Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Studded boots do not come in sizes small enough so Paulinho wears trainers with his yellow ref's outfit. Everything in his house is petite; instead of a fridge he has a minibar. 'I would like to be buried with my ref's uniform on, with a yellow card in one pocket and a red card in the other,' he says, patting his chest.

  I give Paulinho a lift in my taxi as we drive back into town. It is the first Sunday of the competition and 136 games are to be played on forty pitches between 8am and sundown. Paulinho directs the driver to pass several pitches where Kickabout games are taking place. In fact, wherever there is a set of goalposts there is a match underway. Manuas may be surrounded by equatorial jungle, yet all the pitches are dusty rectangles of ochre earth. I see pitches covered in stones, glass and even bones.

  Paulinho is not refereeing today. In its initial stages, the Big Kickabout is self-regulated. Each team must supply four officials – a referee, two linesmen and an administrator-whom are then selected to look after games involving other sides. It is in the team's interests to take this seriously since the team is penalised if its refereeing committee does not show up.

  I stop off at one pitch to see the procedure all the way through. First to arrive are the officials. The referee has brought the ball, a whistle and a red and yellow card. The two linesmen have their flags, which are made from a beige cloth nailed to a wooden stick. (Once, a referee left the red card at home and improvised with a cigarette packet.) The fourth official sets up a makeshift desk in the shade. He has a piece of paper that he picked up at the Kickabout Headquarters on which to write his report of the game.

  A minivan turns up and the first team spills out. I am consistently impressed by how conscientiously the bureaucracy is taken. The president lines up all the shirts on a fence and distributes them to his players. The president, equipped with the team's personalised Kickabout ID cards, then makes sure that each player signs the referee's piece of paper.

  The game starts on time. The referee does his job well. He is neither partial nor does he, as is once said to have happened, stop the game so he can relieve his bowels. To encourage good refereeing, in fact, the Big Kickabout provides a parallel competition for teams of the sixteen best referees. The winner of this tournament enters a three-way play-off with the winner of the best sixteen queens' teams and the upstate champion. The overall winner then wins a bye into the Big Kickabout's last sixteen.

  After a morning of hopping from pitch to pitch I spend the afternoon with Vila Nova, who are playing their first game. I arrive at the muster point a few hours before kickoff. It is underneath an olive tree near Audemir's house. There is a bench made from a plank that bends when you sit on it. About ten people are milling around.

  The atmosphere is tense. Mauricio Lima, Audemir's brother-in-law and Vila Nova's vice-president, explains that the preparations have been a disaster. He had designed a new strip. He has just picked them up from the printers, run by a friend. The sponsor's name, Delirium Drinks, is smudged badly on the chest. They will have to use last year's kit instead.

  Delirium Drinks is the nightclub where Audemir works. The value of the sponsorship can be seen across the path from the olive tree: a big polystyrene ice-box containing two crates of beer.

  News has come through that Erica, Vila Nova's queen, has not made it into the second round. Audemir is frustrated. 'I'm almost against the idea of having a queen,' he grumbles. 'It is just one more expense. We spend more money on our beauty queen than on our players. Teams with money can bankroll a pretty girl. Teams like us have to rely on the strength of our football.' He says the last sentence as if this is somehow unfair for a football competition.

  An hour before the game the team walks the mile to the pitch. Friends join in as we pass neighbouring streets. The path follows a canal and then goes through a slum. Mauricio says that it is controlled by drug dealers who forbid walking through it at night. It is a community on stilts. The slum is above a brook, which you can see between the wooden slats of the walkways. One of our convoy is singing and beating a drum hanging from around his neck. Vila Nova is the only club to have a gay supporters club, founded by Marcos, a local chef. Marcos and his friends are the real Kickabout Queens. They have made green pom-poms and are waving them as we go by.

  When we reach the pitch, I recognise Audemir's maroon Ford. He is lifting a tank of water out of the boot. He rests it on a shoulder and carries it towards the touchline. I notice that Audemir, Mauricio and the other brothers have a different type of green and white football strip than the players. It is to distinguish the players from the coaching staff. I ask Mauricio if any of his family is not present. He replies: 'Just my dad. He gets too excited and ends up fighting with the ref.'

  Vila Nova's opponents are Unidos da Rua Natal, or Natal Street United. Audemir is visibly nervous. Before the kickoff the team puts their arms round each other in a circle. Audemir's voice is shaking for the team talk: 'The symbol of our team is an eagle. It stands for guts, courage, strength, willpower. Remember – there's no such thing as a lost ball.' They recite the Lord's Prayer. To finish they put all their hands together in the centre of the circle and shout: 'Vila Nova!'

  The match begins. Vila Nova dominate but the opposition is tougher than expected. Both teams are disciplined. Neither has an obvious weak spot. A Vila Nova player falls and injures his leg. Two of the coaching staff run on with some ice.

  The first half ends goalless after twenty-five minutes, as the regulations specify for the first two rounds.

  I had heard so many fanciful tales and romantic anecdotes about the Big Kickabout that I had almost begun to doubt them. But a magical-realist script unfolds in front of my eyes. With ten minutes to go I hear the gay supporters start to scream. A Vila Nova player has turned up late from work. He is very good-looking and, before he has entered the pitch, the supporters are jumping up and down. They cheer him on: 'Go, sexy! Go!'

  The late arrival has no shoes. But he tells Audemir that he only knows how to play barefoot. He runs on to the pitch and takes a position in central midfield. Each time he touches the ball Vila Nova's fans yelp excitedly. His presence changes the balance of play. Vila Nova push forward constantly. They win several corners. Minutes later the hunky substitute scores.

  Vila Nova win 1-0.

  'Great result lads,' says Audemir, shaking everyone's hand as they walk off. 'For our debut game we did really well.'

  Afterwards, the team goes back to Vila Nova's olive tree for the 'barge', the name given to the obligatory post-match party. The gay supporters volunteer to be waitresses. They open the beer bottles and make sure everyone's glass is full. In the humid night heat the whole neighbourhood is out celebrating. 'Football is the beginning of everything,' argues Mauricio Lima. 'The rest comes afterwards.'

  The referee caught sight of a treacherous kick and, without blinking, blew his whistle. Foul. Or maybe penalty? Well, that's just a detail. The important thing is that all the players advanced on the ref hungry for blood. But Manuel wasn't stupid. He had come prepared. Under his uniform he had concealed a revolver. With his hand on the gun he threatened to shoot. 'Who's got enough guts now?' he roared, with flames coming out of his nostrils. It turned into a desperate scramble. Players fell over, stumbling on each other in the mad confusion. It was such a tumult that no one paid attention to one little detail. His weapon was a bluff. It was just a little toy, the sort you can buy for 50p.

  Front-page news: Pretty women and football

  I leave Manaus the following day, but am able to keep up with the competition back in Rio. Twice a week A Critica, the Manaus daily, publishes an eight-page supplement which I reserve at my local 'international' newspaper shop. (This is not so silly; Manaus is further from Rio than Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile and Peru.) The supplement is pure testosterone. On half of its pages is football. On the other are pictures of sexy girls. Over the coming months I read that Vila Nova pass through both group stages without losing a game. They are defeated 3-1 by Central P
ark St Antonio in their first game in the knockout round, when there were only forty-five teams left. The Big Kickabout is eventually won by 3B Suprishop, a team run by the owner of an electrical goods superstore of the same name. Samantha Simoes of Glória United wins the Kickabout Queen final, which is broadcast on live TV. Lady Roberta, of Arsenal, does not pass her second-round heat.

  *excerpts from Manaus newspaper A Critica

  Chapter Twelve

  A GAME OF TWO HEMISPHERES

  It is commonly known that the Amazon rainforest shelters many endangered species. Less publicised is that it also harbours one of the world's last remaining pockets of 1980s British electropop. I make this gratifying discovery shortly after I land in Macapa, the sleepy capital of Amapá state. A taxi takes me to the 'best nightclub in town'. The door of Site 500 leads straight on to the dancefloor, which is crammed with a dolled-up young crowd dancing to the Pet Shop Boys and the Human League.

  Overcome by nostalgia, I start dancing, even though, at thirty-one, I feel the oldest by about ten years. Apart from a short bald man dancing with a circle of pretty girls. He looks about forty-five and is very English. His complexion is freckly and fair, with a nose almost vertically coming down from his forehead and a tiny mouth. Were it not for the loud music I would have made conversation. Instead, we exchange complicit glances. He slaps my shoulder cordially. I wonder how an Englishman could have ended up in Amapá, which has no tourist industry, or, in fact, any real industry at all. With just 440,000 inhabitants Amapá is the second-least populated state in Brazil, geographically a diamond-shaped extension of the Guyanas, with 90 per cent covered in jungle and no road connection out. I dance for an hour and leave.

  I have come to Amapá to visit a football stadium bisected by the equator. Since the 1970s – when the dictatorship built enormous concrete stadia in Brazil's major cities – the augmentative suffix '-ao', meaning 'big', became a stylistic necessity in naming football grounds. Zerao, or Big Zero, is the most poetic. As well as being mildly self-contradictory-how can you have the augmentative of nothing? – it is wonderfully evocative of its location. Zero stands for the line of zero latitude, but it could equally describe what goes on in Amapá. With a name that sounds like a euphemism for the cosmic void, where better to build Big Zero than Nowhere Central, a piece of jungle at the end of the world?

  Brazilians are stereotyped for their expressive attitudes towards sex and football. With good reason. What did Britain do on the Greenwich Meridian? It built an observatory, flagging its longitudinal privilege with a global reminder of its punctuality. How did Brazil mark the line of zero latitude?

  'It's a real turn-on fucking on the equator,' says José Archangelo, whom I meet two days later on the touchline of Big Zero. We are watching the final of the state championship's first phase. São José, from Macapa in the northern hemisphere, are playing Independente from Santana in the south. He carries on: 'Before the stadium was built there was nothing here – just a clearing in the rainforest and a 50m line of concrete. In those days me and my mates would drive out loads. We'd get pissed, sing songs on the guitar and shag girls.'

  He starts thrusting his pelvis up and down, which wobbles his weighty belly. 'The girl would lie on the concrete line and have one leg in either hemisphere. It gave you a real turn-on to think you were fucking on the centre of the world.

  'Man, I lost count of the times I did this. We couldn't have sex with virgins because those days if you had sex with a virgin you had to marry her. So we took our maids or picked up girls from brothels. If we couldn't find any we'd use the equator in other ways. We'd get our dicks out and run along it to see who's line of piss went the furthest.'

  José is interrupted because a São José player has been hurt. He is the team medic and he scuttles on to the pitch.

  At Big Zero the equator marks the centre line. When the referee tosses the coin he asks the team captains: 'Which hemisphere would you like to start in?' The equator also bisects the one stand, on the west side of the pitch, slicing through the middle of seats, sparing nothing as it circumnavigates the globe. The stand is equipped with a bathroom at either end. If the match is dull, spectators can always spend their time checking that in each sink the water spirals down the plughole in opposite directions.

  Fortunately, São José vs. Independente is anything but dull. The match is hard-fought; the referee's hand is never far from his yellow card. It is a symbolic battle between good and evil. In the northern hemisphere are sitting members of São José's supporters club, the 'Diabolic Fans', wearing T-shirts with cartoon devils. In the southern hemisphere, Independente's players have 'Jesus. Yesterday, Today and Forever' printed on the back of their shirts.

  About 3,000 spectators fill the stand. Each team is cheered by a musical band. Fans hold transistor radios, listening to the commentary from local broadcasters sat a few metres behind. One Independente supporter has brought his lucky pair of bullhorns.

  The stand is neatly painted in yellow and has a capacity of 5,000. From the top you feel like you are on the highest building for hundreds of miles. You can see the Amazon in the far distance, the rainforest canopy and how strikingly Macapa has expanded in recent years. Amapá is Brazil's fastest-growing state. Originally on Macapa's outskirts, Big Zero is now reached by suburbs of simple one-storey homes and asphalt roads. The sky is an ever-changing kaleidoscope of dramatic white, black and blue cloud formations.

  Paid for by the Amapá state government, Big Zero was exactly the type of ostentatious project that Brazilian politicians love to fund. It was hoped that the stadium would be a reference point for the city, a potential tourist site and the stage of nationally important games in the years to come. Fernando Collor, the Brazilian president, was guest of honour at the inauguration in 1990. Zico and Paulo Cesar Carpegiani led a side of nationally capped veterans against Amapá's team of seniors.

  The stadium was the grandest construction in the state since the Portuguese built a riverside fort in an area which is now central Macapa. The fort, dating from 1782, is in good condition. I somehow doubt that Big Zero will be around in 220 years. The stadium is already a historic relic. It has already started to fall down.

  Life in the Amazon is a constant battle against the elements – the heat, the rain and, during September, the wind. Big Zero was so badly planned for the climatic conditions that its roof blew off. The eight concrete roof supports were more sturdy, and they now stick nakedly in the air, as if showing the scoreboard: Nature 1, Big Zero 0, with only a few seconds on the clock.

  Joaquim Neto, vice-president of the Amapá Football Federation, says that during September teams prefer to play in the northern hemisphere because of the vicious north wind. 'A footballer playing north-south once crossed the ball from a corner, and the strong wind pushed it in the net,' he says.

  Joaquim is my guide. He is a gentle man with a white moustache, trusting eyes and an easygoing sense of humour. His day job is in the local government agricultural department. He also has a daily football show on Amapá television.

  He tells me that Big Zero holds other surprises. He asks me to look carefully at the floodlights. I see immediately. They are in front of the stand. It doesn't matter where you sit, your view of the pitch is always partly obscured by the floodlight posts.

  'This must be the only stadium in the world like this,' he says. Joaquim knows it's shameful, but he shrugs his shoulders and makes a feeble excuse. 'It was the first stadium the firm had ever done.'

  I watch the second half sitting next to Joaquim and other federation dignitaries. We are sitting on a bench by the touchline. With a few minutes to go, Independente are leading 2-0.

  Suddenly, I feel a hand cordially slap my shoulder. The sensation is immediately familiar. It is the middle-aged, English-looking man from the nightclub, dressed in a neat blue shirt. He has the same complicit grin. Before I have time to speak, Joaquim introduces us.

  'Alex, meet Senator Sebastiao Rocha.'

  'Welcome to Amapá,
' smiles the state's senior parliamentarian.

  We shake hands. I remark, instantly, that I recognise him from the dancefloor.

  'Oh yeah?' he replies. 'Site 500 is excellent. Have you been to the club Arena. That's cool too.'

  'You must really like house music?' I ask, slightly baffled that a man who spends his weekdays in Brasilia, more than 1,000 miles away, spends his weekends clubbing in Macapa.

  'I love house music. But I can't dance. I just kind of sway. You should go to Belem. The clubs there are excellent.'

  The final whistle blows. As Independente's fans invade the pitch in celebration, Senator Rocha tells me about his life. In his teenage years he played for Independente, which was then an amateur club. He studied medicine and is a professional gynaecologist. In 1998, he became a senator for the left-wing Democratic Workers Party. Despite my image of him surrounded by young girls, and a cordial slap that I now see was as much political campaigning as anything else, I find him sincere.

  For Senator Rocha, Big Zero is the victim of political negligence. When it was inaugurated there were promises that stands would be built on all four sides. But they never came and the stadium became a white elephant. Bickering between state and federal government has left Big Zero's fate at an impasse.

  'It could be used a lot more. It has great potential. But it wasn't even built properly. Did anyone tell you that the roof fell down?' He shakes his head. He believes that with a little political vision and some federal funds Big Zero could be a major international sporting venue.