Even the poorest favelas had lines of green and yellow paper, and richer neighbourhoods were festooned with bunting and streamers dangled above the streets like vines in a tropical forest. Drivers tied green and yellow plastic strips to their aerials, businessmen hung national flags . . . in their windows. Children chalked players’ names . . . on pavements.
In the course of the three weeks Cesar reported that almost every kind of emotion could be observed: delirious pyrotechnic celebrations when Brazil won, a sombre disappointment when they lost. But more complex moods were also present: a sense that a society so divided and disorganized did not deserve to win, and a pervasive nostalgia for the days of Mexico 1970 and for the world that made that moment. That nostalgia had first surfaced three years earlier, in January 1983. After another day of drinking cachaça Garrincha was taken to a sanatorium in Botafogo where he had already had a number of episodes in rehab. This time he died in an alcoholic coma. Within hours hundreds were gathering at the hospital. The press, who had not written a word about him for a decade, began to publish a torrent of remembrance. A municipal fire engine, like the one that had carried him through the streets of the city with the 1958 World Cup winners, took his body to the Maracanã. In a deluxe coffin, paid for by Botafogo, he lay in state for three days. On 21 January his body, carried on the same fire engine, wound its way to Pau Grande. Rio’s working classes came out to mourn him, packing the pavements and overpasses of Avenida Brasil. Thousands more headed for Pau Grande itself, many forced to abandon their cars outside the town. When the coffin arrived at the church for a hasty blessing, the area was besieged by mourners, some hanging from trees, others balanced on rooftops. The coffin proved too large for the grave that had been dug for it, and after his burial it was barely covered by the earth. A guard of Botafogo torcida led the crowd in singing the national anthem. The crowd then departed, leaving the graveyard half destroyed.
Sérgio Leite Lopes argued that ‘his death symbolized the end of a certain kind of working-class life’ characterized by the political freedoms and rising wages of the 1950s and early 1960s, and by an era of football remembered as a golden age of invention and joy. In the desperate economic circumstances of 1983 its passing was felt all the more keenly. At some point in the late 1970s, the Jules Rimet trophy, then in the possession of the CBF, went missing. It was never recovered, and in an era of hyperinflation, it seems likely that it was melted down for its value as a precious metal. Gold might keep its value, but the golden age was over.
6
Magic and Dreams are Dead: Pragmatism, Politics and Football, 1986–2002
‘I have always said that God put the best players here and the worst bosses to compensate’ – Juca Kfouri.
Magic and dreams are finished in football.
Carlos Alberto Parreira
In Brazil there is still the ideology of rouba, mas faz – it’s okay to steal if you get things done. In football this is stretched to the most far-reaching consequences. Everything is forgotten in the light of victory.
Juca Kfouri
I
Magic and dreams looked finished everywhere in Brazilian society in the late 1980s and 1990s. The long-drawn-out process of the abertura was not the soil from which utopian visions of the future were going to flourish. In the decade and a half following the end of military rule Brazil began to repair the damage wrought by the dictatorship, but even these gains came at a price. Inflation was finally brought under control, but Brazil endured two decades of slow growth, widespread poverty, rising inequality and a crime wave to match. In the realm of politics, Brazilian democracy was consolidated and the military seemingly neutered, but it was a highly dysfunctional polity in many ways. The fragmented party system made collective decision-making impossible and the whole operation open to vote-buying and old-fashioned embezzlement.
Only pragmatists, it appears, could prosper. Fernando Henrique Cardoso – or FHC as he became known – made the journey from São Paulo sociologist, and Latin America’s leading Marxist theorist of underdevelopment, to centrist president implementing IMF-approved monetarist policies. Lula began the era as the leader of the recently founded Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, the Workers’ Party) and called for Brazil to break with the IMF, nationalize key industries and institute real structural change. He lost three elections, steadily moderated his language and economic policies, and then at the fourth attempt won a landslide in 2002.
In 1994, under Carlos Alberto Parreira, twenty-four years after they had last won the World Cup, the futebol nation went to the USA and played neither futebol força nor futebol arte. As Parreira said, ‘We will play in the way modern football demands. Magic and dreams are finished in football. We have to combine technique and efficiency.’1 It wasn’t terribly pretty but it worked: Brazil won. Pragmatism and realism could get one elected, they could even win a World Cup, but these victories came at a cost. In football and politics, legitimacy came to rest on results alone – rouba, mas faz. In the 1980s and 1990s the brazen corruption and incompetence of football’s administrators were uncovered but went unpunished. The financial gains of the new commercialism were reserved for a tiny minority, and, worst of all, football’s fan culture, already perilously poised between a spontaneous popular spectacular and a demonic mob, tilted in favour of the latter as violence at football games became pervasive. This, surely, was passion without dreams. For how long could a football culture nurtured on fantasy and spectacle prosper on a diet of pragmatism?
In the 1990s the cycles of football and politics became closer. From 1994, every four years, July meant the World Cup and October meant Brazil’s presidential and state elections. The last presidential race to precede a tournament, rather than be interpreted in its light, was in 1989. Then the contest was between Lula and a hitherto little-known state governor from Alagoas in the north-east, Fernando Collor de Mello. In his youth Collor had dabbled with the populist politics of football, taking on the ceremonial presidency of the leading team in Alagoas, Centro Sportivo Alagoano, but he had registered a shift in the nation’s tastes. On television, at any rate, football was gradually being superseded by telenovelas, the subtropical revenge tragedies that entranced the country with their heady brew of lust, greed, paternity suits and conspicuous consumption. Collor, rather than pursuing the people through football, lived the life of the small screen’s alpha-male patriarchs as an exquisitely groomed playboy-politician. His break in national politics came when the industrial and media elites started to worry about Lula, who was ahead in the polls. As the most plausible candidate to the right of the PT, Collor was supplied with money and unlimited television time. There he adopted a heroic, even messianic tone, promising to clear out corruption, free up markets, reform and shrink the state, and build a new Brazil. He was also telegenic, good-looking and eloquent. Lula was none of these. In the prevailing culture of deference, his fractured Portuguese grammar, rough accent and obvious roots in Brazil’s working classes made him look utterly unpresidential. With the help of some very questionable editing from Globo in the televised debates, Collor sailed into the presidential palace.
Brazil went to the 1990 World Cup, not as a herald of free enterprise, but as a throwback. The team were coached by the dismal Sebastião Lazaroni, a product of the military school of obsessive physical preparation and muscle building. He combined this approach with a rigid commitment to playing a European-style sweeper system. In fact he was so convinced that the system was the solution to Brazil’s footballing maladies that he had written a doctoral thesis on the subject. It was not a happy camp in Italy, where the application of military-era discipline could no longer work with players newly enfranchised by wealth and European experience. The Brazilian press feasted on stories of internal rows and huge drinks bills that no one would pay. On the pitch Brazil were lifeless and uninspired. They played four games, scored four goals and went home. Maradona’s Argentina put them out of their misery.
Collor could have done with better. His pres
idency was already faltering. The price stabilization programme was in tatters, and he was ruling by decree over the heads of an uncooperative but paralysed Congress. In early 1992 the stream of rumours about the regime’s venality were confirmed. The affairs of Collor’s main fixer, Paulo César Farias (known colloquially as PC), became daily news and the subject of a congressional inquiry. Collor denied everything while his brother denounced him on television. Congress established the link between the money in Farias’s slush fund, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, and Collor. In Paris, the Seleção beat France 2–0 in a friendly as Congress voted to accept the damning findings of its own commission of inquiry into Collor. Gazeta Esportiva reported that ‘The news of the score 16-5 in favour of the Report was celebrated with almost the same joy reserved for the goals from Raí and Luís Henrique.’2 In a final bid to hang on, the president called for the nation to deck itself in yellow and green, and to show its support on the street. Instead the country dressed in black and demonstrated in their millions for his departure. Collor stood down just in time to prevent his impeachment by Congress.
Into his place stepped Vice-President Itamar Franco, a politician of no known passion or ideological alignment. Provincial, shy and utterly unprepared for the task, he handed the levers of power, in effect, to Fernando Cardoso, first as his foreign minister and then as the minister of finance. Over the next eighteen months, either side of the World Cup, Cardoso and his team of technocrats devised and implemented the Plano Real – a complex anti-inflation programme that would see the shortlived cruzeiro real (introduced only in 1993) replaced in 1994 by a new currency, the real, and the inflationary expectations and behaviour of Brazilians transformed.
Never before had a World Cup been reported in such detail. Television coverage in Brazil was approaching saturation point. Poor homes were more likely to own a TV set than a fridge. Colour television had become widespread. In addition to the squad of twenty-four players, Brazil sent 440 accredited journalists and hundreds more without press passes. Globo had ten camera crews for every Brazil game. Television viewing figures suggested two-thirds of the nation watched the early rounds and close to the whole population tuned in for the final. The Seleção was on trial before a ball was kicked, the players accused of being dour, boring and unadventurous, even when they were winning. In fact, though the team were neither flamboyant nor adventurous, they were well organized, and nicely balanced in their approach to attack and defence. Brazil squeezed past Holland in the quarter-final, a Branco free kick the difference between them. Then they made heavy weather of beating ten-man Sweden in the semi-final. The final against Italy was billed as a rematch of the legendary 1970 final, an occasion on which to recreate ‘the beautiful game’. But the contrast between the two games could not have been starker. Brazil won on penalties after 120 goalless minutes in which neither side appeared to have the energy to break the deadlock. In the end the penalty shoot-out turned on the tragic mistake of one man. Roberto Baggio’s skied penalty kick and the despairing droop of his head were perfect symbols for Italian despair, but it was hardly the material from which the futebol nation might be mythologically renewed.
The team returned home to Recife where customs took note of the twelve tons of goods they had accumulated in America; Brazil’s collapsing currency had made imported white goods unbelievably expensive even for international footballers. Customs officers insisted that they pay the relevant import duties on the loot and the squad refused. There then ensued a five-hour televised wrangle between Ricardo Teixeira, president of the CBF, the Ministry of Finance and the tax authorities. Finally the CBF agreed to pay the bill, and then promptly deducted it from the players’ bonus payments. On the surface, the victory parades could be read as just a modern version of the nationalist celebrations of the past. A typical newspaper column announced, ‘The victory inaugurates a new phase in Brazil’s history: the return of national self-esteem.’ President Franco was hopeful that ‘this dignity that the players have achieved should be transferred to Brazil itself’.3 In the capital Brasília people were exuberant:
From the second-floor balcony of the presidential palace the team members looked down into a wall of green and yellow. Fans waved green and yellow flags, there were green and yellow hats, green and yellow shirts, green and yellow dogs, green and yellow cars – even green and yellow people.4
Cities not on the victory route exploded too. In São Paulo more than 200,000 celebrated on Avenida Paulista under skies filled with fireworks, while in Belo Horizonte thousands danced in the main city square to a large samba band. In Rio, crowds of half a million gathered to welcome the cavalcade which passed all the way from the airport, through the Zona Norte and centre, before heading south through the progressively richer beach neighbourhoods of Flamengo, Copacabana and Ipanema before finishing at the very pinnacle of Carioca super wealth, Leblon.
In the election campaign that followed, Romário backed Lula, and Dunga came out for FHC. Lula argued that Brazil had changed: ‘The people know how to distinguish between football and politics. When the festivities are over the people know how to separate fantasy and reality.’5 Perhaps they did. Lula’s large early lead in the polls was steadily whittled away as both rich and poor worried about the implications of his economic policies and the Plano Real began to work. In fact it worked so well that Brazil’s annual inflation rate dropped from over 1,000 per cent a year to less than 10 per cent: this was little short of a miracle. Cardoso, architect of the plan and now Lula’s main opponent, won the presidency with ease. Over the next four years, his government would maintain strict anti-inflationary policies requiring cuts to social programmes and punitively high interest rates. At the same time it began to implement the neo-liberal agenda that Collor had promised: privatizing state-owned companies, deregulating financial markets and opening up the country to international trade. Nowhere was this agenda more evident than in the sale of Brazilian players overseas. In 1986 Brazil’s World Cup squad had just two out of twenty-four players playing in Europe, in 2002 there would be eight and by 2010 the home-based players would number just three. From a handful in the 1980s, there were over 100 Brazilians playing in Portugal alone in 2002.
Brazil approached the World Cup in 1998 with a more impressive roster of talent than in 1994, testament to the capacity of the country to keep turning out players of the highest calibre. To the old guard – Dunga, Bebeto and Leonardo – was added a new generation of players like Rivaldo, Roberto Carlos and the goalscoring fenomeno Ronaldo, all of whom were playing in the prime of their careers at Europe’s leading clubs. Together they promised something more expansive than the functional football on offer in 1994.
If in the past Brazilian politicians, writers or poets had been the key voices in shaping the meaning of the Seleção and its performances, this was no longer the case. That role had now been contracted out to Nike. France 98 was the company’s first World Cup as sponsor and supplier to the Brazilian football team, and it made the most of its investment. Nike’s globally shown television advert for the tournament featured the Seleção, bored at the airport, but brought to life by football trickery alongside a fabulously swinging version of Jorge Ben’s ‘Mas Que Nada’ (‘More than Anything’): the sweet ebullient sounds of the golden era, the playful joy of the past and all in globally available branded kit.
Cardoso, who could hardly compete with this kind of image-making, wisely decided to lie low for the tournament. He attended a state dinner in Paris after the opening game, but did not grandstand. By contrast, the PT had decided that football was the perfect metaphor for their presidential campaign. Their advert showed Lula facing the crowd while the Seleção was playing against a team in grey in the background. ‘Brazil’s team is concentrating on marking inflation, while neglecting the others,’ says the voice-over. ‘Ah, unemployment and violence are closing in with a dangerous move . . . Watch out! . . . Goal!! . . . Gooooaaaaal against Brazil!!!’6 In the real tournament Brazil made the final to
no one’s surprise, though a defeat by Norway in the group stage, and a semi-final victory over Holland on penalties, made them look less than imperious. They went on to lose the final 3–0 to the hosts, France; but it was the manner of the loss that mattered. Brazil’s defence was bad, but worse, there was no attacking threat. The day had been rife with rumour as news leaked out of the Brazilian camp that Ronaldo was ill. His name was removed from the team sheet only to reappear just before the game began. Utterly anonymous, he played in a seemingly catatonic trance, detached from the action.
Brazil lost but Cardoso still won and, as the PT predicted, he spent much of the next four years marking inflation – unemployment and violence were given plenty of space in which to operate. The press and politicians conducted the football post-mortem with unaccustomed vigour. Ronaldo’s medical condition and the decision-making process that saw him put in, taken out, then put back in the starting eleven were at the centre of their attention: the Seleção’s doctors were cross-examined by the medical establishment, Nike and the CBF came under investigation, and the communist Senator Aldo Rebelo petitioned for a congressional inquiry. All of this came to nothing until, in 2000, the tax authorities decided to take a look at the financial affairs of the national team coach, Vanderlei Luxemburgo, and Renata Alves, who claimed she was his ex-lover. Alves, it turned out, had been purchasing a suspiciously large property portfolio on Luxemburgo’s behalf, and under questioning she finally alleged that Luxemburgo had taken a lot of cuts from football deals that needed to be stashed somewhere. While the press slavered over the detail, Luxemburgo’s Brazil were beaten by nine-man Cameroon at the Sydney Olympics. He came home to a ritual firing.
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