Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Renata tells me that in the morning she had posed for pictures for a bikini catalogue. She adds that she has been inundated by all the top-shelf magazines. They want to take pictures of her wearing nothing but a Palmeiras top, big white footballers' socks and high heels.

  Posing naked is a tried-and-tested way of affirming female celebrity. Playboy, regularly the country's biggest-selling monthly magazine, is a traditional showcase for football's muses. Ronaldo's two bizarrely identical ex-girlfriends, for example, launched a career as the 'Ronaldas' by appearing in lesbian clinches in its pages.

  I suggest to Renata that she will be doing herself a disservice posing nude since she will lose all her credibility.

  'I don't agree,' she replies. 'People who see the photos will think: "Didn't Wanderley choose well."'

  The Senate CPI gave Aldo Rebelo the political momentum to resurrect his Nike inquiry, which also had the status of a CPI. Congress had never put football under the spotlight before. Now both the lower and the upper house were doing it at the same time.

  Aldo wanted to clear up once and for all what happened on the day of the 1998 World Cup final. To do this his investigating commission voted to call up the main characters surrounding the mystery of Ronaldo's health. First up is Mário Zagallo. I fly to Brasilia to watch the events from the touchline.

  It gives me an opportunity to meet Aldo, who is rapidly becoming the most popular Latin American Communist after Fidel Castro. We dine together in a silver service Spanish restaurant a few blocks from Congress. On the next table is Pedro Malan, the Brazilian Chancellor of the Exchequer. Aldo very much fulfils the international left-wing aesthetic. He has a thick Stalin-style moustache, he chainsmokes high tar cigarettes and tends to slip into Marxist jargon. Yet he is earnest without being humourless. He smiles often, with a broad grin of perfect teeth. I have the impression of a decent, hardworking and idealistic man.

  In 1998, when the Brazil squad returned home after losing in France, Aldo says that he saw a picture in a newspaper of fans waiting at Rio international airport. One held a banner with the Brazilian flag, where in place of the motto 'Order and Progress' was the word 'Nike'. A CBF heavy destroyed the protest. Aldo says this image crystallised his thoughts as to what was going on.

  'Of course we gave away sovereignty,' he argues. 'I think that the CBF betrayed the nation, even though I don't think they had that intention.' He believes that the Nike contract debased the national team by forcing it to play an inordinate number of lesser nations purely for the purposes of marketing. 'Disney didn't export Mickey and Donald, but the CBF sold the national team,' he says. 'There is nothing more representative of the country than football. It is an element of our self-respect. You cannot let business destroy the passion.'

  Until his CPI was installed, Aldo was better known as the deputy behind a bill to defend the Portuguese language from foreign – particularly American English – words. 'My two battles are part of the same general fight,' says Aldo, puffing on a Marlboro. 'It's a fight for the preservation of national identity in front of the pressure of globalisation. I think you can integrate in the world without accepting [other countries'] cultural standards.'

  separated at birth

  our fathers

  Top: Ministers of the Kuwoiti government stand behind the Kuwoiti notionol teom. Father Santana, masseur and spiritual playboy, is second from the left sitting in the front row. Bottom: São Caetano players Claudecir (100 per cent Jesus), Cesar (God is True), fldhemor (Thank you Jesus) and Wagner (ditto) genuflect after one more goal.

  all saints

  Top: Wax throats, hands, bladders, breosts (single and double), necks and other limbs on sole ot the National Shrine. Middle: Posters of football teoms in the Shrine's Room of Mirades. Bottom right: fl staff member in the Room of Mirocles with donated shirts. Bottom left: Sergeant Maia brandishes his son's Impassioned Fon Diploma' issued by the Supreme Court of Corinthian Faithful.

  belles of the ball

  Top: Beauty queens in their team shirts parade at the opening of the Big Kickabout. Middle: Erico dos Santos models Vila Nova's kit, at home with her mother. Bottom: Lody Roberto, Arsenal's muse, Luaits backstage with 500 other FJK contestants.

  red devil

  Left: Poulinho Jorge de Moroes, ot home with his pet cot, makes the gesture for which he is best known. He has sent off almost 6,000 players in three decades of the Big Kickobout.

  Below: Vila Nova's gay fon club livens up the wooden shanties on the way to their opening game.

  are you experienced?

  In 1956 the Soviets put down the Hungarian Uprising, Nasser nationalised the Suez canal and flmadeu Teixeira was mode coach of America – a position he holds until todoy.

  a river runs through it

  A footmud pitch in the Amazon, off the Macopa esplanade. Near right: A footmud goalkeeper during low tide. For right: Voldez Almeida's feet.

  uncovered

  Left: Renato Alves, football's whistleblower turned soft-porn centrefold. Top right: Curico Miranda furiously tries to clear the São Januaruio pitch. Behind him, the electronic scoreboard reads: 'Thank you fans for keeping calm.' (Overleaf: the moment the fencing collapsed.) Bottom right: Arnon de Mello in front of pictures of his father, President Fernondo Collor de Mello, and his grandfather, Senator Arnon de Mello.

  basic principles

  Top: Socrates, in 1982, urges Brazilians to exercise their rights and 'vote on the 15th'. Middle: The Doctor as he is today. Bottom: Mundico tops lotex from a rubber tree, the first step in how to moke your own footboll.

  Aldo talks with a distinctive regional twang. He is from Vicosa, a small town in Alagoas, where his father was a farm hand on a large cattle estate. It was a very poor childhood. Aldo says he grew up playing football with oranges, adding that green ones are best since they are less soft. He is clearly passionate about football. He starts reciting teams from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  'Felix, Oliveira, Galhardo, Assis and Marco Antonio. Denilson and Didi. Cafuringa, Samarone, Flavio and Lula,' he says without pausing for breath. The line-up was Fluminense's from the Roberto Gomes Pedrosa Cup in 1969, which he remembers listening to on the radio. 'For the final match Flavio was injured and Mickey played in his place. He scored the winning goal from his head from a free-kick taken by Denilson.'

  Aldo managed to leave Vicosa to study in Maceió, the Alagoan capital. There he became one of the leaders of the anti-dictatorship student movement. He was first elected to Congress in 1989, aged thirty-three. I ask him if he honestly believes that Ronaldo was chosen because of pressure from Nike. He replies: 'It is presumed that Nike preferred their own players to play.' I press him: was there overt pressure to play Ronaldo? 'I am obliged to think this,' he says.

  He adds that Nike's presence created a harmful atmosphere within the national team: 'I do not think Nike was the unique cause [of Ronaldo's fit], but I think it helped. I think Ronaldo had more pressure on him than he could cope with.'

  I tell Aldo that the appearance of footballers explaining themselves in parliament is particularly comic since most countries would dream of reaching the World Cup final, regardless of the scoreline. Aldo breaks into a hearty smile: 'Second place in the World Cup is a complete failure. It's like you are chatting up a girl and she says you are only second in her affections because she prefers someone else.'

  On Tuesday, 21 November 2000 – two years, four months and nine days after Brazil lost 3-0 in the Stade de France-Zagallo apppears in front of Aldo's congressional commission. It is one of the most eagerly awaited hearings of the year. Dozens of people cram the neon-lit corridor to queue for a good seat. Few are there for the business in adjacent committee rooms – an investigation into regional funding and one into the occupation of public land in the Amazon.

  Zagallo arrives together with Lidio Toledo and Joaquim da Matta. The three men look like country hicks turning up at a city wedding, smartly dressed in different-coloured suits, out-of-place and slightly awed by what
is going on around them.

  We are let in to the committee room. Zagallo, who has thick glasses and wispy white hair, sits on a raised bench beside Aldo, who is presiding over the hearing. Facing them are several benches of deputies and behind that about fifty members of the press.

  In his folksy manner, Zagallo begins the session as if he is an introduced guest on a TV sports show: 'It's a great pleasure to be here . . . I could never shirk an engagement in which the yellow and green is to the fore. I always like to talk about the yellow and green and it couldn't be any other way.'

  Suddenly he turns aggressive. He holds up a copy of a sports paper and says that it alleges that he sent a letter to try to stop the investigations taking place. He claims it's a lie.

  'I want to see who's got morals round here,' he charges.

  The deputies start shouting 'order, order' into their microphones.

  'I'm not dishonest, dammit!' responds Zagallo.

  Aldo tells him he cannot speak out of turn.

  'What's this about? You want me to keep quiet while all this is being said? This is ridiculous.'

  Eduardo Campos, a young deputy from Pernambuco, says: 'I am probably half your age, but I am showing many times your equilibrium . . . please don't feel attacked, but don't have the petulance to attack whoever it might be in this house.'

  Zagallo's face is bright red – half in anger and half in embarrassment. His aggressive style backfired. He looks completely humiliated. Zagallo, who is sixty-nine, is Brazil's most decorated World Cup footballer. He played in 1958 and 1962, coached in 1974, was assistant coach in 1994 and coached again in 1998. He is the embodiment of Brazil, the talisman of the national team. The deputies are treating him like he is a defendant in a murder trial. The clash of football and political cultures is descending into farce.

  Dr Rosinha, a left-wing deputy with a bushy beard, mutters: 'He's not at the touchline of a football pitch where he can shout at the players.'

  The confusion about the letter is explained. Zagallo signed a statement for the CBF, denying that Nike had influence over the national team. The statement was used by the CBF in a letter it sent out to lobby against the hearings. But Zagallo's confrontational approach sets the tone. Once the atmosphere calms down, he is very defensive and unhelpful.

  He explains his version of events at the Chateau de Grande Romaine in Lesigny near Paris on 12 July.

  Zagallo says that the team had lunch together and then everyone went back to their rooms. He went to his, where he watched a video of France's semi-final against Croatia. He said he heard a commotion going on outside, but assumed it was French fans, so he paid no attention. He then went to sleep until about 5pm. Only when he left his room was he told that Ronaldo had had a funny turn – about three hours after it happened.

  In the evening, Ronaldo was sent to the Lilas clinic in Paris. Zagallo went to the Stade de France with the rest of the squad.

  Zagallo says that Edmundo was chosen in Ronaldo's place. During the team-talk he says that to motivate the players he told them the story of the 1962 World Cup, when Pelé was forced out through injury but Brazil still won.

  About forty minutes before the match Ronaldo turned up at the stadium and, according to Zagallo, started putting on his kit. The tests had revealed nothing. Ronaldo was itching to play. 'Faced with this reaction, I chose Ronaldo,' Zagallo tells the hearing. 'Now, was it his being chosen that caused Brazil to lose? Absolutely not. I think it was the [collective] trauma, created by the atmosphere of what had happened.'

  The cross-examination feels more like a glorified post-match press conference. The deputies ask questions like frustrated sports journalists. Zagallo defends his decision by saying: 'If you invert the situation, and I didn't put Ronaldo on and then Brazil lost 3-0, then people would say, "Zagallo is stubborn, he had to put him on, [Ronaldo] was the best player in the world." . . . So I think I would do the same thing again . . . I even asked [Ronaldo] at half-time: "How are you feeling?" [He said] "Zagallo, don't worry I'm feeling fine".'

  He justifies his decision by repeatedly referring to the medical tests. 'The [medical] results, I always say, were from a French clinic' He stresses the word 'French' as if that guarantees its authority. For if it was a Brazilian clinic no one would believe it.

  After Zagallo speaks for four hours, Lidio Toledo and Joaquim da Matta are called up together. One of the deputies is a doctor and the conversation becomes very technical.

  Toledo and da Matta say they are still unsure of what really happened to Ronaldo. They say it cannot have been any sort of a fit since there were no traces of anything in the tests. They say they have spoken to medics and colleagues about what it could have been and no one knows. Ronaldo's incident, they say, was unique in the history of sports medicine.

  Toledo, like Zagallo, defends his decision to let Ronaldo play by stressing that he had been given the all clear. 'The French doctors said he could play. They only asked him one thing – that he didn't score a goal against France.'

  He describes the pressure he was under: 'Imagine if I stopped [Ronaldo] playing and Brazil lost. And if afterwards he said: "I didn't play because of Dr Lidio." At that moment I'd have to go and live on the North Pole.'

  The first day of evidence, while full of colour, does not appear to be incriminating Nike. All the witnesses deny that the sportswear manufacturer called the shots backstage. We wait anxiously for Edmundo, who appears at the hearing two days later. Edmundo had made leading comments after the final that the Nike contract forced Brazil to play Ronaldo for ninety minutes.

  Like a good detective yarn, gradually a full picture is unravelling. Edmundo keeps the hearing gripped as he takes us through his side of the story.

  I was in the hotel just after lunch. It's usual for players to go to their rooms and rest. Those who like to sleep sleep, others like to read, others like to listen to music. So, I was in my room. It was one of those rooms linked to another room. There was me and Doriva in one, and Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos in the other. About 3pm, I can't remember the exact time, I was watching television and Roberto came into the room: 'Edmundo! Edmundo! Doriva! Ronaldo's feeling unwell!' And when I saw what it was I despaired, because it was a really strong and shocking scene. And I ran through the whole hotel, hitting all the doors and shouting for everyone, so that the doctors would come as soon as possible. Since the rooms where the doctors and coaching staff were were a little further away, the footballers got there first. I shouted to everyone and returned to the room. When I got there Cesar Sampaio was already administering first aid: he was unrolling [Ronaldo's] tongue, that sort of thing. It was Cesar Sampaio and me that took the initiative, because no one ever knows what to do, whether to do this or that, before the doctors arrive. And, eventually, we managed to unroll his tongue, he fell asleep and the doctors got everyone together and told us: 'Look, we've got a really important game, a World Cup final, and Ronaldo will wake up and not know what happened. So, we're not going to say anything until the time of the game. Let's all go back to our rooms and rest.' We were to have a snack at about 6pm. We went back to our rooms, we rested, but, you know what I mean, everyone was worried. My room was linked, so I saw everything. Every five minutes someone came and stared, and Ronaldo was there, sleeping like a baby. When it got to 6pm, snack time, we were all like we are here, eating. Ronaldo was the last to arrive. He sat down, didn't speak to anyone, which wasn't normal, he always messed around. This time he spoke to nobody. He sat down, with his head down, and didn't eat anything. He got up and went towards the football pitch that was at the side of the restaurant. And Leonardo got up in desperation and said: 'Doctor, you've got to take this lad for some tests, I don't know what, he's not well.' That was when the doctors approached Ronaldo and told him everything and that they would take him for the tests. He said: 'No, I've got to play. It's the World Cup final, I want to play, I want to play' . . . the doctors told us afterwards that they told him: 'You'll do all the tests. If you are well, then you'll come back a
nd play.'

  Deputy José Rocha wants more details. He asks: 'When you got to Ronaldo's room, the horrible scene that you described, how did you find him? Was he hitting out, or shaking?'

  Edmundo replies: 'Yes. He was hitting out a lot. I don't . . .'

  'Lying down?'

  'Lying down, and hitting himself with his hands like this, with his teeth . . .'

  'Together?'

  'Locked together and with his mouth foaming.'

  'Foaming?'

  'And it was really shocking for me because he is a strong lad. He's big. And doing that with all that strength.'

  'His whole body hitting itself?'

  'The whole body, yes.'

  'And some of your team-mates had to hold down his arms?'

  'Yes.'

  Deputy José Rocha then asks what time Zagallo arrived.

  Edmundo replies: 'I can't be precise, because one building was for the players, and the other was for the coaching staff. But maybe ten, fifteen minutes.'

  'Ten minutes, fifteen minutes?' repeats the deputy.

  Edmundo agrees: 'Definitely no later than that.'

  Aha! The hearing has stumbled on its first cover-up. Zagallo had said he only found out three hours later. Who is lying and why?

  I return to Brasilia a month and a half later to see Ronaldo's deposition. He is the star witness. The committee room is packed with journalists and public squashing to get a view. Aldo Rebelo has brought his son, Pedro, to ask for an autograph.