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Futebol Nation Redux: The Game in Lula’s Brazil, 2002–2013
Be careful what you wish for: Brazil wins the right to stage the 2014 World Cup. Left to right: Dunga, Lula, Romario, Blatter.
I am among those who think that God has crooked handwriting. I think that if we could not win in 2010, it is because God knows that we cannot fail in 2014.
Lula
I
In 2002 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula as he is known, and his Workers’ Party won the Brazilian presidency at the fourth attempt, Brazil’s first unambiguously social democratic and popular government. This, in itself, was a remarkable achievement, but Lula was also the first president to truly hail from Brazil’s lower classes and to establish a deep emotional and political link with them while in office. As he put it in a speech in São Luis, ‘I want to know if the people are in the shit and I want to take the people out of the shit in which they are.’ It was an earthiness that most of Brazil, his most implacable enemies apart, came to find endearing. His charm, his cunning and his strategic capacity for compromise were essential elements of his government’s success. He went on to win a second term, leaving office at the end of 2010 with higher approval ratings than when he arrived, and handed on the presidency, in effect, to his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff.
Football was one strand of Lula’s popular persona and vocabulary. Certainly his relationship with football was far closer to that of the average Brazilian football fan than any of his predecessors’ had been. He was unambiguously a supporter of Corinthians, often commenting on the team and its performances, and helping ensure that the club would receive a new stadium in time for the 2014 World Cup. The social kickabouts he held at the presidential palace were well attended and keenly contested, as evidenced by the finance minister Antonio Palocci entering Congress on crutches after a crunching game between the president’s team and the Ministry of Fisheries. When speaking to the Seleção by video link before the 2006 World Cup, he asked whether Ronaldo was still fat. Innumerable state occasions and audiences involved the exchange of football shirts with diplomats and meetings with players and coaches; the press had fun with the curse of Lula that seemed to follow so many of these encounters, as teams tumbled out of cup tournaments or their form collapsed. His language was peppered with football metaphors: justifying a cabinet reshuffle he argued, ‘Pelé was the best player in the world and he was replaced.’
Cordiality and an easy intimacy with the Brazilian people and the game of football would only get one so far. Lula’s success rested on the economic, social and political changes his governments helped bring about. The state of the Brazilian economy was perhaps the most significant of these. While never achieving the relentlessly high growth rates of the Far East or China, Brazil experienced a decade of unbroken growth and historically low levels of inflation which delivered across-the-board increases in wages and living standards. This was driven by the breakneck growth of China and the widespread industrialization of the global South which together created a huge demand for Brazilian agricultural products like soya beans and sugar. Lower interest rates and access to consumer credit saw the newly enriched working and lower-middle classes splash out on white goods and cars, in turn fuelling growth in Brazil’s manufacturing centres.
Emboldened by Brazil’s increasing importance in the global economy, Lula’s government pursued a more independent foreign policy than any previous administration. The United States, engrossed in its involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, was a minimal presence in the politics of the region, leaving space for Brazil to develop new relationships and commercial alliances with China, India, Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Alongside India, Japan and Germany, Brazil was arguing for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And alongside China, India and Russia, it was part of the BRIC bloc, a notion coined by the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs but made political reality when the four states began to arrange their own summits.
At home, social policy was in many ways constrained by the regime’s conservative approach to macroeconomics. Public health care and education, in particular, remained woefully underfunded. But in one area, Lula brought decisive change: consolidating a whole series of poverty- and hunger-reduction programmes into the Bolsa Família (‘Family Allowance’) and then massively extending it across the country. Thus the government presided over the biggest fall in hunger and absolute poverty that the country had ever seen. This was of enormous symbolic importance, as it was one of the only occasions in which the Brazilian state had truly attended to the needs of its most vulnerable citizens, but its practical political import was immense too. While the poor of Brazil had often voted in the past for conservative parties, afraid that the left would make inflation worse and destroy what little remaining purchasing power they had, the combination of Lula’s macroeconomic conservatism, the Bolsa Família and big increases in the minimum wage, all cemented by Lula’s charisma, saw them shift their votes overwhelmingly to the PT. Prior to this the PT had tried to rule without a majority in Congress, where the fragmented party system made it hard to create a working government coalition. Key figures in the leadership of the PT, from which Lula was able to distance himself, decided to remedy the problem by piecing together an ad hoc coalition in Congress from the PT and the ‘votes for sale’ caucus. Indeed the whole matter was regularized through various safe houses in Brasília, where congressmen would receive, in cash, the mensalão – the big monthly pay-off. The mensalão scandal came to public attention in 2007 and dragged on throughout the rest of Lula’s time in office. What small energies had been devoted to rooting out the country’s systemic forms of corruption and unaccountable zones of power were consistently undermined by the government’s own disgrace.
If football had helped define Lula’s style of governance and public image, he did not enter office measuring the state of the nation by the metrics of the Seleção. On the contrary, he came to power on the promise to measure the progress of the nation by how many Brazilians ate three square meals a day, and how many participated in the huge changes required: ‘Brazil has rediscovered itself, and this rediscovery is being expressed in its people’s enthusiasm and their desire to mobilize to face the huge problems that lie ahead of us.’ But the disenchantment with Brazilian football that Lula had announced back in 1994, when he faced an election in the wake of Brazil’s fourth World Cup victory, did not survive his term in office. By the end of his second term, as he opened a new stadium for the 2014 World Cup, the fate of the nation had passed to the Seleção and the Lord. Yet how else could Brazil mark and celebrate the Lula years? It had been a period of tremendous economic growth, rising international prestige and progressive social change. From the moment in 2007 that Brazil acquired the hosting rights to the 2014 World Cup it was almost inevitable that the staging and winning of the tournament would, once again, be defined as the conclusive proof of Brazil’s transformation and modernity.
As in 1950, this was a double-edged sword, for the futebol nation displayed both the successes of the era and its limits. The commodity-export model of growth was paralleled in Brazilian football. During the global boom in demand for football players Brazil proved to be the leading exporter. In fact, this became the key revenue stream for many Brazilian football clubs, but it didn’t bring the crowds back to the stands. The Bolsa Família may have banished hunger from Brazil but it has yet to blunt the keen edge of poverty that continues to spur such an enormous pool of footballing talent. Brazil’s more adventurous and assertive foreign policy, which began by using the Seleção as an instrument of soft power, mutated into the altogether grander strategy of using sporting mega-events to the same end. The binge of infrastructural spending that followed became emblematic of all the most problematic elements of Brazil’s political economy: corruption, clientelism, inequality and injustices. The Lula government’s policies on racism and gender discrimination found echoes in the world of football where both remained endem
ic, but for the first time some small advances could be registered. Similarly, small steps were taken in the direction of transparency and openness, and the detection and prosecution of corruption, but as in other areas of political life the Lula government’s direct interventions in the game were often blunted by the resistance of entrenched powers. Nowhere were the limits of the Lula years more starkly demonstrated than in the problem of football violence, itself a mere echo of an enduringly violent society.
II
In the last year of the Cardoso government, following the congressional investigations into football governance, the football lobby and the CBF were personae non gratae at the presidential palace. Away from their baleful influence, the sports ministry laboured to craft reforming legislation that would force clubs to take the interests of their fans, or rather their customers, more seriously. Lula and his sports minister, Agnelo Queiroz, inherited the legislation that would become the Supporters’ Charter and pushed it through Congress against the wishes of the football lobby. In 2003, a week after the charter was signed into law, the flag of revolt was raised by the presidents of eight clubs, three state federations and the president of the CBF, Ricardo Teixeira, who in an act of unabashed blackmail suspended the national championship, claiming that their stadiums did not match up to the new requirements. The idea of the football establishment suddenly posing as the guardians of the public interest was so laughable that after virulent nationwide criticism by President Lula and the press they backed off.
Yet, at the same time, the government reopened personal relationships with the CBF. In its early months in office Lula’s administration had persuaded many clubs to back its domestic policy programmes by wearing government-approved shirts – particularly in support of the Fome Zero (‘Zero Hunger’) campaign that was a precursor to the Bolsa Família. However, to make a really big impact at home and abroad the government needed access to the Seleção, and that access lay with the CBF. The CBF in turn needed access to the corridors of power in Brasília, made more urgent by the up-and-coming prospect of a bid to host the 2014 World Cup. A discreet dinner between Queiroz and João Havelange smoothed the way for a rapprochement, though in classic Brazilian style Lula and Teixeira never held an official audience, preferring Friday afternoon informal meetings over glasses of whisky.
In early 2003 the Seleção played a friendly against China in shirts bearing the words Fome Zero and then against Ireland later in the year. The relationship between the government and the CBF was close enough that by the following year, sports minister Queiroz was able to grandstand with the team after they had won the Copa América 2004, while on visits to poorer nations the Brazilian squad handed out sports equipment manufactured as part of a rehabilitation programme in Brazilian prisons. Later the team would play in Haiti, where the Brazilian armed forces comprised the majority of the UN peacekeeping mission.
With solid government support Brazil won the right to host the 2014 World Cup. Ricardo Teixeira may have been prepared to concede some space on the Seleção’s shirts and on its timetable to the government but he certainly didn’t intend to concede any power. Teixeira formed an organizing committee for the World Cup without a single government representative, elected or unelected. By contrast, the organizing committees for the three previous World Cups, in South Korea and Japan, Germany and South Africa, had all had serious representation from national and local government. Instead Teixeira appointed himself as the chair, his daughter Joana Havelange to the number two spot, and added his lawyer, his press secretary, his personal secretary and factotum, and the man who had advised him during the 2001 congressional investigation into football. He then garlanded the team with Carlos Langoni, a right-wing economist who had served as president of the Bank of Brazil in the last days of the military dictatorship. The football paper Lance! commissioned a poll asking the Brazilian public how they felt about this: one-third wanted a tripartite organizing committee with representation from civil society as well as elected politicians on the board but the vast majority didn’t care. The political disengagement and apathy of the majority have often been the elite’s most powerful resource.1
The 2003 Supporters’ Charter had many components, but perhaps the most important was to give football fans the same legal status and rights as any other kind of consumer. While the most basic forms of consumer protection had been established in Brazilian law in 1990, they had hitherto not applied to people who bought match tickets. This in itself was an advance, as was the insistence that all football stadiums must be equipped with an adequate number of functioning toilets for both genders, as well as drinking fountains and medical care – none of which had been the norm. More substantially, the law made the clubs themselves responsible for the health and safety of the fans, an obligation that had not occurred to most of them before. A football ombudsman was established to whom fans could take their grievances. As part of the quid pro quo for having to take on these responsibilities, and acknowledging the gigantic levels of unpaid debts that the football clubs owed to the Brazilian tax office, in 2007 Lula’s government introduced a new football-based lottery, Timemania. With the backing of the clubs, whose results formed the basis of the competition, Timemania would deliver 22 per cent of its profits to them, which were in turn earmarked for the repayment of their government debts. In addition, participation required clubs to open their books to a level of scrutiny that neither the Zico nor Pelé laws had ever managed.
Lula’s Brazil proved better at passing reforming legislation than implementing it. In 2013, looking back on ten years of the Supporters’ Charter, Lance! concluded that there had been real improvement for Brazilian football fans, but many elements of the original charter remained unrealized. Whether it was a consequence of political apathy or the widespread disregard in which judicial procedures were held, the football ombudsman was barely used over the ten years of its existence. Supporters were still treated with contempt by some clubs, especially away fans who would continue to be deliberately delayed or denied entrance to grounds. Above all, the insistence of the charter that the relevant authorities draw up a plan of action covering security and safety for every game was simply not put into action, with the consequence that many games were blighted by chaotic logistics. The police continued to treat football more as an exercise in controlling public disorder than securing the safety of citizens in public spaces. Worse, what the charter and the other reforms of the Lula years did not do was halt the violence associated with Brazilian football, inside and outside the stadiums. Indeed the problem became so serious that in 2010 the government updated and amended the charter with a whole series of highly draconian measures designed to crack down on the torcidas organizadas.
The record of reform, in the end, was mixed. The Seleção had been mobilized in pursuit of progressive social policy but the centres of football power remained totally unaccountable. The Supporters’ Charter sought to empower fans, but it could not corral the police or the clubs. The political coda to the Lula years came in 2011 under his successor, Dilma Rousseff. In the first twelve months of her administration four cabinet ministers were lost to accusations of corruption and embezzlement. Late in 2011, Orlando Silva, the communist sports minister, made it five. Veja magazine published a series of allegations, accusing him of embezzling money from the operation of the government programme Segundo Tempo (‘Second Half’), which supported participation in sport for underprivileged children. A police officer, João Dias Ferreira, who ran a small youth sports project, reported having to pay back, in cash, a good chunk of his organization’s grant from Segundo Tempo. The method was a personal delivery to Silva in the garage underneath the Ministry of Sport and the money was split between his own pocket and the electoral funds of the PCB. Silva denied the claims but quit his post.
III
In the first decade of the twenty-first century Brazil became the leading supplier of playing talent to the global football economy – an export drive that rested on a nationwide network of
scouting, recruiting and training that was at best exploitative and at worst murderous. While transfers kept many football clubs afloat, this diminished the appeal of domestic football, which now faced global competition for its TV audience as well as its players. After many years of effective isolation, Brazilian television stations, especially the cable challengers to Globo like ESPN, began to show a lot more foreign football: by 2006 there were over 400 games shown a year and at weekends a dozen from the biggest leagues in Europe. The European Champions League, in which so many of Brazil’s best players participated, was immensely popular. For the first time one could see on the streets of the country, alongside local strips, the colours of teams from the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga.
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