Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  ‘What is this, Charles?’

  ‘My degree,’ I replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, your son has graduated in football.’

  The old man, in good spirits, laughed, I was off the hook . . .6

  Miller had been educated at Banister Court in Hampshire, played football for his school, then the county and even a few games for the newly professionalized club Southampton. Whatever the real manner of his return, he was soon ensconced at the São Paulo Athletic Club playing cricket and trying to persuade the uninitiated to give football a go. In spring 1895 he and a few other club members made their way to the flat scrubland east of the old city centre where the mules that pulled the trams were left to graze. The mules were chased off and two hastily assembled teams created – the São Paulo Railway Team and the Gas Team – whose players were drawn from those heralds of urban modernity, the new electrical tram corporation and the municipal gas supply company. Opposition was not long in coming; the students of the elite school Mackenzie College took to the game and formed a team. Then, in 1897, a German immigrant called Hans Nobiling arrived in the city with his own German-language rule book and a few games under his belt back in Hamburg. Initially rebuffed by the almost exclusively English members of São Paulo AC, Nobiling helped form SC (Sporting Club) Internacional with players from many of the city’s expatriate communities; though strangely he would quickly go on to create a breakaway club of exclusively Teutonic members called SC Germânia. With the arrival of distinct Brazilian elite clubs like CA Paulistano, whose president was the state government’s minister of justice, and AA Palmeiras, a team exclusively comprised of engineering and legal students, the city now had six teams and, just a few years after Miller’s arrival, a small but functioning championship.

  São Paulo had started the football mania, but Rio was not far behind. In 1897 Oscar Cox, a fabulously wealthy Anglo-Swiss Brazilian, returned from his studies in Lausanne, where among other things he had learned to play football. Initially Cox persuaded the Rio Cricket and Athletic Association to try the game and they were joined by the equally English Paysandu Cricket Club and the Rio Cricket Club across the bay in Niterói. In 1901 he arranged the first game between representatives of Rio and São Paulo, played at São Paulo Athletic Club in October of that year. The local press purred over the calibre of the occasion: ‘The crowd . . . besides being very select was very big, and prominent were the elegant women who lent a happy note to the festivities.’7 The following year, after the final match of the São Paulo Championship, the match ball was bathed in champagne. Brazil’s relationship with the game was set in a hedonistic and flamboyant cast.

  Not everyone was convinced. One newspaper report of a very early match in Rio seemed to find the sport genuinely incomprehensible. ‘In Bom Retiro,’ it spluttered, ‘a group of Englishmen, a bunch of maniacs as they all are, get together from time to time to kick around something that looks like a bull’s bladder. It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts.’8

  In São Paulo, it was considered by some to be just a passing fad, while other papers thought it both uncivilized and dangerously foreign. One dismissed it as ‘A blind and barmy battle of physical force without the intervention of our superior faculties.’ The same author concluded that, ‘Football is an English game and should only be played by the English.’ A São Paulo Athletic Club player, making his way to the velodrome in full kit for a match, was stopped and arrested by a Brazilian police officer who considered him ‘dressed for carnival, out of season, offensively showing his legs in public in the centre of the city’. But for most of the Brazilians who came into contact with the English game it was neither too violent nor too modern. It was irresistible. Charles Miller, in a 1904 letter to his school in England, described the new football mania that had spread beyond the tiny enclave of elite athletic clubs:

  You will be surprised to hear that football is the game here. We have no less than sixty or seventy clubs in S. Paul’s city alone . . . We always get two to three thousand people to a league match, but for the final we had 6,000 . . . A week ago I was asked to referee in a match of small boys, twenty a side. I told them that it was absurd to be playing twenty a side . . . but I found I was very much mistaken. They played over two and a half hours and I only had to give two hands . . . 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 here.9

  The social and cultural consequences of this kind of rapid diffusion of football would only become clear in the 1920s. For the first two decades of the twentieth century Brazilian football remained set in its elite cast. Any doubt about the enthusiasms of the rich and powerful for football, any concerns that it might be too uncivilized were brushed away by the formation of Fluminense, the super-club for the super-rich in Laranjeiras in Rio. The club was founded by Oscar Cox and a cross-section of his chums from the Rio elite, unhappy with the lack of enthusiasm for football at the various cricket and rowing clubs they had frequented. Mário Filho later described the cast of characters in the dressing room and around their fabulous dining tables as ‘chiefs of companies, sons of rich fathers, educated in Europe, used to spending money’. The season was a relentless round of games, dinners, parties and dances. Jack Hamilton, the English coach who had been employed at the equally louche CA Paulistano in 1907, found that his squad needed ‘a lot of coaxing to train properly’.

  By 1917 the Estádio das Laranjeiras had been built. Nestled next to the Palácio Guanabara – the former residence of the Emperor’s daughter – Laranjeiras was a striking mix of the functional and the decorative, the popular and the elite; the pitch was entirely enclosed, access was via the gates in walls of repeating neo-Palladian arches which led out on to three stepped terraces for the general public; the best view was from a seated stand for club members whose woodwork and detailing suggested a beachside palace. Behind this sat the clubhouse which included a gilded ballroom big enough for 500 guests, as well as ample space for drinking and dining, socializing and networking. Indicative of the place of Fluminense within Brazil’s power elites was the role of the Guinle brothers. Carlos and Guilherme held the presidency three times between them before the oldest brother, Arnaldo, took over in 1916 and held on to the position until the 1930s. From an old and wealthy aristocratic clan, Guilherme started out as a civil engineer, founded a bank in Bahia and then in the 1930s moved to the very centre of economic decision-making in Getúlio Vargas’s government, responsible for the creation of a nationalized steel industry and then for a short period became president of the Bank of Brazil. Carlos was a composer and a key patron of the arts in the city, while Arnaldo had time and money to devote himself to Fluminense. Alongside them Fluminense could boast among its roster the leading writers of the day, from the novelist Henrique Coelho Neto to the poet Olavo Bilac.

  In Rio the foundation of Fluminense was quickly followed by the creation of football teams at the Botafogo rowing club which drew players from the elite schools nearby, the Colégio Alfredo Gomes and the Ginásio Nacional. The following year América was created by the sons of old north-eastern families, declining rural elites who had gravitated to the capital and now appeared to embrace its modern urban cultures. The Flamengo rowing club in the luxurious lakeside neighbourhood of Gávea, had initially resisted the pull of football, many of its oarsmen considering the new game a form of unmanly prancing, but when in 1911 a group of Fluminense footballers broke from the club they found a home at Flamengo. The situation in São Paulo was no different. Thomaz Mazzoni, the great chronicler of the city’s game, surveyed over forty players in the decade before the First World War and found them to be: ‘Engineers, building contractors, and merchants . . . with a scattering of accountants, doctors, bankers, army officers, professors, architects and one poet-schoolteacher’.10

  In this era, teams would formal
ly enter on to the pitch, line up in front of the main stand and offer a salute or a bow to the crowd, who responded with three rounds of hip-hip-hurrah, loud applause and cheering. It was a level of decorum that, at first, was maintained despite the fiercely competitive character of the game. São Paulo newspapers praised a Rio team and noted ‘the correctness of their game . . . this was to be expected from boys who benefit from a polished and distinguished education’. Rio’s Gazeta, reporting on a match between Botafogo and América in Rio in 1908, wrote: ‘After the arguments and the matches, footballers are always friends. They are polite young men from our society and respect each other. They do not fight seriously.’11 Crowds were described as jovial; supporters of each club would clap both teams almost indiscriminately. Dress in the stands was formal but stylish. For men it was light suits, straw boaters, walking canes and a simply extraordinary array of waistcoats and waxed moustaches. For the true in-crowd a striped band of the club’s colours could be wrapped around their hats, a detail familiar to those who had attended English public schools.

  However, the single most important fact about the crowd – and an indicator of the social function of football – was that the society ladies of Rio were present and in very large numbers. They came in the latest summer fashions, millinery inspired by Paris, veils and netting, carefully coiffed curls and flowers in their hair. At half-time players would take the chance to join friends and family in the stands, engage in conversation with a lady who had caught their eye on the wing or join the gaggle of girls draping themselves decorously on the carved wooden banisters of the clubhouse. One observer, when watching Paysandu against Fluminense in 1913, looked at the crowd and saw ‘A formidable array of vividly beautiful girls who seem to want to leap up and chant the names of players, the ladies were pale from their enthusiasm.’ As late as 1919 the same writer was claiming that of the fans ‘the most empathetic, the most constant and the most numerous paradoxically were feminine’.12 It wasn’t just flirting either, there was a tangible sexual undercurrent. The celebrity football couple of the era, the poet Ana Amélia and the banker turned historian Marcos de Mendonça, met when she saw him play as Fluminense’s goalkeeper. Her poem ‘The Leap’ leaves remarkably little to the imagination.

  When I saw you today,

  Executing your relaxed, daring and vigorous leap

  Like a figure from the Iliad

  I trembled in the most intimate part of my being

  Swept by a frenetic impulse as if I were before a Greek,

  The hero of an Olympiad.13

  Perhaps, in 1910, it really did feel that ancient Greece was being reborn in the football stadiums of Rio, but by the end of the First World War it was beginning to look more like the rabble that attended Rome’s Colosseum. Writing in 1916, João do Rio reflected, ‘I’ve seen enormous crowds in many countries, great carnivals of health and fresh air, but never have I seen such fire, such enthusiasm, of a crowd like that.’14 Certainly the size of the crowds at football games had grown from a couple of thousand in the first decade of the century to figures nearer 10,000 in the second, and on occasion even more. Clubs had now built walls and gates, and sold tickets to the public, though the members continued to gain free access to games and a spot in the reserved seats in the best stand. For the rest of the public there were standing terraces and tickets were still cheap, certainly less than a trip to the theatre and closer to the cost of a cheap meal in a workmen’s café in the city. This was still beyond the means of the poorest and most peripheral who often watched Fluminense games from the surrounding hills, but for the lower middle classes, indeed anyone with regular employment, it was an affordable pleasure.

  The crowds, transformed by the arrival of this new social stratum, appeared to be changing their behaviour too. They became more partisan and possessed an altogether more excitable attitude. In the press and vernacular speech they were now referred to as torcida, literally meaning ‘the twisted’. It was a term that drew on the imagery of handkerchiefs being spun in the air by celebrating fans, and the turning of their guts as the tension mounted. In the gossip columns of the sports press it was rumoured that Fluminense fan Captain João Pereira had got so overwrought at a game that he had ‘lost his moustache’.15 Apparício de Brinkerhoff Torelly, who as the Barão de Itararé would go on to be the nation’s leading humorist in the otherwise decidedly unfunny Vargas years, was cutting his satirical teeth on football in Rio. His poem ‘Match de Foot-ball’ contrasted the high social standing of the game’s participants with the now distinctly low-rent crowds.

  And the mad crowd, brutish and rude,

  Booed the honourable head of a family.

  Another fell to the floor. People booed him.

  He got up furious, but fell again.

  All of this seemed, in my considered opinion,

  Twenty-two furies, pursuing the world.

  And after an hour and a half of fighting,

  The referee blew his whistle.

  The game was a draw.16

  The lower classes may have been arriving in the cities of the Old Republic; they may, at the margins, have been making their presence felt, but football and above all Fluminense was still essentially an elite affair. An hour before the decisive game of the 1919 Carioca Championships, played between Fluminense and Flamengo, the newly expanded Laranjeiras stadium was full to its 18,000 capacity with 5,000 people locked outside without a ticket. A warm-up game entertained the crowd but half an hour after it had started President Pessoa, together with the First Lady and the minister of the navy, entered the directors’ box and the game was paused for five minutes while the teams lined up in front of them and the navy band played the national anthem. Fluminense won the main attraction 4-0 after which players and fans descended on to the pitch and, marching with the navy band, conducted a great shambling victory parade. Fluminense’s third consecutive title – the tricampeonato – was celebrated by both heraldic trumpets and a 21-gun salute. Mário Filho wrote that, henceforth, Fluminense fans would recite the names of this team: ‘Mendonça, Lais, Oswaldo, Strong, Mano, Zezé . . .’ as if they were an Olavo Bilac sonnet.

  III

  The tiny rarefied world of the Olavo Bilac sonnet, of the ballrooms of Fluminense and the glitter and allure of football in Rio and São Paulo sat at the social apex of the Old Republic. Laranjeiras appeared an elite citadel, an aristocratic pleasure palace. But the solidity of the social and political arrangements on which this otherworldly glamour and privilege rested and which also kept the rest of society out was being slowly undermined. Two processes would profoundly disturb them: migration and urbanization.

  Migration was both internal and external. The enduring poverty of the north-east saw poor blacks, mulattos and whites move to the coastal cities. Salvador and Recife both doubled their populations under the Old Republic. Simultaneously, migrants from Europe flooded in. From around 25,000 people a year in the last days of the Empire, the number of annual arrivals climbed as high as 165,000 in 1895 and continued at this high rate into the 1920s, by which time over 4 million people had arrived in the previous half century. Italians were the most numerous of the new arrivals, making up over a third of the total. They were followed by the Portuguese and then the Spanish and the Germans and a long mixed tail that included the Swiss, the French and the Russians. In the early twentieth century the demand for labour in the São Paulo coffee fields was so high that Brazil accepted over a million landless Japanese farmers, subsidized by their own government to make the transpacific crossing. Alongside them there was a steady flow of Britons, especially engineers, technicians in transport, electrical and manufacturing industries, as well as considerable numbers of Syrians, Lebanese and Jews. Overwhelmingly this wave of migrants headed for the south of the country and while many began in agricultural work they too moved to São Paulo and Rio, whose growth was truly astronomical. With just half a million inhabitants at the beginning of the Republic, Rio alone was home to 1.2 million by the early 1920s. São Paul
o grew eight-fold over the same period to a population of over half a million and would, within a decade or so, surpass Rio itself.

  Together these processes created new social classes and social forces right on the doorstep of Brazil’s urban elites: a literate urban middle class, and a small but expanding working class, both of which consisted of a mix of blacks, mulattos and whites. These people could not be entirely excluded from the public life of the nation, but nor could they be easily assimilated into the elite’s own sense of itself as a white European nation, concentrated in the two big cities of the south-eastern corner of the country. Football in the first two decades of the twentieth century provided an arena in which these geographical and sociological shifts could be registered. Clubs could blackball members, stadiums could have gates, but no one could stop people just playing. In 1914 the chairman of Exeter City while departing Rio from the docks saw a game in progress and remembered his surprise ‘To discover that the match was between junior teams . . . They were all niggers, as black as your hat, and most of them playing in bare feet.’17 In 1922 the Brazilian writer and journalist Lima Barreto wrote:

  Everyone in this good city of Rio, provided they’re not leaden footed, or at least with their head full of lead, play the so-called British sport. There isn’t a rich man or a poor man, old man or youth, white or black, street kid or posh boy who doesn’t belong, at least informally, to a club destined to perfect men in the art of using their feet.18

  Football, unlike most other emergent popular cultural forms, provided a public space for Brazil’s male urban and working classes, as players, fans and organizers, and put them in contact with elite circles they would only otherwise encounter in the workplace. The São Cristóvão club, named after its working-class neighbourhood in the port zone of Rio, was emblematic of these processes. It was founded in 1909, crystallizing out of informal games and teams that had marked out a pitch in a patch of open public space. Such was the enthusiasm for the project that by 1910 they were playing in the Rio metropolitan league and holding a wide range of social events. From 1913 to 1916 the club built its own small Estádio Figueira de Melo in a piecemeal fashion, drawing on the skills and resources of its many members.