Pelé had made it clear that he would retire in 1974 and he would not be going to the World Cup that year. Rede Globo ran a nationwide campaign to get him to think again, João Havelange virtually grovelled and President Médici wrote in too, but Pelé was done. Reborn as a global brand, he would surface in America the following year as the star turn of the New York Cosmos during the short boom in American soccer. Havelange himself jumped ship. His long campaign for the presidency of FIFA culminated in victory over the incumbent Englishman, Sir Stanley Rous, on the eve of the 1974 World Cup. He won by mobilizing the votes of Asian and African football associations dissatisfied with the dominance of Europe in the organization and the placation of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and once in place he set about revolutionizing FIFA, turning it from a tiny amateurish federation into one of the world’s most powerful international organizations.
Left to its own devices the military regime took charge of the Seleção. Cláudio Coutinho, the fitness trainer in 1970, was given overall control. He spoke of his players as light armour and infantry, and their skills as weapons. He festooned the training camps with patriotic slogans and insisted on military discipline among the squad. Drawing on the ideas emerging from the army’s physical training schools, he espoused scientific football, a game based on exceptional fitness and cohesive teamwork. He avoided calling up dribblers and individualists, and argued that ‘the dribble, our speciality, is a waste of time, and proof of our weakness’. Rebellious characters like Paulo César Caju were out. The 1978 World Cup campaign that followed was defensive and uninspiring. The team scraped their way through the first round in games so disappointing that travelling Brazilian fans in Argentina burnt an effigy of Coutinho in Mar del Plata. When the team was knocked out (albeit without losing a match), he returned home and was fired.
IV
Reinaldo, who had been warned off politics by President Geisel, celebrated his goals for the side with a clenched fist, live on Brazilian television. This was just one of a whole series of challenges to the ruling order expressed through football in the 1970s and early 1980s. The most surprising challenge, and perhaps in the long term the most significant, came from the beaches of Copacabana, Leblon and Ipanema. As early as 1975 there were reports of women, many of them maids in the surrounding duplexes, playing football in their time off. This was an illegal act. In 1941 Vargas’s national sports council had banned women’s football, and barred them from martial arts and boxing, the pole vault and the triple jump. All were deemed unsuitable. Twenty years later the same arguments were being reproduced through Brazil’s coaching and sports administration colleges. Walter Areno, a lecturer in the army’s physical education school, wrote in a 1962 paper: ‘It is inappropriate for a female to participate in sports where there is physical contact, such as the infamous female soccer or futsal. It is abnormal to watch 20 women (as two are the goalkeepers) running around a ball in ungraceful and rough conditions.’7 Despite this, women’s teams were playing as late as 1949; two women’s sides from Pelotas, Vila Hilda FC and Corinthians FC, packed the small stadiums in Rio Grande do Sul and charged entrance money. But with the closure of these clubs in the early 1950s women, who had once been a central element of the Brazilian football crowd, were almost entirely marginalized. Though female fans continued to attend games, Betty Milan’s recollections were probably closer to the norm: a world in which women were not included in the football conversation but were expected to serve the coffee.8
The ban was revoked in 1979, and at a speed at least the equivalent to the male football mania of the early twentieth century, women’s football took off: the sports press were reporting over 3,000 teams by the early 1980s. In 1981 Rio was the first to hold a women’s state championship and eleven other states followed in the next couple of years. However, there was almost no money available to support women’s football from clubs, the CBF or the lottery. In fact most clubs made the team the responsibility of the social rather than the sporting wing of the institution. In 1984 São Cristóvão and Tomazinho had to cancel a game because both wore white shirts and neither could afford change strips. Equally problematical was the tendency for television and the press to trivialize and sexualize the women’s game. Globo, keen to shape the phenomenon, created the Globettes from their roster of TV celebrities. The women’s Copa do Brasil, which was meant to help choose the national women’s team, was treated like a fashion show. Gazeta Esportiva saw it like this:
Fingernails red polish, shiny lipstick, hairdo, black shorts and yellow jersey: that is Neusa Cavalheiro’s look. Braids decorated with colourful beads, the hairdo launched by Stevie Wonder enhanced the beauty of Mocidade Independente’s charming samba dancer, Cilda, who was also wearing shorts and jersey in the blue and yellow colours. But the two of them were not part of a samba school rehearsal show, they were on a football pitch.
When on the pitch, many of this generation of women players were subject to sexist abuse. Cenira, a striker with the club Radar, spoke for many: ‘Today when I came on to the field, I heard a guy say that I should be at the laundry sink, washing clothes. But I did not bother to reply to him, although I was angry. My reaction came later, with the ball at my feet.’9
In the men’s game players led the way, challenging the feudal conditions of their employment and the often subservient character of their relationships with coaches, the press, officials and club directors. Initially the challenge came from that small but persistent strain of middle-class, educated footballers in Brazil – a phenomenon stretching back to Botafogo’s medical students in the early twentieth century. Tostão, a hero of the 1970 World Cup team, was an eloquent and occasionally outspoken critic of Brazilian football in this era. He retired early in 1973 and became a doctor. Afonsinho and Sócrates, who were among the most well-known rebels, also took that path. Afonsinho played at Botafogo. Already out of favour with conservative coach Zagallo, he had spent the summer of 1970 travelling and watching the World Cup in bars in Europe. He returned to Brazil with his hair long and sporting a small beard, and was banned from training and playing for the team. Most importantly, the club which held his playing licence refused to allow him to move elsewhere. The case went to court and Afonsinho became a cause célèbre, attracting huge support from students, intellectuals and musicians on the left. His fight was the subject of the only serious football film of the decade, Oswaldo Caldeira’s Passe Livre. Sharply critical of the football authorities and by extension the regime, the film was shown to small groups in a short-lived attempt to create an underground film circuit. Afonsinho won his court case and grew his beard, declaring it ‘a symbol of freedom’. He played out the rest of his career in small stints at professional clubs and in his own touring team of bohemians and rebels, the Train of Joy.
In addition to articulating a critique of football’s labour relations and cultural conservatism, Afonsinho also criticized the impact of the joyless military style of training, physicality and discipline that was becoming prevalent in football. He was not alone. Reinaldo, the star striker at Atlético Mineiro, had, as we know, crossed swords with President Geisel. He continued to make public statements on political issues, including the amnesty proposals of the late 1970s which would pardon all those charged and convicted during the recent political struggles, and the need for direct elections. It was a stand that saw him garner huge public support. While the CBF threatened his place in the national team, students at the University of Minas Gerais painted a huge wall with the words ‘Why shouldn’t Reinaldo have a political opinion?’10
Rebellious dressing rooms and outspoken players could be dealt with, but the prospect of a truly mass opposition was another thing. The dictatorship’s control of political organizations and public spaces had been comprehensive. Thus the Corinthian invasion of 1976, while just a huge football party, had ominous even threatening undertones. Given the huge distance between most Brazilian cities and the ramshackle state of the transport network, away fans were a rare phenomenon in Brazilia
n football, cross-city derbies aside. In 1976 Corinthians were drawn against Fluminense in the semi-finals of the Campeonato Brasileiro in Rio. Though less than 200 miles apart, the transport connections between Rio and São Paulo were still poor, but there was just enough road capacity and private car ownership to permit a giant caravan of Corinthians fans to be assembled for the trip east. Over two days something in the region of 70,000 Paulistas made their way to Rio. The local press gave the event blanket coverage, reporting that the main avenues were choked with cars bearing São Paulo number plates and that an air of carnival had engulfed the city. The last time a group of people this large had occupied Rio’s public spaces they were shot at. The gathering of the crowd at the Maracanã bearing thousands of flags was most impressive of all. In the driving rain a delirious Corinthians crowd saw their side win a waterlogged penalty shoot-out. Later in the year the first signs of a new student movement would emerge and the first tentative protests and occupations would begin.
While the student movement continued to irritate the regime, the most serious challenge to its authority came from the new independent trade union movement that was growing in the ABC industrial suburbs of São Paulo. Once again it was the football stadium that offered the space in which the collective strength of an organized populace could be acknowledged. But rather than deploying it in pursuit of the championship, here it was used to challenge the authoritarian structures of government and industry. The strike wave of 1979 began in the Saab factory, and the union looked to spread it to the other car plants of the region as it stockpiled money and food for the families of its members. In opposition to the government-appointed officials, independent union leaders led by the rising star of the left, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula as he was known, called a mass meeting at the Estádio Vila Euclides in São Bernardo. Over 50,000 people attended and, though without a PA system, relays of speakers conveyed messages of solidarity. The strike then spread to every car manufacturer. As the unions were driven from public spaces with pepper spray and batons, they made Estádio Euclides a citadel. Over the next three weeks, the stadium served as a debating chamber and provided a tangible display of unity.
The final expression of this wave of footballing protest was the emergence of the movement known as Corinthian Democracy in the early 1980s. This combined two forces. On the one hand there was a democratic movement in the Corinthians dressing room where a group of senior players – Sócrates, Casagrande, Wladimir and Juninho – were looking to challenge the authoritarianism of their playing and training regime. On the other hand there was a struggle for control of the club board in elections for directorships. Normally a faction-ridden affair, this time the election took on a wider political significance. Representing the old guard was a slate named ‘Order and Truth’. Ranged against them was Corinthian Democracy. The sports magazine Placar summed up the choice in an election campaign that was fought on television and in the papers and cost over half a million dollars: ‘liberalization or heavy-handedness, efficiency or paternalism, new times or old methods’. The players came out en masse for the democratic slate and Sócrates said he would leave the club if the old guard were to win.
Corinthian Democracy won the vote and for a couple of years the club was engaged in one of the most innovative and important political experiments in the country. The coaches’ authority dwindled while the players took on a much bigger role in organizing training and playing. They also allowed for a lot more drinking and smoking and taking it easy. Speaking at the time, Sócrates said, ‘I’m struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for equality, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player, preserving the ludic, and the joyous and the pleasurable nature of this activity.’ For a short time it worked as the team played with verve and the fans exulted. A banner in the stadium read: ‘Win or lose but always with democracy.’
V
The military takeover of 1964 had been justified, at least in part, by the desperate need to control Brazil’s unstable inflationary economy; itself a symptom, the military argued, of the country’s political polarization and indiscipline. But by 1980 the annual inflation rate was back up to 110 per cent, and in 1985, on the eve of the generals’ departure, it had reached 235 per cent and was still heading upwards. The great wave of international borrowing and domestic spending of the 1970s, at what were at the time negligible interest rates, became unserviceable in the early 1980s as interest and inflation rates soared. Brazil was forced to default on its financial obligations in 1982 and was subject to an excruciatingly painful IMF adjustment programme.
Under President Figueiredo the military conducted an orderly retreat from political power, offering amnesties to political prisoners and exiles – and themselves – and opening up the electoral process in 1982. Finally, in 1985 they would permit an indirect congressional election of a civilian president, to whom they would hand a poisoned chalice of problems. The economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s was truly over and it became apparent that the benefits of the boom had been spread very unevenly. Between 1960 and 1980 the share of national income that went to the richest tenth of Brazilian households rose from 40 per cent to over half. The poorest 50 per cent received less than a fifth of this amount to share among themselves.11 As public services and employment shrank and the value of what little cash the poor possessed was constantly eaten up by inflation, those inequalities stretched even further. In the north-east, more than 40 per cent of the population remained officially hungry. In the big cities it was at least a quarter. From 1980 onwards the crime rate rose as robberies and homicides increased at a phenomenal rate. High-security measures swept through Brazil as every apartment and office block acquired bars, gates and guard patrols.
Domestic football stumbled its way through the economic crisis, clubs often surviving from week to week by delaying wages and payments long enough for the inflation rate to reduce them to a fraction of their original value. In 1977 stadium advertising was permitted and shirt sponsorship began in 1983. Although the biggest games could still attract crowds approaching 200,000, average attendances had begun a long decline. The debts kept mounting up and after three decades of resistance the club presidents yielded to the inevitable and sold the live rights of Brazilian football to Rede Globo.
On the pitch the character of the game was changing. The futebol arte of the past clung on, represented by Zico and the great Flamengo sides of the early 1980s, who won not only the Copa Libertadores but effortlessly dominated the champions of Europe, Liverpool, in their Intercontinental Cup encounter. However, the doctrine of futebol resultados and the physicality of futebol força had made enormous inroads. Grêmio and Internacional from Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, the home state of four of Brazil’s five general-presidents, played a self-consciously more physical and disciplined European game, and won five national titles between them.
The 1982 World Cup side under Telê Santana was a team that aspired to the artistic and romantic traditions of Brazilian football, and in Zico, Falcão and Sócrates it had players of the requisite skills and dispositions to make it happen. In the early rounds in Spain they were mesmerizing, scoring ten goals as they beat the Soviet Union, Scotland and New Zealand. Then, in the second round, as the surrender of the Malvinas was being signed, they swept aside a dispirited Argentina. Progress depended on their game with Italy, and as with the 1950 final Brazil needed only a draw to secure this. It proved to be among the most exceptional World Cup games ever played: open, pulsating and unpredictable. But Brazil lost 3–2. Even Carlos Drummond de Andrade had had enough of poetry. In one of his last World Cup crônicas he suggested to his readers that they should wipe their tears, roll up their sleeves, and get back to the serious business of making political change happen.
In 1984 the Diretas Já movement gathered all the forces of the opposition in a call for direct presidential elections in 1985 rather than a vote by Congress. A millio
n people demonstrated in Rio, and 1. 5 million people gathered in central São Paulo to hear, among others, Sócrates calling on Congress to make the necessary changes to the constitution. He was poised to make a move to Italy, but said he would stay if the measure passed. It did not. Sócrates went to Fiorentina and his club, Corinthians, relinquished their Paulista crown to Santos. They had reached the limits of Brazilian football’s democratic uprising. The abertura would be on the military’s terms.
In 1985 nationwide democratic elections voted in a new Congress and they in turn elected Tancredo Neves as Brazil’s first post-military president. But his sudden death before his inauguration left vice-president José Sarney in charge of the country’s raging inflation, rising crime rate and unpayable bills. Brazil went to its first World Cup for almost a quarter of a century as a democracy, but neither the team nor the polity felt like winners. The core of the 1982 squad went to Mexico in 1986 and made steady if unspectacular progress to the quarter-finals. In France they met their match. With the score at 1–1 in the seventieth minute, Zico stepped up to take a penalty and made it easy for the goalkeeper to save. The game went all the way to a penalty shoot-out in which Sócrates and Júlio César missed their kicks. Brazil were careless, they were also unlucky, but they were not good enough either. The response of Brazil’s football authorities was to rule, without consultation, that all drawn games in the national championship should be decided on penalties – a ruling soon abandoned after some clubs refused and were then forced into replayed shoot-outs in empty stadiums.
Terry Cesar, an American in Brazil for the 1986 World Cup, was a sharp observer of the mood of the nation. Brazil really did close down for the games. The Bolshoi Ballet had to cancel its Rio show when it clashed with a match. Universities and schools closed, business sent employees home, and ‘buses just stopped at street corners’.12 Over the three weeks of the tournament itself, ‘Life increasingly took on the character of an interval so utterly engrossing and so ceaselessly represented that it could only be compared to the experience of a nation at war.’ For many, the occasion was particularly charged with meaning as this was the first World Cup for a generation where one could cheer and not worry that one was also cheering for a dictatorship. Despite the central role of television in covering the World Cup, Cesar thought that it still mediated an essentially spontaneous and popular festival, rather than taking control of a made-for-TV spectacular.
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