Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  At the peak of this scandal there was sufficient pressure for Brazilian politicians to act. Rebelo’s CBF–Nike inquiry became a reality, and the Senate created an even more far-reaching commission of inquiry to look into a whole range of problems associated with the nation’s game. Both committees sat for over a year and reported in late 2001. The Rebelo commission failed to prove any connection between Nike and the disastrous World Cup final of 1998, but along the way it did uncover detailed evidence of corruption, nepotism and incompetence. The hapless president of the Minas Gerais Football Federation, Elmer Guilherme Ferreira, was found to have employed twenty-seven members of his family at the federation. Ricardo Teixeira, called to give an account of himself and the CBF, went on extended sick leave. The Senate’s inquiry concluded by calling for criminal prosecutions to be initiated against seventeen figures. Rebelo himself had called for criminal proceedings to begin against thirty-three football administrators and club directors. But in the years since these reports were published, not one of the serious allegations of fraud, corruption and embezzlement has even gone to court. Brazil’s football establishment were saved, as usual, by the timidity of the judiciary, the byzantine complexity of the legal system and the brilliance of the national team.

  Luxemburgo’s replacement as Brazil’s coach was Luiz Felipe Scolari – known as Felipão or Big Phil – who had pioneered a particularly abrasive style of play and mode of interaction with the press, but had won national and international titles with Grêmio and Palmeiras. His greatest asset was a thick skin. He needed it. The criticism rained relentlessly down upon him as, first, Brazil were knocked out of the Copa América 2001 by Honduras, and then a series of draws and defeats in World Cup qualifying games put the team in danger of not going to the World Cup for the first time since its inauguration in 1930. Cardoso, not given to making statements on the matter, went public, saying that failing to qualify would be a ‘bigger disaster’ than the looming economic crisis triggered by Argentina’s debt default. In the end, Brazil survived the shock waves from the financial disaster on its southern border and a win over Venezuela in the last game of the qualifying round took Brazil to the finals in Korea and Japan in 2002. Once there, they were, for the most part, superb. They were imperious with the minnows Costa Rica and China, beat England despite going down to ten men, and overcame an excellent Turkey side twice. Ronaldo was in extraordinary form and, not to be denied his moments of redemption, scored two goals in twelve minutes against Germany in the final in Tokyo. Brazil had won their fifth World Cup.

  Cardoso welcomed the team home, saying, ‘The whole world saw the courage of the Brazilian people. They saw we are capable of organizing ourselves and winning . . . and they will see the same thing in the economy. We can organize our domestic affairs and triumph there as well.’7 But then he had only a few months left of his long period in office and had run out of reforming zeal. The CBF and the football establishment breathed a sigh of collective relief: the commissions of inquiry were closed as World Cup number five came home. As the writer Juca Kfouri said, rouba, mas faz – ‘It’s okay to steal if you get things done.’ Teixeira’s cheek was undiminished, corralling the team to attend a home-coming ceremony in Fortaleza to support his favoured presidential candidate, Ciro Gomes. Yet Lula’s claim that Brazil now understood the gap between sporting fantasy and political reality proved true. That October Gomes came in third as Lula, finally, was elected president of Brazil.

  II

  Juca Kfouri’s assessment of Brazilian football – ‘I have always said that God put the best players here and the worst bosses to compensate’ – was confirmed by the president of the Senate’s commission of inquiry into Brazilian football. Senator Álvaro Dias presented the commission’s 1,600-page report, saying, ‘The Brazilian Football Confederation is truly a den of crime, revealing disorganization, anarchy, incompetence and dishonesty.’8 It was a fitting summary of the first decade in office of CBF president Ricardo Teixeira, and an accurate predictor of the decade still to come. The governance of Brazilian football was no longer shaped by the armed forces, but it was rotten and the rot was at its most virulent at the top.

  Ricardo Teixeira was born to a banking family in Minas Gerais, grew up in Rio, dabbled in law, finance and volleyball, and then struck the mother lode: he married Lucía Havelange, daughter of CBF and then FIFA president João Havelange. Under Havelange’s tutelage Teixeira was groomed for a life in football, and in 1989 he was manoeuvred into the presidency of the CBF. In his long years in the post, he came to think of the institution, indeed the Seleção itself, as both his personal property and a public incarnation of his own unquenchable ego. As he said when discussing the CBF’s finances, ‘I have $75 million in the bank’, and looking back to the draw for the World Cup in Germany, ‘I didn’t want to play the opening match of the 2006 World Cup.’9

  In keeping with the neo-liberal agenda of the Cardoso years, Teixeira removed the CBF from the public sphere altogether. His decision to stop taking government grants or lottery monies absolved the organization from any external scrutiny or social obligations, and freed it up to pursue more inviting commercial opportunities. In 1996 he signed off a ten-year sponsorship and kit deal between the CBF and Nike. Reputed to be worth $300 million over ten years, its details were kept secret, though a congressional investigation later revealed that Nike had a significant say in the location and timing of Brazil’s friendlies. Liberated by this huge injection of cash from any need to engage with domestic football, the CBF went on a spending spree. Between 1997 and 2000 its income quadrupled, directors received 300 per cent pay rises, the money spent on hotels increased five times over, yet the percentage of the budget devoted to football fell. Expenditure on the football lobby, as it was known, was maintained though. The organization took five Rio High Court judges on all-expenses-paid trips to the 1994 World Cup and all were sitting on at least one of the forty cases then lodged against the CBF in the Brazilian legal system. In Brasília a discreet CBF house was maintained from which favour and money were dispensed to a network of politicians who could be called upon when necessary. There was still change left for the CBF to commit to buying the milk production of Teixeira’s own ranch and to rent his string of nightclubs at exorbitant rates.

  The CBF, at least, made money. Brazil’s football clubs stumbled through the 1990s losing money. Despite raising considerable sums from player transfers to Europe and Asia, clubs were notorious debtors and late payers to their players, the taxman and everyone else. In part this was a product of incompetence and infighting: Flamengo reached a point in 2001 when it had seven coaches’ contracts on its books, having sacked six in a year. Not content with a single warring board, a few years earlier the club had managed to have two boards of directors at each other’s throats.

  The dire situation among the clubs was also a consequence of football’s dysfunctional relationship with television. Globo had acquired the domestic monopoly over football on television in 1987 and they held on to it tenaciously. While this ensured a steady supply of money to the clubs, the lack of any serious competitors meant that the rights boom enjoyed in Europe was not replicated in Brazil. Equally importantly, football held a subservient position in Globo’s scheduling strategies. Telenovelas were, from the late 1980s, the real ratings winners and the source of the most valuable advertising income. To ensure that these programmes occupied prime time the football schedule was determined by Globo, forcing fans to attend inconveniently early or very late kick-offs, with changes often announced at the last moment. In 1999 the third and decisive game of the final of the Brasileiro, between Corinthians and Atlético Mineiro, was scheduled by Globo and the CBF for the Wednesday afternoon before Christmas – a ludicrous time. The mayor of São Paulo actually went to court in an effort to move the start of the game, leaving fans unsure as to when it would be played. At lunchtime on match day an injunction was granted shifting the kick-off to 9 p.m. Those who actually made it to the game saw Corinthians creep to
the title through a miserable goalless draw beneath a torrential downpour. Average attendances for the national championship, over 20,000 in 1987, had fallen to 10,000 by the end of the century. Most infuriatingly for the majority of football fans, Globo pandered to a small number of the largest clubs, giving them much greater and much more sympathetic coverage, whatever their form, than smaller teams. TV was like the absentee landlord of a crumbling property: it put a roof over Brazilian football’s head but let its assets waste away.

  A third reason the clubs were in such financial trouble is that a lot of money just went missing. The Senate’s 2001 investigation into football made clear the kinds of things that had become entirely commonplace over the previous decade. Eduardo José Farah, president of the São Paulo Football Federation, was asked to account for very large transfers of money from the organization to his own account. Whatever the payments were for, they weren’t showing up in his income tax statements. Samir Jorge Abdul-Hak, president at Santos for five years from 1994, had similar difficulties explaining the disappearance of over 30 million reais from the club’s accounts on his watch. Edmundo dos Santos Silva, president of Flamengo for two spells between 1999 and 2002, was all at sea tackling the details of the club’s transfer dealings. He had somehow forgotten about the existence of an offshore Flamengo bank account in the Cayman Islands, an account that the Bank of Brazil should have been notified of but wasn’t. Eurico Miranda, the pugnacious president of Vasco da Gama and a federal deputy for a party of his own invention, simply couldn’t understand why the committee would be interested in how he had acquired property in Florida and a fabulous yacht despite drawing no salary at Vasco or indeed anywhere else. Didn’t they know how business was meant to be conducted? ‘What the court has to understand,’ Miranda told them, ‘is that the best Brazilians have their own laws.’

  Foreign investors, who against all known reason had been persuaded to invest in Brazil’s leading clubs, found their business model equally lopsided. Between 1999 and 2001, Parmalat, the Italian dairy company, invested in Palmeiras; ISL, the global sports marketers, put money into Flamengo and Grêmio; the US venture capital firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst bought slices of Corinthians and Cruzeiro; the Bank of America, for its sins, found its way to Vasco da Gama. Within two years all of these deals had been terminated. Parmalat went bust for reasons of their own back in Italy, but the rest were simply taken to the cleaners with no discernible returns. ISL put $13 million into Flamengo’s ancient training facilities, but after the money had been spent the Gávea stadium was still infested with cockroaches, its pitch covered in cat shit.

  Perhaps the most telling feature of football governance in Brazil was the attitude of leading clubs to relegation. In 1996 Fluminense were relegated but in a classic virada de mesa – a turning of the tables in which the rules are suddenly changed in favour of the powerful and to the detriment of the weak – they retained their place in the top flight. For no plausible reason, the top division expanded by four teams. This kind of manoeuvre just delayed the inevitable as the big clubs kept on losing. A two-year points-averaging system was used to calculate relegation places, which allowed them the luxury of having an off season. Nonetheless, in 1999, Botafogo and Internacional still managed to get themselves relegated from the national championship. They were saved by a post-season decision at the CBF to award extra points to the teams for games they had played against São Paulo, who had fielded the ineligible Sandro Hiroshi. Interestingly, of the twelve games that Hiroshi played in, only these two triggered any alteration of the record, and São Paulo themselves were not penalized with the usual five-point deduction for this kind of misdemeanour. The net result of all this intricate maths was that Botafogo and Internacional would stay up and the small provincial team Gama were going to take the drop. Gama and their congressman took the CBF to court, which ruled that Gama should stay up and Botafogo go down. The CBF responded with scorched-earth tactics. They abolished their championship, to which the ruling applied, and handed the operation of the league to a cartel of leading clubs. They in turn created the monstrous 116-team João Havelange Cup, including virtually every professional side in Brazil but for Gama. Gama went back to the Brazilian courts, which ruled that their exclusion from the new tournament was illegal, which then became a 117-team competition. Even by Brazilian standards this was chaos. Some teams played just one game in a month, others had four in a week; a third of games had to be rescheduled, and Fluminense, who had been relegated to the third division at this point, were allowed to miraculously resurface at the top.

  The need for some kind of reform of football governance exercised both the Collor and Cardoso administrations. President Collor appointed Zico as sports minister in 1990 and he fashioned a limited set of reforms designed to bring a minimum of order to the legal status of Brazilian football clubs; to remove the state from direct interference in sporting institutions of all kinds; and to abolish the pernicious player-licensing system. In 1993 the Zico Law made its way through Congress with little rancour, but then it merely tinkered with the system.

  A more serious effort was made to address football governance in 1998 when President Cardoso appointed Pelé as Extraordinary Minister of Sport. Pelé’s four years in office were spent drawing up a set of regulations that would make two key changes: first, football clubs would be converted into private limited companies, extracting them and their accounts from the utterly opaque legal world of charities and social clubs; and second, the murky world of player contracts would be reformed. Even such a minimalist programme was subject to the furious attentions of the CBF’s football lobby, who rewrote key provisions and forced whole sections of the law to be dropped. Despite a restive press and widespread public recognition of the laughable state of affairs into which football governance had descended, this was as far as reform could go. But then the reality of Brazil’s post-dictatorship democracy was a polity in which public opinion, if it could be formed and aired, counted for very little. As Eduardo Viana, president of the Rio Football Federation through this era and entirely typical of Brazil’s football establishment, said, ‘I detest public opinion. The people could all be shot by machine guns for all I care. I’m the son of a factory owner, the elite and I’m a right-winger.’10 And for the moment they were all still in post.

  III

  Football, which had continued to be a component of elite and popular cultures through the dictatorship, proved a less attractive subject under democracy. Its adoption by the military and the collusion of much of its establishment with them had, for some artists, tainted the game. More importantly, the game’s abandonment of flamboyance and spectacle in pursuit of victory made for more World Cup wins but less material out of which to construct mythologies and heroes. No poet or writer of the calibre of the Andrades or Lins do Rego took on the football crônica in the 1990s, nor did the game feature in the new writers’ poems and plots. Juca Kfouri, the pre-eminent football journalist of the era, was distinguished by his unrelenting attacks on the probity and competence of the football authorities rather than fantastical accounts of football triumphs. In the visual arts, the pop encounters of the 1960s were not repeated, nor did the generation of minimalist and conceptual artists that followed find football a useful trope out of which to construct their installations and performances. The huge street-art scene that emerged in the 1990s included the odd football reference or image, but these were just a few of the thousands of sources of glyphs, icons and imagery that appeared on the nation’s underpasses, bridges and walls. Football was left to naïve or outsider artists, now given more recognition in Brazil’s art world, who continued to paint football matches as dreamscapes and high colour cartoons.

  Economics also played its part. The harsh conditions of the era squeezed the market for most books, films and music. The Brazilian film industry was, perhaps, the sector most harshly affected by these economic circumstances. The withdrawal of federal subsidies and competition from Hollywood reduced its output in the early 1
990s to a small core of local comedy and domestic pornography. Certainly there were no football films of note. In fact until the very late 1990s there were no football films at all. Only towards the end of the decade did the industry begin to revive. Among its successes were two football movies, both released in 1998. They stood out as popular and accomplished pieces of film-making but also as weathervanes of Brazil’s changing attitudes to football.

  Boleiros – Era Uma Vez o Futebol (‘Football, Once upon a Time’), directed by Ugo Giorgetti, was set in a bar in São Paulo. A group of friends, ex-players and coaches as well as fans, reminisce about football times past, their stories told in flashback: a referee who took bribes to fix a match and has to get a penalty retaken three times to make it happen; a short-sighted player of the past forced to sell his glasses to pay his debts; an injured player who is relentlessly pursued by fans who want him to get better – or else; a star striker who escapes from his team’s training camp to attend a romantic tryst. The tone is gentle, humorous and humane. Unquestionably the film has a nostalgic and melancholy quality, but not for a golden age that didn’t exist or is known only through myth. These are not the stories and settings of exceptional football, but of the quotidian game; its characters are neither demons nor angels, but complex and flawed people. Their stories do not speak to great moments of nation-making but to the everyday grind of working life in an industry that enriched so few of its participants.