Futebol Nation
Page 18
That everyday grind was the central concern of Arthur Fontes and João Moreira Salles’s three-part film Futebol. In its open-eyed look at the realities of life as a professional football player, it reached back to the Cinema Novo films of the early 1960s like Subterrâneos do Futebol and Garrincha: Alegria do Povo. However, a quarter of a century later there had been a huge growth in Brazil’s football industry, with nationwide networks of scouts, agents and middlemen, a phenomenon of such a scale that it required something more ambitious and wide-ranging than the films of the 1960s. Futebol rises to the challenge, covering the whole trajectory of a player’s career: from hopeful youngsters trying to break in, via new professionals making their way, to the retirees of an earlier generation struggling to survive. Part one begins with 1,500 boys showing up at Flamengo for its annual open trial, many travelling across the country to attend, families borrowing money for the coach fare. The film makes clear that in an era of declining living standards for the poor, football remains an absolutely central escape route for individuals and their extended families. The odds of success, though fantastically long, look better than in the lower reaches of the labour market and the lottery. A pair of teenagers from inland Goiás spend the last of their savings to go to Rio. Here they end up living with an agent who scans the beach with binoculars from the window of his cramped flat in Copacabana. He schemes on the phone to sell them to Grêmio, a deal which turns out, when they make the long journey south, to be a mirage. Part two focuses on two players – Lúcio and Iraldo – from similar backgrounds who have made it into Flamengo’s squad. Both struggle with the huge emotional and psychological pressures of the life, pressures for which they are almost entirely unequipped. Part three is a brilliant profile of Paulo César Caju, a great star of the late 1960s and early 1970s, remembered for his exquisite playful football, his flamboyant public demeanour and the wildest wardrobe in the country. The late 1990s finds him, bald but raffish, making a living from his network of high-end private football games and society parties. This was Brazilian football without much joy and precious little magic. There were dreams aplenty but they were dreams of survival rather than flights of fancy.
Boleiros announced the turn from magic and mythology to a more sober reckoning with Brazil’s fabulous football past. Futebol took a long hard look at dreams, and found them increasingly quantified by the rule of money. Nostalgia and the cash nexus will get you so far, but for some this was thin emotional and spiritual gruel to help explain their engagement with football. Religion, long a component of the Brazilian game, was the most important cultural response to this secular vacuum. Prior to the 1980s Catholicism mainly appeared in Brazilian football as a form of popular religiosity: crossing oneself before running on the field, a goalkeeper uttering a blessing as he tapped the crossbar, a striker kneeling after scoring or pointing to the sky. Many clubs built chapels within the confines of their grounds. Vasco’s is no more than thirty metres from the pitch and houses holy soil from the grounds of the three great Portuguese clubs: Porto, Sporting and Benfica. The national shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida has side rooms storing the innumerable football shirts and other memorabilia that are taken there as offerings. African religious and belief systems, both the rural syncretic candomblé and its urbanized magical form macumba, have been present in Brazilian football since the 1930s when the first reports of fans bringing charms to the stadium appear. It was certainly common currency in Rio that Vasco da Gama’s long wait for a championship through the 1940s was a consequence of a curse laid on them by Arubinha, a player with a small team called Andrari who had been humiliated 12–0 by Vasco in 1937.
While both Catholic and African traditions persisted in Brazilian football, the spiritual landscape of the game underwent the same massive shift as the rest of Brazilian society. From being an almost totally Catholic society, Brazil’s evangelical Protestants now make up nearly a quarter of the population. Although they had a small presence in Brazil from before the First World War and started to grow in the 1950s, their explosive growth began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Traditional evangelical practice had demanded the strictest of lifestyles: no alcohol, no non-religious music, no TV and no sex before marriage. Even in this hairshirt version it was attractive to the lost and hungry souls of the urban peripheries of Brazil who were prey to crime and drugs and misery. It also offered football players a framework within which they could survive the rigours and temptations of professional life. This was the impetus behind the creation of Atletas de Cristo, Athletes for Christ, by evangelical pastor and ‘God’s goalkeeper’ João Leite of Atlético Mineiro. Using a small group, even cellular structure, key proselytizing individuals spread the word through their squads via prayer groups and Bible-reading sessions. They preached a model of Protestantism that encouraged players to acquire an individual relationship with God, to take control of their lives, monitor their behaviour and battle their devils – a theology particularly suited to the emotional demands of professional football with all its uncertainties, rivalries and fluctuations of form. Under the leadership of ex-Formula 1 driver Alex Dias Ribeiro, the organization recruited across all sports, but especially football, and by the late 1990s it had a membership of 7,000. There were enough former members of the Seleção for them to play as an Atletas de Cristo exhibition team. At the 1994 World Cup alone there were six members: Jorginho, Taffarel, Paulo Sérgio, Müller, Zinho and Mazinho. Ribeiro served as chaplain to that World Cup squad and the next two.
Some traditional evangelicals continued to view football and indeed all sports with suspicion, referring to the ball as the devil’s egg. But the influence of this kind of Protestantism was swept away by the arrival of the theology of prosperity in the 1970s. The many neo-Pentecostalist churches founded in this era preached a gospel that drew on the language of self-help and positive thinking, and asked congregations to channel their religious energies into making money and enjoying their bounty. This volte-face opened up the churches to a whole new constituency and provided the revenue streams for the remarkable profits they would make and assets they would accrue. Austerity and poverty were out; paying, consuming and spending were in. Indeed in a bizarre twist on Calvinism, consumption became the outward sign of one’s piety.
Football players have been part of this evangelical constituency. In the last decade hundreds more Brazilian footballers have become evangelical Christians, particularly in the huge diaspora of players working overseas for whom the churches are a powerful connection to home in otherwise very alien environments. Prominent evangelicals playing for the national side over the last fifteen years have included Lúcio, Edu, Edmílson and Kaká. Jorginho, while playing for Bayer Leverkusen, worked as a pastor and opened a church. The donations have been rolling in. Estevam and Sônia Hernandes, founders of the Reborn in Christ Church, which counted Kaká as one of its members, were reputedly worth over $50 million and the Brazilian midfielder apparently made donations of 2 million reais from Milan – though he left it in 2010 after allegations of the leadership’s mishandling of its finances. The Seleção prayed standing in a circle at the 1994 World Cup; in 2002 they were kneeling, though Cafu, the captain, dedicated his victory to his family and the poor, not to Jesus. After winning the 2009 Confederations Cup in South Africa captain Lúcio and five other players celebrated wearing ‘I belong to Jesus’ T-shirts.
In the 1990s these player narratives of miraculous but perilous social mobility, personal piety and spiritual transformation, while present in the mainstream coverage of football, were really mere subplots. Poets, novelists and artists may have abandoned football, but television and the popular press remained true. The increasing wages for the playing and managerial elite and their often erratic behaviour combined with the aesthetics of Brazil’s media conglomerates to turn many players’ private lives into their own personal telenovelas: scandal, rivalry, paternity suits and conspicuous consumption were at the heart of football’s mediascape. Modern celebrity culture, with its intrusive
photographers, relentless hype and cynical invention, had arrived.
Among the cast of characters that football offered Brazil none was more extraordinary than Edmundo. Born in 1971, he made his debut with Vasco da Gama in 1992 and with the national team later that year. Though there were fallow periods, especially when he played in Italy, he consistently scored a lot of goals. For this, he was much forgiven – and there was much to forgive. Over the eighteen years of his career he changed club seventeen times, breaking up and getting back together with Vasco five times. He fell out, often violently, with teammates, opponents, officials, coaches, journalists, fans and administrators. Soon nicknamed ‘the Animal’, he received five red cards in his first full season and was famously attacked by three Corinthians players he had taunted, sparking a mass brawl. After smashing a camera at a Copa Libertadores game he was put under house arrest in Ecuador. In 1997, his record goalscoring season with Vasco as champions, he received seven red cards. In 1995 he was accused of drink-driving in a car crash in Rio in which three other people were killed. Edmundo spent much of the next ten years eluding trial and sentencing, appealing decisions, and after just a few nights of actual incarceration, exhausting the legal system entirely. His career, alongside a lot of fabulous goals, was filled with splenetic anger, ill-disciplined emotions, immaturity and violence, all of which were covered in microscopic detail in the press – as on the occasion he was supposed to have got an ape drunk at his son’s birthday party.
In the stories the futebol nation told itself most often we do not find the struggles of the poor or the pious professional, but the tales of the rich and famous who enjoyed not only their wealth but their immunity too.
IV
The torcidas organizadas that had first emerged in Rio and São Paulo in the late 1960s and 1970s as breakaway youth groups from the more conservative charangas of the 1950s had the stands to themselves in the 1980s. In 1997 Juventude from Rio Grande do Sul played Portuguesa of São Paulo in the quarter-finals of the national championships – fifty-five people paid on the door. Crowds as laughably small as this were not uncommon in Brazil. In a poll in Lance! – a leading football daily – three-quarters of their readers said violence was keeping them away from the game. Average attendances at matches in the Brasileiro were half that of their peak in the early 1980s.
For the very grandest occasions Brazilian football could still summon huge crowds. The state championship of Bahia would regularly overfill the 80,000-plus capacity of the Fonte Nova in Salvador. As late as 1992 Flamengo could draw 120,000 to the Maracanã. But people went at their peril. The policing of football was exemplified by the special Rio Football Units, established in 1991. As well as providing escorts for match officials, these highly militarized and armed units were responsible for dealing with stadium disorder mainly by using higher levels of violence than the organized fans. Clubs and their officials had long abandoned any attempt to steward or control the torcidas.
While the rest of the crowd often stayed away, the torcidas remained in place and were responsible for maintaining the carnivalesque dimension of the game, organizing flags, fireworks and chanting. Over the next two decades they spread right across the country, to every professional club. Their leaders established informal working relationships with club directors and boards, getting access to free tickets and subsidized transport, and in places shaded into the organized crime and gang culture of the urban peripheries. Always more oppositional in style than their predecessors, the new torcidas of the 1980s ended up at war with each other and the police in a nationwide wave of disorder and violence. In this regard they only slightly lagged behind the wave of violence against people of and property crimes that engulfed Brazil in the early 1980s. Under the most extreme conditions of hyperinflation and hunger, crime rates doubled between 1980 and 1985, and continued to climb thereafter. In São Paulo the rate of homicides tripled between 1980 and 1996, a collective psychological brutalizing to add to the still unresolved wounds of the dictatorship. Under such conditions, the intense protective solidarity and communality of the torcidas was easily converted into rage and violence.
Brazilian football had seen deaths before of course. Stadium crushes and panics at Fortaleza in 1971, and Teresina in 1973, had resulted in a dozen deaths and many injuries. Lima Barreto, back in the 1920s, had recorded the first gunfire in the stands, but 1988 saw the first football murder. Cléo Dantas, the president of the Palmeiras torcida Mancha Verde, was shot dead in front of their clubhouse, in a killing widely attributed to Corinthians fans. In 1992 São Paulo fans threw a home-made bomb into the Corinthians crowd at a cup match between their youth sides, killing a thirteen-year-old boy. In 1993 a Palmeiras supporter shot a sixteen-year-old São Paulo fan in the stands of the Morumbi.
If the crowd didn’t get you, the stadium might. By the 1990s Brazil’s football infrastructure was creaking. Twenty years of economic stagnation and neglect had prematurely aged the raw concrete bowls of the military era. The Maracanã, approaching half a century old, was crumbling. Some of the concourse’s concrete walls were stained and worn from serving as open-air urinals. During a Flamengo–Botafogo game in 1992 a fence on the upper tier gave way before a huge crowd. Fifty people, together with metal railings and concrete debris, plunged into the stands below. Three died of their injuries and many were hospitalized.
Behaviour on the pitch was little better. The 1993 season opened with a red card per game. During their match with Santos, Grêmio players and officials attacked a referee when he awarded a penalty against them. In their furious Supercopa match with Peñarol in Porto Alegre, four players from each team were sent off and the match finished with the home side fighting the police on the pitch. These were just the most explosive moments of a football culture where both feigning injury and violent tackling were on the rise, and where ballboys were encouraged, when required, to waste time and distract opponents. Encroachment on free kicks by the defending side was so out of control that the São Paulo State Federation introduced disappearing paint sprays for referees to mark the ten-yard line: the paint burnt a hole in the turf. In 1994 the carnage spread to smaller cities. A Corinthians fan was trampled during a brawl in the stands in Campinas and died in hospital eight days later. In São Caetano a young São Paulo supporter was chased through the streets by a gang of Corinthians fans demanding his club shirt. He died, hit by a train, as he fled across a railway line. Back in São Paulo later in the year a Palmeiras fan died after being struck on the head while running away from a post-game fight with Corinthians supporters; a Corinthians fan was then shot in the back of the head by a Palmeiras fan. The disorder reached a new peak in 1995 at what became known as ‘The Battle of the Pacaembu’. Hundreds of torcidas from São Paulo and Palmeiras invaded the pitch at the end of a youth team game. Live on television, they fought wildly with sticks and iron bars, leaving one dead and over 100 injured. Both clubs’ torcidas organizadas were closed down by the São Paulo police, only for them to mutate into samba schools or re-form under new names – Palmeiras’s Mancha Verde becoming Mancha Alvi Verde in 1997.
The risks involved in trying to exclude the torcidas were made clear in 1999 when Palmeiras won the Copa Libertadores at home, beating Deportivo Cali on penalties. Many members of the reformed Mancha Verde, along with other ticketless fans, gathered outside the stadium and tried to storm the turnstiles during the match. Scuffling and fighting between police and torcidas turned into a full-scale battle when they were joined by the delirious Palmeiras crowd leaving the stadium. Riot police were called in and volleys of tear gas were fired ahead of massed baton-and-shield charges down Avenida Paulista, the corridor of skyscrapers at the heart of the city’s business district. The Palmeiras torcidas tore up the paving stones and erected impromptu barricades.
Not content with fighting each other and the police, the torcidas began to attack their own players. In 1997 the Corinthians team bus was returning to São Paulo after being beaten by Santos 1–0. Once their police escort had dep
arted the squad found itself chased and harassed by cars with blacked-out windows, a wayward lorry and finally another coach that forced them to pull up on the road. This coach was packed with torcidas from Gaviões da Fiel (‘The Hawks of the Faithful’) who proceeded to stone the bus, then storm it, physically and verbally abusing the players.
At the turn of the century the numbers of dead and injured in Brazilian football continued to rise with another eight killings in the next four years. The prevalence of guns and, it seemed, the increased willingness to use them saw more football-related shootings in São Paulo. A fan in Porto Alegre was killed when the home-made bomb he had brought to the stadium exploded in his hands. Thus by the end of the twentieth century the atmosphere inside Brazil’s dilapidated and increasingly empty football stadiums, the heart of the futebol nation, was increasingly determined by the aggression and violence of the torcidas and the police.
At least one of Brazil’s World Cup victories should perhaps be the defining moment of this era. But a strong case can also be made for the final of the Campeonato Brasileiro in late 2000. Eurico Miranda’s Vasco da Gama played São Caetano, a small team from the industrial heartlands of São Paulo. The first leg finished 1–1 in São Paulo. The deciding game would be played at Vasco. In a typical act of spite the tickets promised to São Caetano were all sold to home fans, and as was often the case, the club had sold 5,000 tickets more than there were safe places in the stadium. After about twenty minutes, the game was brought to a halt by the referee who had noticed a huge crush of people behind one goal. A twisted mass of bodies and wire fencing had tumbled on to the field; 168 people were injured, two very seriously. A dozen ambulances came on to the pitch, a helicopter landed beside them to take the most critical casualties to hospital and the military police surrounded the players on the touchline. Miranda, incandescent, informed the cameras, ‘Nothing serious happened. But something could if the game doesn’t continue. I want these fucking ambulances out of here!’11 São Caetano’s president thought it common sense to abandon the match. An hour after he had stopped the match the referee announced it was all over. The governor of Rio state, Anthony Garotinho, watching the fiasco on television, had called in to insist that the game be abandoned. A little later, Miranda and the Vasco players reappeared on the pitch, grabbed the national trophy that was still sitting on a table by the halfway line, and took a lap of dishonour. The following day Lance!’s front-page editorial was genuinely shocked: ‘Eurico Miranda . . . has always been praised for putting his club’s interests above everything else. No one imagined that he was capable of taking this obsession to the limit of not respecting human lives.’12 Now Brazil didn’t have to imagine – he did, and he would get away with it. Vasco won the replay and Miranda won the next election as Vasco’s president: rouba, mas faz. In a society where the rule of law was weak, where elites were so rarely called to account, and where winning and efficiency had become the sole measures of progress, this too was the price of pragmatism.