teams had quotas on the number of African American players they would sign. Many of Brazil’s teams set about the task of full integration as soon as it was allowed. After 1938, when any pretense of stopping integration ended, the Rio club Bonsucesso fielded a team of eleven Afro-Brazilians without any fear about quotas or appearances.
Now, as Alex Bellos argues, “futebol was not the game that Charles Miller imported in 1894. Futebol was the sport that was played as a dance; it was the sport that united the country and that showed its greatness.”13 Bellos’s description of the “Brazilian style” is stunning; he illustrates
a game in which prodigious individual skills outshine team tactics, where dribbles and flicks are preferred over physical challenges or long-distance passes. Perhaps because of the emphasis on the dribble, which moves one’s whole body, Brazilian football is often described in musical terms—in particular as a samba, which is a type of song and a dance. At their best, Brazilians are, we like to think, both sportsmen and artists. Since most Brazilians learnt from informal kickabouts, it was likely that they would play in a way less constrained by rules, tactics, or conventions. Since many started playing using bundles of socks, it was also likely that their ball skills would be more highly developed and inventive. Alternatively, one could explain the flashy individualism by pointing to the national trait of showing off in public.14
