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

The obvious point of comparison, as noted above, is the Brazilian martial art/dance of capoeira, devised by slaves as a dance that masks the use of lethal force. Today in Brazil, capoeiristas gather on beaches and in studios to practice this unique martial art. The movements in both Brazilian soccer and capoeira demonstrate the art of “hiding in plain sight.” In both cases, the imprint of African culture, history, and influence cannot be overstated.

Soccer achieved even higher prominence with the ascension of military dictator Getúlio Vargas. Vargas understood that soccer was becoming a national obsession and was the first major politician to see the political benefits of being identified with the sport. He started the National Sports Council in 1941 to fund a network of soccer clubs, with the goal of developing talent and making sure the national team had the best possible training and facilities. If we want to understand why Brazil is, as of this writing, the only country to have won the World Cup five times, part of the answer is certainly Vargas. He made sure that all of these leagues and federations were under his central control. He also pointedly and publicly subsidized all expenses for the national team’s trip to France for the 1938 World Cup. This was a savvy move, as the country was enthralled by the thought of its team returning historic favors and conquering Europe. Brazil flourished in the 1938 tournament, coming in third after getting knocked out in the first round of the previous two World Cups. The tournament also made a star out of Leônidas da Silva, winner of the World Cup’s Golden Ball award for most outstanding player as well as the Golden Boot for the tournament’s top scorer. This was a particularly satisfying honor given that European teams held the majority of the votes. Leônidas was a national celebrity, symbolizing the very essence of what being Brazilian could mean in the twentieth century. He was also Afro-Brazilian and his nickname, Black Diamond, was a celebration of this dual heritage. Leonidas is also credited—though the point is disputed—with inventing the “bicycle kick,” a reverse kick that to this day only the truly daring attempt and only the greats pull off.15

It would be two decades before Brazil actually won a World Cup, but the nation was now hooked not only on playing but also on the idea of setting an international standard, proving its worth to the parasitic powers that had bled it dry over the centuries. Soccer became synonymous with a certain kind of manhood. “Real men” played soccer and, by that transitive property, Brazilian men were equal or superior to any men on earth. (We will deal later in this chapter with the question of Brazilian women in soccer.)

Gilka Machado, an iconic Brazilian poet of the 1930s, wrote a poem about the 1938 World Cup. She celebrated the team’s “entrancing, winged feet” and gave a glimpse into the rise of soccer and its place in the constellation of Brazilian cultural identity:

Brazilian souls

follow in your footsteps

to the rushing ball,

to the decisive kick

of the glory of the Fatherland.

The players of the national team are playing for the manhood of a nation as they

Fix in the eye of the foreigner

The miraculous reality

That is the Brazilian man

The poem ends with a salute to the soccer players, the heroes of Brazil:

The soul of Brazil

Lays down a kiss

On your heroic feet.16

Then there was the 1950 World Cup final, where Brazil lost to Uruguay in front of a packed Maracanã filled to the rafters two hundred thousand strong, by a score of 2 to 1. Not unlike the Boston Red Sox fans who used to talk endlessly about the Curse of the Bambino and relive what they refer to as “Game Six” (of the 1986 World Series, that is), Brazil’s soccer culture obsesses over this loss. It is considered the Maracanã’s most famous moment. It even has its own name: the Maracanaço. Roberto DaMatta, a renowned Brazilian anthropologist, writes of the 1950 World Cup final as “perhaps the greatest tragedy in contemporary Brazilian history. Because it happened collectively and brought a united vision of the loss of a historic opportunity. Because it happened at the beginning of a decade in which Brazil was looking to assert itself as a nation with a great future.”17 Brazil’s goalkeeper, Moacyr Barbosa Nascimento, suffered racist recriminations and was treated as a pariah for decades afterwards. “Under Brazilian law the maximum sentence is thirty years,” Barbosa said in 2000. “But my imprisonment has been for fifty.”18

To understand how deep this loss goes, consider the year 2000, which marked the thirtieth anniversary of Brazil’s third World Cup victory in a final game that expressed all that is beautiful about the Brazilian way of soccer. That year, 2000, also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Maracanaço. According to Bellos, the anniversary of the 1970 victory “passed barely without trace,” while Rio newspapers published headlines commemorating the 1950 loss: “A HALF CENTURY OF NIGHTMARE.”19 The Brazilian novelist Carlos Heitor Cony wrote, “Survivors of that cruel afternoon believed they would never again be able to be happy. . . . What happened on July 16, 1950, deserves a collective monument, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. These are the things that build nations, a people drenched in their own pain.”20 The 1950 loss carries such cultural weight that it is permanently imprinted on Brazil’s national psyche; its international soccer team, as Alex Bellos writes, is “always playing against itself, against its own demons, against the ghosts of the Maracanã.”21

One result of the 1950 loss was that Brazil tried to shake off the doldrums by redesigning its uniforms to the now iconic vivid yellow, blue, green, and white. Since 1970, with the widespread commercial availability of color television, their dazzling green and canary yellow shirts have signified a unique kind of soccer. For the world, no one wore that shirt with quite the panache of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as Pelé. Yet within Brazil, which revels in its own uniqueness, the real icon is someone far less familiar to casual and international soccer fans, someone as brilliant and as tragic as the Maracanaço. His name is Manuel Francisco dos Santos, but they call him Garrincha.

Garrincha and Pelé

To even have a cursory knowledge of Brazilian soccer or its place in Brazilian culture, you need to know the legend of Garrincha. Born in the impoverished rural town of Pau Grande, a region of Rio de Janeiro, Garrincha was the key player in Brazil’s 1958 and 1962 World Cup victories. Many Brazilians regard the athletically gifted, personally flawed Garrincha as the greatest player to ever come out of Brazil, better even than Pelé. Garrincha is Portuguese for “wren,” a bird defined by both its delicacy and its surprising speed. He has also been called “the Angel with Bent Legs” because he was born with spinal defects that bent his right leg inward and made his left leg six centimeters shorter than his right and curved outward. From this unlikely start, he became a master of ball control and goal scorer without peer.22

Somehow, on his bent legs, Garrincha was also a speed merchant, blending incredible balance and ability with an inability to be caught. As teenagers, Garrincha and Pelé were on the same triumphant 1958 World Cup team. Stunningly, neither was played during the first two games. They finally were put in for the third, against the USSR. At the very beginning of the game, Garrincha hit the post after dribbling around the field for forty seconds. Pelé also hit the frame of the goal after a pass from Garrincha. This barrage ended mercilessly with a goal by their teammate, striker Edvaldo Izídio Neto, known as Vavá. This is considered the “finest three minutes” in Brazilian soccer history.

This entire 1958 World Cup squad represented a new, multicultural generation filled with a promise of hope and social mobility unknown to previous generations. David Goldblatt notes that the 1958 World Cup squad was largely made up of

the youthful elite of the new generation of football players who came of age in the boom. . . . The squad underwent intensive medical checks in Rio’s leading hospitals which revealed an extraordinary catalogue of disease, neglect, and long-term malnutrition. Almost the entire squad had intestinal parasites, some had syphilis, others were anemic. Over 300 teeth were extracted from the mouths of players who had never been to a dentist, and but for this episode might never have gone. Epidemiologically, Brazil’s ’58 were a team of the people.23

Yet alongside their hope, tragedy also lurked in the poverty that malnourished many of these players. Many of them discovered, much like future generations of athletes, that once the cheering stopped, no one was going to look out for their interests—and a fall from greater heights could produce an even more jarring impact.

No one personified this familiar story of sports, economic adversity, and misfortune more than the everyman Garrincha. He was, in the brightest possible spotlight, a tragic figure, an alcoholic like his father who spent himself to bankruptcy. Anthropologist José Sergio said, “When someone dies, you take stock of all the person’s life. Garrincha was identified with the public. He never lost his popular roots. He was also exploited by football so he was the symbol of the majority of Brazilians, who are also exploited.”24 Garrincha’s was a grand narrative: the wren picked apart by vultures who was not only an able player on crippled legs but beautiful. He lived life with reckless, wicked abandon. His legend is how some Brazilians choose to see themselves. Pelé is a different kind of role model, one Brazilians have been more apt to respect and resist simultaneously. Both are works of art, but Pelé is cold as marble.

The Cold Cool of Pelé

When Rio was chosen to host the 2016 Olympics, the man standing by Lula’s side was Pelé. Who else could it possibly have been? Born in 1940 outside of São Paulo, Edson Arantes do Nascimento was raised in poverty. Unlike Garrincha, Pelé was a legacy athlete, the son of a respected Fluminense player known as Dondinho. In 1956, before his sixteenth birthday, he was already a prodigy, stuck with the nickname Pelé against his will for reasons that are still unknown (possibly because he had difficulty pronouncing the name of his favorite player, Bilé). The top scorer in his league in São Paulo at fifteen, he would score the one-thousandth goal of his career thirteen years later at the Maracanã.

Pelé’s accolades, described in full, would fill an encyclopedia. He was named FIFA’s player of the twentieth century, along with Argentina’s Diego Maradona. He was voted World Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics. He finished ahead of people like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan and was voted Athlete of the Century by the IOC, in conjunction with the Reuters News Agency. By any statistical measure, Pelé was the most prolific player and scorer ever to live. A pro at fifteen, he joined the Brazilian national team at sixteen and won his first World Cup at seventeen. At that 1958 World Cup, Pelé became the youngest player to play in a World Cup final match at seventeen years and 249 days, scoring two goals in the final as Brazil beat Sweden 5 to 2. His first goal, a lob over a defender followed by a precise volley shot, was selected as one of the finest goals in World Cup history. When Pelé scored his second goal, Swedish player Sigvard Parling later commented: “I have to be honest and say I felt like applauding.”25 Pelé is still the only player to be a part of three World Cup–winning teams. He still holds the single-game record for goals in a game, with eleven scores (no, that’s not a typo). In 1961, when Pelé was twenty, Brazilian president Jânio Quadros declared him “a national treasure,” both to burnish his own presidency and to prevent Pelé from signing with a club in Europe.26 This would be the first of countless times Brazil’s political leaders would attempt to bask in his glow.

What Pelé was able to do like no one before him, or perhaps even since, was to transcend Brazil and become an international icon. His face became one with the most popular sport on earth. In the pre-Internet age, his global fame was rivaled only by, perhaps, Muhammad Ali. In 1967, the two armies of the Nigerian Civil War declared a forty-eight-hour ceasefire in honor of—and so they could attend—an exhibition game that Pelé was playing in Lagos. His stardom contributed to black athletes’ new heightened status in Brazil: “Promoted by intellectuals, the media, and the dominant classes as a symbol of Brazilianness, futebol achieved the fullest extent of its influence when blacks, like Pelé, were given full recognition within the system. The outpouring of national pride and self-esteem which accompanied the three World Cup victories could not have been imagined under other circumstances.”27

During the 1970s, a survey showed that Pelé was the second-most recognized brand name in Europe, after Coca-Cola. By nineteen, the Brazilian Coffee Institute had already asked him to be its international emissary. He was the first athlete to trademark his own name. He also made himself a blank political slate as well as a “brand.” In this Pelé was ahead of his time, paving the way for superstar athletes of African descent like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods: the neoliberal superstar in an age before neoliberalism. Becoming an international icon was very profitable for Pelé, but it also had the effect of distancing him from Brazil’s masses. If he belonged to international commercialism, then he could never really belong to them.

This was not all that would distance him from the masses.

There is no doubt Pelé was an incredibly powerful symbol of pride and excellence at a time when few Afro-Brazilian faces were accorded such status. But he never used his hyper-exalted platform to challenge any of the racism in Brazilian society. Instead, Pelé had an army of publicists programming his every move off the pitch. Even as “the revolt of the black athlete” was on everyone’s lips in the 1960s, Pelé was criticizing Muhammad Ali for resisting the draft and refusing to fight in Vietnam.28 In an era where the rulers and rules of the world were being challenged, Pelé met and entertained European royalty. He allowed Brazil’s dictatorship to use his image on postage stamps and went on “goodwill tours” to newly independent African republics on behalf of whichever of the rotating dictators happened to be in charge. He dressed in African garb, celebrating a Brazil in which the position of the Afro-Brazilian masses was dire.

It is not that Pelé was a hardline, heartless right-winger as much as he was someone who chose to risk very little. The Brazilian government was, ultimately, his most important patron, and he sided with the ruling power in his country, right or wrong, time and again. He was an industry unto himself—partially owned and subsidized by the state. When asked by a foreign journalist, as he invariably was, about poverty in Brazil and the mushrooming growth of the favelas, Pelé’s stock answer was that God had made people poor and his function was to use his God-given athletic greatness to bring joy into their difficult lives. Textbooks for schoolchildren invariably included his picture “not only as a sports hero but to emphasize teamwork and the virtues of hierarchy.”29

When Pelé scored his one-thousandth goal in 1969, this hero worship reached levels best described as galactic. “In a schmaltzfest of tears and declarations,” Goldblatt writes, “Pelé dedicated the goal to the children of Brazil. A Brazilian senator composed a poem in his honor and read it from the floor of Congress. The following day’s newspapers, which in every other country on the planet covered nothing but the second Apollo moon landing, were split down the middle in Brazil. Apollo 12 on one side, Pelé on the other.”30 This was life under dictatorship: for all the beauty and democracy he represented on the pitch, Pelé allowed himself to personify a dictatorship. His thousandth goal was Brazil’s moon landing.

After Brazil’s victory in the 1970 World Cup, the military dictatorship pulled out all the stops to use the national team to solve what Goldblatt calls “the problem of securing popular legitimacy.”31 Addressing the nation, military dictator of the moment Emílio Garrastazu Médici said:

I feel profound happiness at seeing the joy of our people in this highest form of patriotism. I identify this victory won in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship with the rise of faith in our fight for national development. I identify the success of our [national team] with . . . intelligence and bravery, perseverance and our technical ability, in physical preparation and moral being. Above all, our players won because they know how to . . . play for the collective good.

Médici was so ham-fisted in his efforts to ride the popularity of Brazil’s team that many on Brazil’s left rooted for the country’s opponents. Medici repeatedly attempted to use the team as a way to symbolize Brazil’s economic miracle.32 Even as his government rounded up political dissidents, it also produced a giant poster of Pelé straining to head the ball through the goal, accompanied by the slogan Ninguém mais segura este país—“nobody can stop this country now.”

Pelé was no unconscious actor in this. When asked in 1972 about the dictatorship, he responded, “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] in a spirit of toleration and patriotism.”33 Keep in mind that when Pelé was saying this, twenty-five-year-old Dilma Rousseff was being tortured in prison. One wonders if this has ever come up in conversation.

In 1974 President Médici and FIFA president João Havelange begged Pelé to play in the World Cup, but he refused, choosing instead to play for the New York Cosmos. In 1978, from his safe New York City perch, he still addressed the dictatorship in favorable terms, this time saying that in a country as uneducated as Brazil, the masses were better off not voting.34 At his final game, an exhibition match at Giants Stadium between the Brazilian team Santos and the Cosmos in which he played one half for each team, Pelé spoke to the crowd, asking them to say the word “love” with him three times—the unbearable banality of the politics of Pelé.35 (This is why soccer great–turned–rebel politician Romário once said, “Pelé is a poet as long as he stays silent.”36)

There is one exception to Pelé’s history of tying himself to power—yet even this extraordinarily uncharacteristic act derived from dovetailing social justice with financial self-interest. It happened when he took on the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) and its entrenched, deeply corrupt president of twenty-three years, Ricardo Teixeira. Teixeira’s father-in-law happened to be the aforementioned president of FIFA, João Havelange. In 1993 Pelé and his sports company sought the TV rights for the Brazilian domestic soccer leagues. Pelé claimed that Havelange and Teixeira made it very clear during the negotiations that bribes and other assorted sleazy goings-on were a prerequisite to securing the rights. This was tradition, the sports version of the “Brazilian cost.” It also underlines the words of renowned soccer journalist Juca Kfouri: “I have always said that God put the best players here and the worst bosses to compensate.”37

As he explained to the public, Pelé resisted and lost the bid. Enraged, he went public with charges that the CBF was corrupt in a 1993 interview with Playboy.38 In retaliation, FIFA shut him out of the 1994 World Cup launch ceremony and celebrations. He was a pariah—not only as a public figure, but also economically. In 1995 he attempted to exact a measure of revenge, accepting an appointment from President Cardoso as Extraordinary Minister for Sport. Pele devoted his four years in the post to campaigning for what became known as the Pelé Law. This involved forcing clubs to open their books and converting clubs listed as nonprofit or charitable trusts into private limited companies. It also involved systematizing and regulating contracts in favor of the players as well as reorganizing domestic Brazilian soccer leagues and competitions. In proposing these reforms, “Pelé was attacking the interests that kept Teixeira in power. Pelé became the figurehead of football’s ‘modernizers.’”39 The Brazilian Congress passed an extremely watered-down version of the Pelé Law in 1998—so watered down, in its final version, that Pelé withdrew his name. It was a bitter and public defeat. In 2001, however, Pelé and Teixeira called a truce and shook hands, agreeing to work together. It is for this, perhaps more than anything else, that Pelé is criticized in today’s Brazil. Sports journalist José Trajano called it “the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive,” adding, “Pelé has let us all down. . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.”40 Kfouri wrote: “In Brazil there is still the ideology of ‘rouba mas faz’—it’s OK to steal if you get things done. In football this is stretched to its most far-reaching consequences. Everything is forgotten in the light of victory.”41

The Unity of Garrincha and Pelé

Garrincha and Pelé became known as the “golden partnership”: the tragic and the corporate, coming together. As long as they were on the field at the same time, the Brazilian national team never lost a match. It was also profoundly significant for the country that Pelé was of Afro-Brazilian and Garrincha of Afro-Indigenous heritage. Under their young leadership, Brazil became the first multiracial team to win the World Cup. If Garrincha is the Wren or the Angel with Bent Legs—miraculous but vulnerable, celestial but delicate—then Pelé’s other nickname reflects the distance he has created between himself and the masses: he is the “King.” Journalist Alex Bellos puts it perfectly:

There was no player as amateur in spirit as Garrincha. . . . Pelé, on the other hand, was unmitigatedly professional. . . . Whereas Garrincha indulged in most of the vices available to him, Pelé always behaved as a model player. He led a self-imposed ascetic life, concentrating on training and self-improvement. . . . Pelé had an athlete’s perfect body. Garrincha looked like he should not be able to walk straight. When Garrincha was still stuffing his wages into a fruit bowl, Pelé had registered his name as a trademark, employed a manager, invested money in business projects and advertised [international brands].42

After winning the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, the teenaged Pelé returned to São Paulo, where he was feted with a parade and given a luxury automobile. He refused to drive the car because he did not yet have a license. He told the crowd that he was grateful for the outpouring of love, but he had to go train for the upcoming season. Garrincha, on the other hand, returned to Pau Grande and drank a World Cup–sized amount of alcohol with his oldest friends. This would be a familiar compare-and-contrast throughout both of their lives. As Bellos summed up quite nicely: “Garrincha demonstrated, quite spectacularly, that there is no safety net in Brazilian society—while Pelé, unlike almost all his peers, found a career beyond football. Garrincha only ever thought of the short term. Pelé was—and is—always making plans. Garrincha argued with the establishment. Pelé became the establishment.”43

While Pelé has become Brazil’s symbol of individual success (and of using soccer to achieve that success), Garrincha symbolizes playing just for the sheer love of playing. Garrincha and Pelé: one amateur, improvised, creative; the other professional, regimented, formal, market-based—both of them fighting for the soul and the direction of their nation, long after hanging up their cleats. But perhaps the best way to understand their difference in the eyes of the country is to see how they are both immortalized at the Maracanã. The visitors’ locker room is called “Pelé.” Home is known as “Garrincha.”

The Wisdom of Sócrates

Both of these soccer legends evoke the arguments another Brazilian soccer legend, Sócrates, was making about the changing nature of the game before his death in 2011. But before I relay Sócrates’s critique of the homogenization of Brazil’s beautiful game in the twenty-first century, it is worth establishing just who this man was and why we should take his words to heart.

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was the captain of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup squad, a team that did not finish first but whose players’ style was so beloved that they are remembered with more affection, arguably, than any of the country’s many World Cup victors. The masterful midfielder died from an intestinal infection at fifty-seven, but not before leaving a legacy that showcases the immensely powerful political echo of the sport in Brazil’s history. Sócrates was a rare athlete whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game. His interests, talents, and achievements were, frankly, staggering. He was a medical doctor, a musician, an author, a news columnist, a political activist, and a TV pundit. And somewhere in all of this, he managed not only to lead what may have been the most artful team ever to grace the pitch, but also, using his pulpit as a soccer star, to fearlessly challenge the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil for decades.44

Alongside the 1982 Brazilian midfield of Zico, Falcao, Cerezo, and Éder, Sócrates exhibited a combination of technical prowess, deadly goal-scoring ability, and blissful creativity that has never been matched. If ever the uninhibited joy of play has merged seamlessly with raw competitive dominance, it was in the squad that Sócrates led to the World Cup semifinals in Spain. Sócrates approached soccer with the same intensity and lack of restraint he brought to every aspect of his life. He drank, he smoked, and—perhaps most daringly—he played without shin guards. His impetuosity as a player and a person was embodied in his signature move on the field: the blind heel pass. Sócrates became a full-time professional player almost as an afterthought, signing with Corinthians at the relatively advanced age of twenty-four. And unlike so many of his fellow players, let alone top-level professional athletes, he refused to check his politics at the door.

Unlike the great Pelé, Sócrates never made financial or political peace with Brazil’s dictatorship. In fact, with his medical expertise, his flowing hair and full beard, and his politics of political resistance, he had less in common with Pelé than with Che Guevara. That is not hyperbole. Sócrates may be the only professional athlete ever to have organized a socialist cell among his fellow players. He helped to build Corinthians, a club team from São Paulo, on a radical political foundation. Under his leadership, cheering for Corinthians or even wearing their colors became a focal point for national discontent with Brazil’s military dictatorship.45

The military, as we saw in the previous chapter, had ruled Brazil since 1964, when it overthrew left-wing president João Goulart. Throughout the 1970s, it had used soccer as a way to showcase national pride. By the early 1980s, as the dictatorship was beginning to strain under the weight of mass repression and economic stagnation, Sócrates and his teammate Wladimir were not only playing for Corinthians, but turning their team into the time do povo—the “people’s team”— to demonstrate the power of democracy. With the blessing of club president Waldemar Pires, the players established a democratic process to govern all team decisions. As Sócrates explained, “Everyone at the club had the same right to vote—the person who looked after the kit and the club president, all their votes had the same weight.” The players decided what time they would eat lunch, challenged strict rules that locked players in their hotel rooms for up to forty-eight hours before a match, and printed political slogans on their uniforms.46

In this way, one of South America’s most popular teams became a beacon of hope not just to Brazilians but across a continent then stuffed to the rafters with US-backed dictators. In a country where a wrong word could have authorities knocking at your door, Sócrates was as bold as those national colors. On his way to 297 appearances and 172 goals for Corinthians, he was one of the most popular figures in the country and thus nearly unassailable, even by the military rulers. As he put it: “I’m struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for equality, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player, preserving the ludicrous, and the joyous and pleasurable nature of this activity.”47

The tragedy of Sócrates’s death in 2011 lies both in his age—just fifty-seven—and in its timing. As the World Cup and Olympics thunder toward Brazil, his would have been a critical voice against the way these international sporting carnivals run roughshod over local communities for the benefit of the elite. When asked by the Guardian earlier in 2011 if the coming World Cup would help the poor of Brazil, Sócrates replied, “There will be lots of public money disappearing into people’s pockets. Stadiums will be built and they will stay there for the rest of their lives without anyone using them. It’s all about money. What we need to do is keep up public pressure for improvements in infrastructure, transport, sewerage, but I reckon it will be difficult.”48 But Sócrates, true to form in this interview, didn’t confine his commentary to soccer: “What needs to change here is the focus on development. We need to prioritise the human being. Sadly, in the globalised world, people don’t think about individuals as much as they think about money, the economy, etc.”49

In another interview near the end of his life, he tried to analyze why the sport in Brazil had made that journey from joy to fear; from a uniquely Brazilian rhythm to the more regimented style that has begun to redefine the sport.50 He began with the big picture, then worked his way down. He started by discussing the death of public space. “We’ve become an urban country,” he said. “Before, there were no limits for playing—you could play on the streets or wherever. Now it’s difficult to find space.” The price for this—and this will sound very familiar to basketball fans in the United States—is that the game does not develop organically or through improvisation, but instead through highly structured league play from the youngest ages. As Sócrates put it, if you are playing the sport in a serious way and have any kind of athletic gifts, you will be “involved some kind of standardization.”51 He also spoke about how even the most innocent-looking soccer contests have been regimented: “The barefooted tykes kicking footballs on Rio’s beaches are not doing so at liberty—they are members of escolinhas, Beach Soccer training clubs. . . . In São Paulo, children do not learn to play on patches of common land—because there is no common land anymore. . . . The freedom that let Brazilians reinvent the game decades ago is long gone.” He then put a stunning exclamation point on the project:

For many years soccer has been played in different styles, expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity is more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of the century world, whoever doesn’t die of hunger dies of boredom. . . . Soccer is now mass-produced, and it comes out colder than a freezer and as merciless as a meat-grinder. It’s a soccer for robots.52

These days, if you want to find creativity in Brazilian soccer, you’d be much better off looking at an area of Brazil’s soccer world that has actually benefited from segregation and neglect—because no one has regimented its players with lessons about how they have to play. These are the women of Brazil.

Women and Soccer in Brazil

Can you imagine your son coming home with his girlfriend saying: “She’s the defender for Bangu”? No way, huh.

—Former Brazilian national coach João Saldanha53

Individual women and all-female teams were playing soccer in São Paulo and Rio by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, during the early years of the Vargas dictatorship, historian Fábio Franzini has identified as many as forty teams in Rio alone. Then came Article 54 of Vargas’s National Sports Council’s decree of April 14, 1941, stating that “women will not be allowed to practice sports incompatible with the conditions of their nature, and for this reason, the National Sports Council should issue the necessary instructions to sports entities in the country.”54 Although women did break these laws and organize their own games throughout the following decades, the ban stood for a generation. Even in the 1970s, when an international women’s movement was changing the relationship between women and sports, “Brazil reinforced the exclusion of women . . . [which] excluded them from a greater collective and a broad spectrum of social practices. Incapable of symbolically representing the nation, they were not only passive, silent and submissive, but also second-class citizens. To keep them from playing soccer was to exclude them from full participation in the nation.”55 As Roberto DaMatta noted, “In Brazil, soccer has a strong gender demarcation that makes it a masculine domain par excellence. It is a sport that contains all of the various elements that are traditionally used to define masculinity: conflict, physical confrontation, guts, dominance, control and endurance.”

By law, women’s soccer was banned in Brazil from 1941 until 1979. (Some sources even put that latter date at 1981.) Even when the ban was finally lifted, the National Sports Council implemented a series of rules to diminish both women’s abilities and their accomplishments, such as requiring breast shields and shorter game times. The São Paulo Soccer Federation maintained that “feminine” appearance and beauty would be prerequisites for making the team. Its president, Eduardo Farah, said, “We have to try to combine the image of soccer and femininity.”56 Renato Duprat, another of Brazil’s charming soccer bureaucrats, sniffed, “No one plays here with short hair. It’s in the regulations.”57 This shows that homophobia is also strongly intertwined with gender norms; like in the United States, it’s difficult to separate where homophobia ends and sexism begins when discussing women’s sports. Even with the growth of these highly repressive local leagues, it took until 1994 for a countrywide championship tournament of women players to be held. The 1996 Olympics and the international success of the US women’s team finally spurred a measure of national interest, investment, and respect. Despite its relatively new history, the Brazilian national women’s team won the silver medal at the 2004 Olympics, made it to the final of the Women’s World Cup in 2007, and even beat the powerful US women’s team 4 to 0 in the semifinal. Shortly after placing second in the 2007 World Cup, the Brazilian women’s team faxed a letter to the CBF, signed by all twenty-one of its players, demanding greater support for the women’s game. The widespread prejudice against women’s soccer in Brazil did not truly crack, however, until the national team won the Pan American Games, held in Brazil in July 2007. Only then did the CBF announce that it intended to set up a women’s professional league.

The new women’s league is known as the Campeonato Brasileiro do Futebol Feminino. It is an annual Brazilian women’s club football tournament, contested by twenty clubs. Like its counterpart in the United States, Brazilian women’s club soccer has had a difficult time gaining a foothold, not to mention corporate sponsorship. Santos closed its women’s football club, which had been the most successful in recent years, in early 2012 in order to fund the male players’ payroll, which had ballooned in the club’s effort to keep budding superstar Neymar from leaving for Europe. The last women’s championship tournament was played in near-empty stadiums, with an average audience of just three hundred people per game. The media coverage it gets is pitiful: one study of the four leading Brazilian news magazines showed eleven articles about women’s soccer over four years.

Women have been historically discouraged not only from playing but even from attending men’s games. The implications of this are profound. If soccer attendance—being part of the multitude in the stands—is Brazil’s great cultural unifier, what does it mean to shut women out of that space? Symbolic of this is that the soccer fan clubs, the torcidas, exclude women from membership. Then there are the very terms with which the very ball is discussed: as if it is a woman to love or to ravage, depending upon who’s doing the talking. Even Eduardo Galeano does this in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow: “The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.”58 This is beautiful writing. It is also a ball. Little thought is given to whether this kind of discourse could alienate young girls from either playing or feeling like there is a place for them in the sport.

There is a story of a woman player saying, back in 1984, “Today, when I came onto the field, I heard a guy say that I should be at a laundry sink, washing clothes. But I did not bother to reply to him, although I was angry. My reaction came later, with the ball at my feet.” One player who has challenged sexist assumptions about the place of women in the sport and made the beautiful game her own is soccer superstar Marta Vieira da Silva. Marta is an absolute genius with the ball, her plays YouTube-friendly highlights the likes of which are often forbidden to the men in the new, regimented soccer. Marta was named FIFA World Player of the Year five consecutive times, between 2006 and 2010.59 Yet even she has had to fight for every bit of respect, signing a protest letter with teammates that said simply, “We need help.” During the 2007 Pan American Games, when she was twenty-one years old, she said, “I hope that our successes will change everything. I’ve gone through hell myself.” But the hell continues.

Neither Lula nor Dilma, in all their crowing about the benefits of bringing the World Cup to Brazil, has said a word about how hosting the Cup could benefit women’s soccer. Without a movement to demand it, it is difficult to see how women won’t be left behind once the Cup is done.

The Neoliberal Game

The reckless abandon, improvisation, and joy associated with Brazilian futebol has always been reflected the stands as much as on the pitch. Whether through song, dance, or celebration, the passion and creativity of Brazilian fans have always been a part of the show. Brazilian soccer matches were the first sports games in the world to feature fireworks shows at halftime, which were first remarked upon as early as the 1940s. The practice of having every fan hold up a colored card, which the NFL now has fans do to send messages of support for the US armed forces, started in the stands of Brazil. Then there are the costumes. Covering the body in wildly vibrant colors has historically been a statement all its own. In a nation whose different cultures clang together on a daily basis, where economic class separates people with grand chasms, the stands have always been the place where commonalities could be found and a national identity forged.60

Soccer has also reflected the contradictions of a country at once plagued by violence and blessed by joy. As Bellos wrote, “Brazilians are a happy, creative, excessively friendly people, yet—because of the country’s social problems—they live with levels of murder and violent crime almost equivalent to a country in civil war.”61 Today, however, the contradictions are being ironed out, as Brazil’s elite prepare to sell its national identity and culture by the pound for an international audience. Nowhere is this more evident than in the transformation of the Maracanã (discussed in chapter 1).

It can also be seen in the exploitation of the players. In November 2013, several Brazilian teams took the field with their arms folded, vowing “drastic measures” if the Brazilian Football Confederation refused to alter their intense, nearly nonstop schedule. Players also demanded “more vacation time, longer preseasons, fewer games and a bigger voice in decision making.”62 Some kept their arms folded throughout the contests. In other games, players passed the ball from one end of the field to the other after the referees threatened to give them yellow cards. At one match, during the national anthem, players from both sides unfurled a banner in the middle of the pitch that read, “For a football that is better for everyone.” As their organizing body, Common Sense Football Club, posted on its Facebook page: “If there are attempts to prevent players from expressing themselves in a peaceful way, drastic measures will be taken. We expect an official position followed by moves that will benefit Brazilian football.”63 They even threatened to wear clown noses on the pitch if changes were not forthcoming.

The protests are understandable, if you know the reality of life for a Brazilian pro soccer player. Top guns on the best teams earn salaries that compare favorably to those on many of the best teams in Europe, but the overwhelming majority work for poverty wages, with 90 percent earning less than fifty dollars a month.64 For all its bread-and-butter demands, though, this protest was really about corruption and exploitation in the CBF. Not even Pelé, with all of his cultural capital, could defeat that. The normalization of corruption as just a part of the sport is also far too familiar a theme in Brazilian soccer. This corruption, magnified by the demands of the World Cup, was the catalyst for the 2013 protests.

The truth is that Brazilian soccer has been corporatized and privatized half to death. Fábio Menezes once said, “The best way to project yourself in Brazil is either to start a church or a football club. . . . People use football clubs to serve their own interests.”65 Teams exist to sell players to the next level, mirroring what we have seen in the Brazilian economy: just another market-based product. The soccer historian Bellos said that researching the commercialization of the sport reminded him “of the latifundios [the old slave-based plantation estates]. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of sugar, coffee and footballers. I began to see the country like a big estate where the agricultural product is futebol. The country is a sporting monoculture. And football mirrors the old hierarchies. The oligarchic powers are sustained by those at the bottom who, like the cane-cutters, live on almost nothing.”66

The CBF is a private organization that has corruption in the marrow of its bones. From 1997 to 2000 its revenue quadrupled, but it still somehow did not manage to pay off its debts. The aforementioned Ricardo Teixeira and his friends at the top, however, voted themselves pay increases of more than 300 percent. As they were paid more, they spent less on developing and expanding soccer. In 2000 alone, this cartel spent sixteen million dollars on air travel, “enough for 1,663 first-class tickets from Rio to Australia.”67 Summing up the conclusions of a congressional investigation, Senator Álvaro Dias described the CBF as “a den of crime, revealing disorganization, anarchy, incompetence and dishonesty.”68 In 2012 Teixiera stepped down after a Swiss judge found that he and his former father-in-law had taken forty-one million dollars in bribes from different companies vying for exclusive World Cup marketing rights. Despite the stench that surrounds him, Teixiera has not served any time for his obvious and extensive corruption.

Neoliberalism is making Brazilian soccer as static as the European game from which it once joyfully emancipated itself. Brazilians rightfully recognize this as a tragedy. If soccer is not Brazilian, then what is Brazil? They fear that Brazil does not have the time or space to answer these questions with the World Cup and Olympics breathing down its collective neck. They fear that, like the tree in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which gave everything it had until it was just a stump to be sat upon, Brazil has given all it has to give and is now compelled to offer up its culture to the world to sit upon. What is most personal becomes the last commodity to offer up to the European powers that are coming to call.