The inaugural game in 1917 saw them play Santos, who had travelled many hundreds of miles from São Paulo state, in front of a crowd of 6,000; though sadly the game only lasted fifteen minutes before the referee, complaining of the vicious intimidation coming from the home crowd, called it off. São Cristóvão’s players, needless to say, did not live the life of Oscar Cox. Like most of the new clubs that were emerging at this time, they drew their players from the lower classes, of all racial categories, and received jobs, housing and food from the club’s directors. A similarly excluded group were the Portuguese bourgeoisie of northern Rio, who as recent arrivals and despite their wealth found themselves shut out of the leading clubs and facing a wider economic and political decline in the changing demography of Rio. In 1898 they created Vasco da Gama as a rowing and social club and fielded their first football team in 1915, using the same recruitment methods as São Cristóvão. By 1922 they had reached the same league as the elite teams.
These initiatives from below were matched by experiments from above as a rash of factory teams emerged in Rio in the first decade of the century. The first and most notable of these was Bangu AC, created in 1904 by the British managers and technicians of the textile firm Companhia Progresso Industrial do Brasil, located on the distant edge of Rio’s Zona Norte. Initially the team was made up just of English and Scottish technicians and managers, but they soon gave way to Italians and then Brazilian mulatto and black players. There was a similar mix in the crowd which, unlike those of the downtown teams, could mingle freely in any part of the ground. Bangu were the most successful of the factory teams, gained promotion to the top division in Rio and became far more widely known than the factory and company that had given birth to the club. Players were increasingly recruited from outside the firm and then received one of the less strenuous jobs in the factory leaving them time and energy to train. This kind of corporate paternalism proved attractive to many other Brazilian companies who were grappling with the problems thrown up by Brazil’s first wave of real trade union organization. The country’s first workers’ congress was held in 1906, and a national labour movement was established in 1908 and, fortified by the arrival of Mediterranean anarchists and syndicalists in the great wave of migration, conducted a decade of strikes and agitation. Andaraí in northern Rio grew out of a textile firm and in 1908, eighty miles down the rail tracks from the city, SC Pau Grande was founded by the América Fabril company.
In São Paulo the first challenge to the status quo came from the working classes. In emulation of the English team Corinthians who had visited the city, in 1910 a group of railway workers and painters met in the north-eastern corner of the city to found SC Corinthians who rapidly attracted members and supporters from the city’s growing multiracial working class. Italians in São Paulo had, hitherto, occupied a middling position in the racial spectrum of Brazil’s elites: white and therefore above people of colour, yet below those of northern European descent and worryingly proletarian. For the most part they had begun as agricultural workers but on the eve of the First World War they had created significant Italian neighbourhoods in central São Paulo, possessed over a hundred cultural and social institutions of their own including an Italian-language newspaper, Fanfulla, made up perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the city’s population and in Francesco Matarazzo acquired an Italo-Brazilian millionaire of considerable standing among the city’s business community. After the Italian clubs Pro Vercelli and Torino had toured São Paulo in 1912, Fanfulla wrote: ‘In São Paulo we have . . . the football club of the Germans, of the English, of the Portuguese, of the international and even of the Catholics and the Protestants, but a club that might be composed exclusively of Italian “sportsmen”, and our colony [is] the largest in the state, [yet] still nothing has been tried!’19
Palestra Itália was founded the following year and its football team played in the Paulista Championships. Others followed their lead and over the next decade the foundation of clubs like Syrio, Hespanha and Portuguesa gave a public face to the mosaic of ethnic groups that the city had acquired. As with Rio, these new clubs, unable to draw upon a stock of university students and young professionals with time, energy and money to burn, found themselves paying in kind and in cash for players.
Beyond the Rio–São Paulo axis, football clubs and football mania first thrived in the big cities of the next most important and powerful states, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais, creating clubs that endure to this day. In the main city of the south, Porto Alegre, the considerable German-Brazilian community founded Grêmio in 1903. Apocryphally, the main mover, Cândido Dias, had gone to see an exhibition game between teams from São Paulo during which the match ball had burst. He lent his own ball to the teams so the game could be completed and, thus advertised as a football player and enthusiast, founded the club over drinks with a few dozen others that evening. Grêmio was an unambiguously German club, by language and membership, and intended to keep things that way, rebuffing players and members from other ethnic groups. In 1909 it acquired a rival, when those football enthusiasts of Spanish and Portuguese descent, especially among the city’s students, formed the consciously cosmopolitan Internacional.
Belo Horizonte, the new capital of Minas Gerais, had been planned and built from scratch in the late nineteenth century as the garden city of the Belle Époque; but for all its municipal splendour there was precious little to do in the way of entertainment. In 1904 Vitor Serpa, a university student from Rio who had played football in Switzerland, and a small group of civil servants, shop workers and traders formed the city’s first team, SC Football. Within a year they were joined by pop-up sides of students and clerks with a taste for the historical, calling their sides Pliny FC, Columbus and Vespucci, while the local press started publishing championship league tables. The resumption of the university term and the devastating rains of the autumn meant the fixture list was never completed. A few years of park football followed before a new rash of clubs were formed: Atlético Mineiro in 1908, the team of the local but liberal elites; the Yale Athletic Club in 1910, an exclusively Italian society which would become Palestra Itália in the 1920s; and América, who accepted only the most connected and conservative among the local grandees.
By the outbreak of the First World War state championships of some kind or another had been established in Bahia, Pará and Amazonas. By 1920 they had been joined by Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul in the south and by the cluster of small north-eastern states including Pernambuco, Paraíba, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and even the backwaters of Piauí and Maranhão. Here the state championships, like almost everything else, were overwhelmingly concentrated in the coastal state capitals, where the old elites gathered and the new migrants poured in. The former took to football once the elites of Rio had given it their seal of legitimacy. The urban masses, where they could, followed suit.
Thus in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, football emerged from the Anglophile and aristocratic Vitória cricket club. In Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, Náutico was founded in 1901 as a rowing and sailing club for the Anglo-German businessmen of the city; for the Brazilian elite, unable initially to gain entry, Sport Club Recife was founded in 1905 by Guilherme de Aquino Fonseca, an engineering graduate of Cambridge University, where he had played football. Less than a decade later, Santa Cruz, immediately the team of the poor, was created by a group of teenagers who met and played in a churchyard. The distance of this moment, geographically and socially, from Fluminense is a measure of just how far and how fast football mania had caught on in the growing provincial cities of Brazil.
IV
As the verses of Ana Amélia and Apparício Torelly make clear, football had found its way into Brazilian poetry and letters. In the world of the visual arts the first paintings of footballers began to appear, including Rodolfo Chambelland’s Boy with Ball in 1914 and Ismael Nery’s Goal in 1917. Carlos Oswald, who would later contribute to the design of the Cristo Redentor statue and painted panels for the walls and
ceiling of Botafogo’s clubhouse that depicted footballers as semi-divine Hellenic beings. The first recorded song with a football connection was released in 1913. ‘Foot-Ball’ was one of a series of polkas and waltzes featuring a saxophone, flute, ukulele and guitar, released on 78s by Grupo Lima Vieira. However, for the small world of Brazil’s literate urban public, the newspapers were the place where football was most regularly examined and argued over. The overwhelming majority of the comment was positive. Three of the leading figures in Brazilian intellectual life, all members of the prestigious Academy of Letters, Afrânio Peixoto, Henrique Coelho Neto and Olavo Bilac, wrote in the game’s favour.
Henrique Coelho Neto was an exuberantly mustachioed mestizo from the northern state of Maranhão, son of a white Brazilian father and an indigenous Indian mother. He rose to prominence in Rio at the end of the nineteenth century as a furiously productive and endlessly florid journalist, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also a Fluminense obsessive. The game first appeared in his literary work in the 1908 novel Sphinx, which featured an Englishman in Rio, James Marain, who mysteriously disappears on Sunday afternoons, it transpires, to watch the football. Coelho Neto himself was a regular spectator, reporting that he would see up to four games in a single day as he watched some of his fourteen children play in Fluminense youth sides. One of them, João, would go on to a long and varied athletic career under the name of Preguinho, playing football for Fluminense and Brazil, captaining the side at the 1930 World Cup as well as dabbling in water polo, volleyball and athletics. Coelho Neto is said to have led the first pitch invasion in Brazilian football when contesting the decision of a referee at a Fluminense–Flamengo derby game and he certainly did write a hymn for the club, improbably to the tune of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’:
Fluminense is the crucible where our energy is forged,
In the air, in the bright sun.
The joy of the fair fight,
Our efforts are focused on the manly ideal.
Invigorating our race, our Brazil.
Like many of his class and generation, Coelho Neto had absorbed the biological models of race and the eugenic action plans of European scientific racism. If European Brazil was going to prosper as a nation it needed to get outdoors and get fit. Coelho Neto argued that ‘. . . a new breed will leave behind their dismal cultural heritage . . .’20 Footballers were the sporting and eugenic missionaries of the new Brazil, and for those who didn’t play football he was an endless advocate of walks in the fresh air, Baden-Powell-style scouting and swimming.
Afrânio Peixoto is best known in Brazil as a doctor and was the leading figure in the modernizing of public health and the mental health reforms of the early twentieth century. In 1918 he revealed himself as a fan of the game. While Coelho Neto had based his enthusiasm for football on biological theories of race, precepts which Peixoto by and large shared, it was the scientist and medic in him that saw football’s contribution to nation-making as more cultural and educational. ‘This game of football, this sport that makes us strong and healthy,’ he asserted. ‘It teaches discipline and order, demands cooperation and solidarity . . . it is a great school that is remaking the character of Brazil.’21 But individual character was not enough. The point of football, at least the way the English and Germans seemed to play it, was that it gave individuals a powerful sense of the common good.
The Latins who came here, were like all Latins, unattached from each other, incapable of surrendering their independence to the greater numbers, which added together, give a people its strength, a nation its victory. The . . . Anglo-Saxons are disciplined by education. A man is only worth something as a fraction of society; a player doesn’t exist, but only as part of a ‘team’. And this long collaboration, in their race and in the individual, always ensures eventual success, in all their enterprises. In sport, just as in life . . .22
Some critics of the game, like Carlos Sussekind de Mendonça, a Rio magistrate and journalist, were still operating in the same intellectual universe as these nationalists, but worked the logic of the argument differently. Football, rather than being a way of improving the nation’s stock, was the route to decline and degeneracy. In his 1919 book Sport and the Decline of Brazilian Youth, the author argued that it is impossible to claim that sport in general, and football in particular, nurtures reason and the intellect. On the contrary, its passion and furies diminish them. Football was a ‘microbe that spreads imbecility’.23 Lima Barreto and Graciliano Ramos, both critics of the game, stood outside of this framework, however, and were all the more acute in their observations for that.
Barreto was the leading satirist of his day. Born a mulatto into a middle-class but hardly wealthy Rio household, he made his living as a novelist and chronicler of city life, with a sharp eye for the injustices and inequalities of Rio rather than just its grandeur and gossip. His sarcasm was directed at the sclerotic character of the Old Republic, its elite’s secret shame over the mulatto nature of its people. He attacked their obsequiousness to foreignness and, uniquely for the time, peppered his text with vernacular language. His wariness of European influences on Brazil saw him decry the game, ‘brought into our midst by arrogant and ruddy English clerks’. He deplored the use of public money to support elite clubs and football tournaments when so many social needs were ignored. Above all, he thought the game brutish and the emotions it generated in the crowd equally so. ‘Football is a school for violence and brutality and doesn’t deserve protection by the public authorities, unless these want to teach us how to kill.’ A year after writing this, in 1920, when describing a game between a Rio XI and a São Paulo XI, he would record the first gunfire at a football match in Brazil. Drawing on the support of other medical and social critics of the game, in 1919 he launched the League against Football, arguing:
It’s impossible not to mention the sport they call British. Every hour of the day, it fills our papers with news of violent acts and, more than this, murders. It’s impossible that the police authorities can’t see this type of thing. Rio de Janeiro is a civilized city and can’t be delivered into the hands of a certain type of ruffian posing as a sportsman. Those betting in cock fights behave better. Among them, there are no questions, nor arguments. The bets are held in peace and the police don’t have to get involved. But the so-called footballers every Sunday are involved in arguments and fisticuffs and the police give them a pat on the head.24
Barreto also noted that football seemed to be coarsening the considerable female presence at games. Remarking on the women fans at one match, he wrote, ‘What is most worthy of appreciation is their language. Rich in slang, vehement and colourful, their turn of phrase only has any equivalence among those pulling carts on the quayside.’
Graciliano Ramos was born in the north-eastern state of Alagoas, and though he would live for two long periods in Rio, it was the culture of his home region that shaped his writing and thinking. Ramos, who would later join the Communist Party and be imprisoned under the Vargas regime, certainly objected to the game’s elitism, but it was from his position as a north-easterner that he launched his most trenchant attacks. In a crônica published in 1921, he expressed the opinion that such a foreign and urban game could never catch on in the north-east:
But why football? Wouldn’t it perhaps be better for the youth of the nation to take its exercise by practising national sports, without any foreign mixture, the fisticuffs, the cudgel, the flick knife, for example? It’s not that I’m repelled by the introduction of exotic things among us, but I like to check whether we can assimilate them or not.
Even then why should the culture of the whole country take on a foreign hue? Why should everything about the new, modern Brazil be established in the cities of the south?
Rehabilitate the regional sports out there that have been abandoned: the truncheon, the smack round the chops, arm wrestling, running, so useful for the citizen dedicated to the risky activity of stealing chickens, seizing the bull’s horns, jumping, horse ri
ding and, best of all, foot tripping. Tripping up! Now that is the national sport par excellence!25
Ramos barely wrote on football again. Barreto died tragically young in 1922. Brazilian football lost its best and most acute critics. It would be all the poorer for it.
V
Visits by Argentinian clubs in 1907 and 1912, and later by the Italians Pro Vercelli and Torino, were warmly received but these matches never functioned in the minds of the participants or in the popular imagination as international games. In 1910 invitations were issued by the Argentine FA for a representative Brazilian team to attend its celebration of the centenary of the May Revolution which had begun the process of secession from the Spanish Empire, but no national Brazilian team was sent.
The visits of the English amateur team Corinthians – a collection of aristocratic sporting troubadours – in 1910 and 1913 to both Rio and São Paulo came closer to the mark, as select Brazil XIs were among the sides to take them on. Moreover, observers began to note a distinct difference in the style of play, the English appearing consistently more physical and organized. In 1914 the English professionals of Exeter City, on a South American tour, stopped off at Rio and played three games in the city. Their 2–0 defeat by a Select XI was deemed the first international match and the first victory for a Brazilian side.
The newly founded national football association, the Confederação Brasileira de Desportos (CBD, predecessor of the CBF), sent the same team to play in Argentina later that year in the General Julio Roca Cup. Roca had twice been President of Argentina and had been the man in charge of the country’s near-genocidal expulsion of indigenous Indians from the pampas. Yet this cup, he said, was ‘to encourage the young people who play such a noble sport and to cultivate good relations between our two countries’. Brazil won the third game of the three-match series by a single goal by striker Arthur Friedenreich. In itself this was unremarkable – except for the fact that he was a mulatto.26
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