by Alex Bellos
At 6.15am on Saturday morning at the far end of Barra da Tijuca, where Rio is expanding into a coastal marshland and moneyed cariocas live in spacious gated condominiums, the first men arrive for the kickabout at Paulinho Figueiredo's place. By 6.45am fourteen names are down, two goalkeepers have arrived, and two eight-a-side teams are formed.
Paulinho, aged fifty-seven, has not only built a half-size football pitch for himself and his mates but a club house with Jacuzzi, sauna, massage table, showers, and barbecue. Three full-time staff toil to keep the grass a perfect emerald green. Sixty men – including architects, engineers, businessmen, bankers and a military colonel – pay £400 a year to be associates. Except the six goalkeepers. They are exempt from the annual fee. Even among the Brazilian well-to-do, no one likes to stay in goal.
At 8am the sun is rising and the temperature approaches 30 degrees C. Paulinho's house is the last building in the condominium and surrounded by lush green. In the quiet distance – beyond an untouched lagoon – you can make out the beach road. A match starts. The average age is about fifty. Sliding tackles are banned because of the fragility of ageing bones. Yet the standard is high. The men run, shout, sweat. Football here is taken seriously. Saturday mornings are a sacred time.
The game is another Brazilian innovation: 'society football', football for the upper class. The game's roots date back to the 1950s, a decade which smiled kindly on Rio's bourgeoisie. It was a time of political freedom and rich cultural activity, sweetened with the national pride of winning the World Cup for the first time. The word 'society', pronounced as in English but written socaite to respect Portuguese spelling rules, was used to characterise glamorous leisure activities. It was fashionable for landlords with large premises to set up small grass pitches for friends. You need money to keep grass in tropical Rio de Janeiro. The posh kickabouts became known as futebol soqaite.
Society football is about status. Paulinho's pitch is true to the word's origins. His father, General João Figueiredo, was Brazilian president between 1979 and 1985, the last dictator of the military regime. Paulinho's kickabouts started in 1977 at a society pitch belonging to Lideo Toledo, doctor for Botafogo and the Brazilian national team. 'It was just a group of friends,' Luiz Vinhaes, a founder member, tells me after the football has stopped. 'But Paulinho was the son of the president. Many people wanted to lick his arse . . . so our group got bigger and bigger.' One member lent them a well-located piece of land in Barra da Tijuca. With astute political timing, the minute Figueredo left the presidency the man asked for his land back. 'Then Paulinho decided to put a pitch here, so we came here.'
By 11am, the men are drinking beer from ice-cold cans and the smell of charred steak from the barbecue wafts over the pitch. For the men and the boys (sons may attend, but not wives or daughters) these kickabouts act as social cement. That's generally true for Brazilians of every class; the only real difference here is the wealth of the participants, who could clearly afford any indulgence. Well-heeled and well-to-do they may be, but as Brazilians, they prefer football.
Since the club is made up of rich, influential men, it inevitably becomes a forum for doing business. 'We chat and swap ideas. It gets you introductions to people who might be useful. Even if there are no politicians here, there are people who have the ear of politicians, people who can get you to see the mayor. Things work out,' says Sérgio Vitor, owner of a video company. When Liicio Macedo, who runs a marketing business, organised an end-of-year party at Paulinho's, he managed to get a bank to sponsor it, giving £2,000 for a marquee, a barbecue and a carnival samba group. Pictures made Caras, the Brazilian version of Hello!.
More than the media, the status of Paulinho's club brings members into contact with celebrity footballers. Branco, part of the 1994 World Cup-winning team, and Jairzinho, who scored in every game in the 1970 World Cup, are regulars. Paulinho's mates live out childhood fantasies. 'It's a wonderful thing to do,' says Lúcio, 'to play football on a Saturday morning and pass the ball to a world champion.'
I finally speak to Paulinho. He is slimmer than most of the others, wearing tight olive green swimming trunks. He looks much younger than fifty-seven – partly because of his short dark hair, but mainly because of an incessant grin that reveals a childish gap between his two front teeth. He is a great host and has a mastery for charm and football small talk that must have been perfected through a lifetime of Brazilian society parties. Our conversation is so effortless and pleasant that as soon as it is over I cannot remember what we spoke about.
In São Paulo, society football emerged in the mansions of the richest neighbourhood, Morumbi, but took a different turn in the 1980s. As the city's population expanded, common land that had been used for football became scarcer and scarcer. Seven-a-side society football required less space than full-sized pitches. It began to proliferate for people of all classes, its expansion aided by the accessibility of synthetic turf. Nowadays society football is used to describe any small, outdoor grass or synthetic pitch. Society football pitches now outnumber full-sized pitches in Greater São Paulo.
Brazilians will play football wherever they can. In the central Amazon, three hours by boat upriver from Manaus, I saw a futsal pitch on stilts as part of a luxury hotel complex. Activities included fishing for piranhas, sailing to see Indian tribes and five-a-side kickabouts. Elsewhere in the Amazon football is played knee-deep in water, as if submerged goalposts are only a minor inconvenience. Workers on many of Brazil's offshore oil rigs play on small football pitches enclosed by fencing.
The most obvious example of Brazilians adapting football to suit their marine surroundings happened on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. Beach football grew so fast that when mayor Henrique Dodsworth tried to ban it in the 1930s, he received a petition with 50,000 names on it and changed his mind.
The 1950s and 1960s were beach football's heyday. Teams based at different patches of Copacabana and Ipanema attracted professionals from the game's grass cousin – and in return produced top players, like Paulo Cesar Caju, who played for Olympique de Marseille and the Brazilian national team. Walk down the beach today, however, and beach football played with eleven men has almost disappeared. The game lost force because as beaches became more crowded it was harder to mark out space, and also because of violence between fans and assaults on referees.
The football that is played nowadays is Beach Soccer, a compact version invented in the early 1990s for television and promoted worldwide by sports marketing group Octagon. The aggressive organisation has filtered down and every few hundred yards along Copacabana and Ipanema children are training in Beach Soccer teams. The five-a-side sport has three periods of twelve minutes each, so with ad-breaks, preview and wrap a game fits perfectly into an hour-long programme. 'In one hour of a Beach Soccer game there are on average 14.7 goals. In the 1998 football World Cup there were 1.8. This makes Beach Soccer a very interesting spectacle,' explains Fiilvio Danilas, vice-director of Beach Soccer Worldwide. Beach Soccer was developed in conjunction with Globo, Brazil's main television channel. Viewing figures have already reached eighty million. Octagon is hoping the sport will eventually follow beach volleyball into the Olympic Games.
To play beach soccer you do not need to be by the sea. In the inland states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso do Sul and Goiás it is played on sandy riverbanks. Rio's state government has paid for four Beach Soccer pitches to be installed in the city's suburbs. It is considered fairer for poor children than proper football because it does not require boots.
Beach football also suffered because too many stray footballs hit too many sunbathers. In the early 1960s football on Copacabana was banned until 2pm. In order to get round the legislation, a bunch of lads from in front of Constante Ramos Street migrated about 100m to a beach volleyball court in front of Bolivar Street. Famous volleyball players hung out at Bolivar. The Constante Ramos crew started to do football practice there, knowing that they couldn't get banned because then the volleyball players would have to
get banned too. And the volleyballers were too well known for that. The result was a sporting hybrid: footvolley.
When you stroll up and down the beach at Rio, which a lot of people do, there are many good reasons to stop and stare. The sky. The landscape. The seascape. The beautiful bodies. But the most spectacular sight is footvolley. It is two-a-side volleyball played only with one's feet, chest and head. The skills needed are breathtaking. Because the smash is almost a physical impossibility, rallies go on for longer than they do in volleyball. It is not a sport which requires brute force so many women play, their main disadvantage being only that they have less flexibility killing a ball with their chests.
Rio's beaches are the city's cultural laboratory. They shape its fashions, its language and its laid-back way of life. There is a sense that footvolley has distilled the essence of Rio-flash, flamboyant, and performed in swimming trunks. The city looks towards the beach and the beach is a stage for footvolley.
Footvolley is also associated with macho rebelliousness. Almir, Brazilian football's original hardman, was one of the sport's pioneers. Almir was Pelé's substitute at Santos and also played in Rio for Vasco and Flamengo. Better known for his fighting, he broke two players' legs and then – in one of the frankest interviews ever given by a player-admitted taking drugs when Santos won the 1963 World Club championship against AC Milan. He was shot dead in a brawl in a Copacabana bar in 1973. A footvolley match was arranged as a tribute.
Edmundo, nicknamed Animal for his violent temper, plays footvolley in Ipanema whenever he has the weekend off-and sometimes when he doesn't. The piece of skill he showed at Vasco that was the highlight of the 2000 World Club Championship was a move you see a hundred times on the beach on Saturdays. With his back to Silvestre he chipped the ball delicately over the Manchester United defender's head and then ran to intercept it and score.
The most famous footvolley aficionado is Romario. When he moved to Flamengo from Barcelona he asked for two sand pitches to be installed – one at the club and the other at its training ground. The club obliged. He has even appeared on a soap opera, playing himself playing footvolley. Romario's influence has been important for the sport's growth. Crioulo, president of the Rio Footvolley Association, estimates that there are 5,000 who play the game regularly in Rio. 'There are now as many footvolley courts in Rio as there are beach volleyball courts. The kids prefer to play with their feet.'
Brazilian beach culture is now unimaginable without football. Other communities have also incorporated the sport into their way of life. Football is so tied to the notion of Brazilian identity that it has become a way for social groups to assert their own Brazilianness. In Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, the ultra-conservative Centre of Gaucho Tradition organises football tournaments where players must wear bombachas-local riding breeches buttoned at the ankle and wide above the knee.
Some types of football have harder challenges than awkward trousers. Blind football was developed in Brazil's institutions for the visually impaired. 'The lads would mess about, then rules developed as different institutions played each other,' says Ulisses de Araiijo, national coordinator of blind football. The game is played on a futsal court with five players a side. The goalkeeper is sighted and can orient the four outfield players. The coach on the touchline and a 'caller' behind the opposing goal can also shout instructions. Brazil has won the first two blind football World Cups, in Brazil and Spain. The country has fifty-six teams, covering almost every state.
Brazil has the world's largest commercial cattle herd. In a cross-species spirit of inclusion, even the bulls get a chance. In the rodeos of rural central and south Brazil a football pitch is improvised, members of the crowd are chosen to make two five-a-side teams, and then a bull is released into the arena. 'Footbull is a real crowd-pleaser,' says former rodeo champion Gilberto Mega. 'The bull doesn't go after the ball, he goes after the players. It's not that dangerous because you don't use a hardcore bull. You put a light one in. If you put a dangerous bull in someone could easily get killed.' Emilio Carlos dos Santos, director of Brazil's largest rodeo at Barretos, near São Paulo, adds that the bull must be really bad-tempered. 'It's no fun if the bull just stands there. Sometimes the bull even goes after the ref.'
To see an equally ridiculous spectacle I drive one Sunday in February 2001 to a kickabout pitch on-the periphery of Rio. Roza FC, Brazil's only transvestite football club, are playing their annual game against a team of local married men. When Brazil coach Emerson Leao took over the national squad in 2000, his first comment was that he wanted his players to be 'ballerinas' of the beautiful game. He need have looked no further than Roza.
Caroline looks fabulous in skintight jeans but falls over as soon as she touches the ball. After conducting a first-aid examination it is happily reported she has not broken her fingernail extensions. The referee is Laura de Vison, wearing a red plastic dress and knee-high boots. She is a twenty-stone silicone-enhanced club performer whose star trick usually involves lollipops, not whistles. Vison is creative in her interpretation of the rules. 'Penalty! No chatting up the centreforward!' she orders after Roza's first threatening attack.
Beneath the camp slapstick there is a serious point. Playing football is a way for the transvestites to feel included in Brazilian life, which despite the temporary transgressions of carnival remains fundamentally homophobic. For Roza's captain, Kaika Sabatela, a thirty-six-year-old drag queen squeezed into a shocking-pink sequin hotpant catsuit, football is a symbol of political freedom. 'We work, we pay our taxes and we like watching football – why shouldn't we be allowed to play the game?'
What Brazilians value most in football is innate skill rather than team tactics. The purest form of this skill is encapsulated in ball-juggling. Forget adapting football to new terrain, Brazilians have adapted it to where there is no terrain at all. Milene Domingues didn't need a team or any type of pitch to show off her talent. When she was seventeen she kicked the ball in the air a record-breaking 55,187 times over a period of nine hours and six minutes without it touching the floor. It was a meticulously planned challenge; she was trained by Moraci Santana, the Brazil fitness coach at the 1994 World Cup. Preparation included learning how to eat and urinate without dropping the ball. (You duck your head and catch the ball at the back of your neck.) Milene became an adolescent pin-up, a national celebrity, revered unanimously as the Keepie-Uppie Queen. A giant poster of her kicking a ball in the air was on the side of a building on the motorway out of Rio de Janeiro for several years.
Milene, who grew up in a lower-middle-class family in São Paulo, played kickabouts as a child with her elder brothers. After the 1994 World Cup there was a fad for women's football. She joined a club. When the momentum fizzled out she was left holding the ball. Or rather, kicking the ball. Repeatedly. Without it hitting the ground. She was soon performing during half-time at football matches, giving demonstrations and available for cocktail parties, weddings and bar mitzvahs. Business events could book nothing more chic than the pretty blonde teenager tap-tap-tapping a football in the air.
With a certain amount of inevitability Milene married Brazil's male football prodigy, Ronaldo, in 1999. She became a particularly unconventional footballer's wife not simply because she could enjoy kickabouts with her husband but because her close-to-body ball control was better than his. Not bad, considering he was twice voted FIFA Footballer of the Year. It is an endearing football marriage. When I interview her in 2001, Ronaldo approaches us and nags: 'Come on love. We're all waiting for you.' His mates are playing football and she is needed on the right wing.
Becoming Mrs Ronaldo established Milene as Brazilian football's first lady while heralding her abdication from the ball-juggling throne. It unleashed a scramble for the crown. Milene had unwittingly created a title to which there were pretenders. 'I'm the Keepie-Uppie Queen now,' asserts twenty-year-old Claudia Magalhães. Claudia's personal best is 25,184 in four hours and twenty-five minutes. In the south of Brazil, however,
opinion differs. Claudia Martini, aged twenty, of Caxias do Sul, claims her record is 41,788 in seven hours and five minutes. Yet both should watch their backs: the Ball Girl, aka Gilliane Xavier Fernandes Gonçalves, aged ten, is a mini-celebrity in the inland agricultural capital, Goiania. The Ball Girl (current record 190) can be seen during the half-times of first division team Goiás' home games. She already has two sponsorship contracts and a manager.
Like Milene, Claudia Magalhães is from São Paulo. The similarities don't end there. They both have blond shoulder-length hair, are slightly built and have honest-looking pretty faces. It's as if Keepie-Uppie Queens have to be a certain physical type. Claudia has a contract with the São Paulo Football Federation to perform during half-time at games in the state championship. Which she probably wouldn't if she looked like Socrates.
For Claudia, there is more grace and charm in a woman ball-juggling than a man. Men are better equipped for contact sports. A young Brazilian boy with ball skills will be able to put them to use in youth football, futsal or beach football leagues. With less opportunities for competitive action, but still wanting to demonstrate footballing ability, the girls have become parading mascots.
Brazil's cottage industry of keepie-uppie professionals is not a female ghetto. 'I'm not a pretty girl. I'm old, ugly and poor,' laments Zaguinha, aged forty-nine. 'So I had to invent new ways of doing things.' More than any other ball-juggler Zaguinha has turned his vocation into an art form. He has formalised twenty-three different keepie-uppie tricks. 'This is the Romario,' he says, kicking the ball up using the top of his toes and skipping with his feet, in an instantly recognisable action of the eponymous striker. He moves into a Marcelinho Carioca, named after another Brazilian player. He chips the ball so it hits the inside of his foot and is given some spin, and he passes the ball from one foot to the other. 'The last one I invented is called the World Challenge.' He kicks the ball so it is about to fall behind him and then kicks it back using his heel.