by Alex Bellos
As the mechanics got better, the cars became stronger and with practice the players learnt new tricks. (There were hardly any training sessions. It was too expensive.) Some players preferred less subtle touches. 'Scorning the required crash helmet, his black flight suit unzippered to show his chest hair, [Walter] Lacet gunned around the field with the kind of revved up machismo that seems a prerequisite for autoball. When the ball got pinned between two cars, he would wheel off to the far end of the field and then come roaring back at full speed until the opposing driver backed off the ball. If he did not retreat, mechanics armed with sledgehammers were called in to disentangle the wreckage and, if necessary, provide substitute cars,' wrote US magazine Time.
Booking a good pitch was always tricky, since a game of autoball trashed the grass. Fluminense allowed the sport at its Laranjeiras stadium during returfing. Crowds were anything from 4,000 to 15,000. Seventy years before, Laranjeiras had been the birthplace of football in Rio, where the young sportsmen were white members of the city's elite. Autoball was also a hobby for the young rich. Almost all the players were stockbrokers flush with cash (apart from one cab driver 'obviously venting pent-up aggressions').
Like Marcos de Mendonca, who kept goal for Fluminense between 1914 and 1922 and became an eminent historian, the autoball class also became public figures of some distinction. Walter Lacet is one of the top executives at Brazil's second-largest channel, SBT. Ronaldo Cezar Coelho was one of the founders of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, together with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and he has been elected a Congressman three times.
Ivan Sant'Anna is a character as colourful as the sports he played. He lived life large and he knows how to spin a yarn. After thirty-seven years in financial markets he became a successful storyteller, first with a financial thriller, Rapine, and then with Black Box, an account of three real-life air crashes. During the early 1970s, when he seemingly had more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a fortune travelling to sports events. Between 1970 and 1977 he saw every single game that Fluminense played. 'I saw maybe a hundred games a year. I can remember sometimes I left on Sunday to go to Manaus, I would come back and work, then on Wednesday I would go to Bahia, and at the end of the week I would be in Buenos Aires.
'The furthest I went was Sarajevo. I went to almost all the countries in Africa.' He pauses to list the countries the Fluminense caravan passed through: 'Botswana, Malawi, Burundi, Lesotho, Tanzania. I travelled with them, I stayed in the same hotels. By the end I was almost part of the team. Then, in 1977, I lost all my money and stopped. But for the period 1970-77 I have the impression that I was the biggest football fan that there has ever been in this country.' His feat is probably unequalled in the world due to the large number of matches, the distances involved in the national league and the unpredictability of what might happen. Once, when he was living in Belo Horizonte he came to Rio to see Fluminense play Vasco. The game was abandoned after ten minutes in the second half when the perimeter fencing caved in. The following day, back in Belo Horizonte, he read that the remaining half hour would be played in the evening. He went to the airport but there were no seats left. So he chartered his own plane. He just made it to the game. His team lost 2–1.
Autoball's image of conspicuous consumption and innate sense of waste reflected the economic confidence of the era. Between 1969 and 1973 – the darkest years of military rule – Brazil experienced its 'economic miracle'. GDP rose almost 12 per cent a year. The state borrowed huge sums for grandiose projects like the Trans-Amazon Highway, an ill-fated plan that opened up huge parts of virgin rainforest to colonisation. 'The country felt rich but it was an illusion,' says Mário with bittersweet nostalgia. 'We were getting further and further into debt. In that day to be rich was wonderful. Now things are a lot more difficult.' Autoball, which was almost the private sport of the Rio bourse, can be seen as one of the last extravagances of Rio de Janeiro before it started to lose its power as a financial centre. One by one the banks and big companies moved to São Paulo until, in 2000, trading on Rio's stock market shut down completely.
Autoball came to an end not because of the danger or the expense, but because the government banned all motor sports in the light of the 1974 world energy crisis. The phenomenon reflected an era of accelerated Brazilian excess that spluttered and ran out of gas. 'The four or five years in which there was autoball was an interesting time. It got good publicity,' says Ivan. 'If it hadn't been banned, and it had managed to be played on a big pitch, then maybe it would be known now all around the world. It would be a very exciting sport, much more than car racing. But it needed a fatal accident. This was my premonition – the sport would only be a success if people died.'
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Signs that football was destined to overstep its sporting parameters and permeate Brazilian cultural life in more subtle ways were evident even at the start of the twentieth century. The 'violent British sport' had barely taken off its swaddling clothes when children started to play football-inspired tiddlywinks using thick buttons ripped from their coats. They placed two teams of eleven buttons each on a smooth tabletop, and flicked them to ricochet a tiny ball into a miniature net. The result, button football, has survived until today.
Marcelo Coutinho sets up a button football demonstration in his shop, the Button Office, on the top floor of a busy mall in Rio's North Zone. The pitch is a green felt board half the size of a table tennis table. Ground markings are lovingly detailed with white paint. Button football's great strength is that it offers sporting glory to fans physically predisposed to staying at home. Marcelo's body has the generous shape of someone who cannot remember the last time he kicked a ball. But give him a button and his fingers become Pelé's dancing legs. He places a button 20cm from the goal. One flick – pfutt!-and the ball flies into the net. Gooooooal. The goalkeeper, an inanimate domino-sized wedge, never stood a chance.
'Sometimes there's no space to play proper football, or you can't play well. So you play with your buttons instead,' explains Marcelo, whose goatee beard and cropped dark hair is speckled with grey. The Button Office is the only shop in Brazil dedicated exclusively to the sport. Thousands of colourful buttons are stuck on the wall. Men that walk past seem unable to resist ogling, a feeling conspicuously absent in their female partners. The objects of their affection are so marvellously uncomplicated that they seem to have been teleported from a forgotten age. Football buttons are only one small step up the toy evolutionary ladder from coat buttons. They have not sprouted human forms to become like Subbuteo figurines or incorporated holograms or flashing parts. The buttons look like painted poker chips. Modernity has brought them more sophisticated finishing, embossed lettering and a wider variation of colours – but nothing can disguise what they really are: humble plastic discs.
The Bangu reserves
Marcelo's Vasco all-stars
Marcelo keeps his teams of buttons in custom-made wooden boxes, called 'changing rooms'. He also travels with a first-aid kit that includes furniture polish, liquid silicone cleaner, towels, several types of wax, a cleaning block covered in felt and headache pills. Enthusiasts have several sides they develop, sometimes over decades. Marcelo takes out the champion team he played with from 1984 to 1987 and lines them up: Pelé at right back, Falcao in central defence and Zico, Cruyff and Beckenbauer on the substitute's bench. 'What other team in the world has Cruyff and Beckenbauer in the reserves?' he boasts.
Button football is deeply rooted in the Brazilian psyche. The game's simplicity provided a fantastic canvas for romanticism. Button players – 'buttonistas' – give their buttons the names of players and keep lists of which button is leading scorer. Team colours can also be freely chosen. Marcelo's all-star international team plays in the red and white of Rio club Bangu.
Pelé, Cruyff and Beckenbauer started off in the Bangu first team but had missed a few easy shots. Of course, it was Marcelo who had missed the shots by misflicking those buttons, but the inner game of button foo
tball demanded that the stars make way for other talent. 'It's superstition, a psychological thing,' explains Marcelo. 'In reality, all the buttons are exactly the same.' Pelé, he says, was going through a terrible phase up front, so he was substituted. 'But Pelé is Pelé, he can play in any position. He managed to find a way bacjc into the first team, improvising at right back. The shake-up worked and the Bangu defence stabilised, becoming one of the best in Rio.' Marcelo then changed his colours. He formed a squad made up of friends and family, in the blue of Portugal's Porto. His wife, Monica, was on the right midfield and his son, Bruno, centreforward. For a while he fielded buttons named after historical freedom-fighters: Zapata, Castro and Guevara in midfield, offering service to Gandhi and Mandela up front. Marcelo's current team is an all-star Vasco side, although he took the nepotistic liberty of signing Bruno, Porto's child prodigy.
Button football is similar to Subbuteo in that both are miniature versions of football played on tabletops. Yet button football predates both Subbuteo, created by Waddingtons in 1947, and its precursor Newfooty, created by a Liverpudlian family in 1929. Geraldo Decourt, the first man to try and regularise button football, wrote in his autobiography that he started playing in 1920, when he was about nine. In 1930 Decourt published the first official rule-book, calling it Foot-Ball Celotex since the wooden surface of the tables was imported by the Celotex Company of Chicago.
Button football emerged independently of the toy industry and has managed to stay outside it. Buttons are made by men like Adriano Moutinho, whose thick moustache, shoulder-length black hair and pot belly make him look more like a boozy Hell's Angel than a local craftsman. Adriano, aged forty-four, is a die-hard buttonista who spends eight hours a day at home in a Rio suburb carving buttons out of plastic on his lathe. Some are beautifully adorned works of art, using combinations of materials, miniature shields and coconut husks.
The disorganisation that has been button football's strength has also meant that the sport has become comically riven by factions. Three versions dominate – based respectively in the states of Bahia, Rio and São Paulo. Bahian rules demand a tiny plastic disc as a ball and allow one flick each go. Rio rules have a felt ball and three flicks each are allowed, whereas Paulista rules require a smaller table, a felt ball and twelve flicks. The differences may sound pedantic but the rivalry is intense. In order to cool tempers, sports magazine Placar printed The Buttonista's Ten Commandments. Number one: 'There are no bad rules, just different options and tastes.'
After decades of bickering the three sides agreed to call a truce in the mid-1980s. A delegation including members of each ruling faction travelled to Brasilia to lobby the government for recognition. On 29 September 1988, the National Sports Council published in a resolution that 'table football' was, de facto, a sport – due to the large number of practitioners and the fact that national championships already existed. It was allegedly demonstrated that the buttonista walks the equivalent of 3.5 kilometres per match, 'physical force' being a prerequisite for approval. A national 'table football' confederation was founded with a revolving presidency between the three modalities.
The incapacity to regularise the rules, however – there are established variations in Maranhao and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as some dangerous renegades who prefer to use a tiny cube as a ball – has left the sport virtually unmarketable. With the advent of computer games, some fear for button football's survival. 'I understand people's concerns with the demise of the Spix's macaw and the golden lion tamarin monkey. But what I'm worried about is the death of button football,' wrote broadcaster and columnist José Trajano in the daily sportspaper Lance! in 2001.
Reports of button football's demise are exaggerated. Some of Brazil's top clubs – including Internacional of Porto Alegre and Corinthians of São Paulo – have button departments. Button footballers must wear the club's football kit and play with buttons in club colours when they compete in local leagues. The game is mentioned in pop songs and many celebrities – even professional footballers – make a point of expressing their love for it. By investing in the Button Office, Marcelo has put his money where his heart is. For him button football is as Brazilian as samba. 'Every child comes into contact with button football. It is ingrained in our society.'
Button football reduced the game to a tabletop. So did nail-ball, which is also on sale at the Button Office. In nailball, players flick a coin between two teams of eleven nails hammered into a board. In fact, given any surface area, no matter how inconvenient, it is a good bet that the Brazilians have invented a sport for it that involves kicking a ball. Ecoball, played in the rainforest capital Macapa, prioritises environmentalism in equatorial surroundings: football played on a pitch dotted with trees. If you hit a treetrunk you are sent off temporarily – to suck a lime. Footpenalty, invented in Porto Alegre, uses half a pitch and one goal. 'Footpenalty arose from the necessity to find something to do when one side doesn't show up,' says the founder, Sidnei Oliveira, aged forty-seven.
The difficulty of maintaining full-sized grass football pitches in a tropical, developing country – the cost, the climate and the lack of urban space – has led to the sport being adapted to whichever terrain is available. The incessant modification of football is also the result of a society which is not hung up about changing rules. A hallmark of Brazilian popular culture is inclusion. Carnival is a way of letting barriers between classes drop. Religion is malleable to allow almost any type of belief. Likewise, no one is excluded from appropriating football to suit their quirks or practical needs.
The prodigal son of football's Brazilian offspring is futsal, which has been so successful that it is estimated to be the most practised game in the country – more than football itself. Futsal is five-a-side indoor football played on a basketball-sized court, with twenty minutes each half and a small ball. Players need to be very fast, versatile and have great domination of the ball. Futsal looks like a cross between ice-hockey and football. The ball, which rarely bounces, is passed around like a spherical puck. The game is eulogised as having nurtured several of the most gifted Brazilian footballers, such as Rivelino and Zico. It is regarded as an incubator of the Brazilian soul.
The idea of kicking a ball around a basketball court was first had by a Uruguayan, Juan Carlos Ceriani, at the Montevideo YMCA in the 1930s. But it took his Brazilian colleagues at the São Paulo YMCA to formalise the game into a sport. Since a regular football was too bouncy, the Brazilians experimented with smaller balls weighted with sawdust, cork and horsehair. Futebol de salao, or 'drawing-room football', as it was known before the abbreviation futsal stuck, was nicknamed the 'sport of the heavy ball'.
The first futsal federation was founded in Rio in 1954. Before 1959, when the different state federations unified their rules, futsal spawned some of the oddest practices of any contact sport. In some games, futsal players were not allowed to speak. Any utterance would result in a foul. Fans too, for a short period, were not allowed to make any noise. But the silliest rule stipulated that players were not allowed to play the ball while a hand was touching the floor. This meant that if someone was knocked over, or tripped up, he would avoiding using his hand for support – since this would rule him out of play. Players twisted their bodies to try and land on their backs, fronts, shoulders and heads. The rule was reportedly abolished when a medical paper showed that, due to the large number of broken arms and dislocated shoulders, futsal was the most dangerous sport in Brazil.
In 1971, the International Federation of Futebol de Salao, or Fifusa, was set up in São Paulo. In 1989 the sport was taken over by FIFA, coining the name futsal and splitting with Fifusa. Since then futsal has flourished worldwide. More than 160 countries applied to enter the 2000 World Championship.
In Brazil a professional league has existed since 1996, although a grey professionalism has existed since the 1960s when the best players would be paid hefty 'expenses'. Now, the top futsal players earn as much as some footballers. Manoel Tobias, Brazil's best-paid futsa
l athlete, is estimated to have an annual income well in excess of £100,000. The sport has grown like a jungle weed. The Brazilian Futsal Confederation (CBFS) has registered about 160,000 new players since 1991 to play in amateur leagues.
'Futsal is the sport now that gives most alegria-happiness – to Brazilians,' says Vicente Figueiredo, the author of The History of Futebol de Salao. Brazil dominates the world scene. 'Out of thirty-eight international competitions, Brazil has won thirty-five.'
A peculiarity of Brazilian futsal is the dominance of Ceara, a state in the northeast better known for untouched beaches, cowboys, Catholic pilgrims and droughts. Its capital, Fortaleza, is the only one of Brazil's eight largest cities that does not have at least two football teams that regularly play in the top division. Perhaps because of this, Ceara has put its energies into futsal. Ceara is the state with the largest number of victories in futsal's Brazil Cup. 'I think futsal fitted us like a glove. The Cearense is irreverent, he's not interested in tactical systems, he likes messing about,' adds Vicente Figueiredo. 'Here people are more interested in futsal than football. All the big futsal clubs in Brazil always have a Cearense in the team.'
Futsal is the football derivative that is played indoors. On weekends, in Rio de Janeiro, it is possible to find people playing football outdoors twenty-four hours a day. In the traditional neighbourhood of Flamengo, a park of artificial pitches run by the city council stays busy well after midnight. It is the only time when men employed in evening jobs such as waiters, security guards and doormen can play in their own leagues. Demand is so great that some people queue overnight to make sure they are allocated a pitch.