6R. Shaw (2009), ‘Brazilian football’s race problem’, WSC Daily, 10 December, see http://www.wsc.co.uk/wsc-daily/978-December-2009/4194-brazilian-footballs-race-problem.
7J. Knijnik and P. Horton (2013), ‘ “Only beautiful women need apply”: human rights and gender in Brazilian football’, Creative Approaches to Research 6(1), June, pp. 60–70.
8Quoted in J. Knijnik (2013), ‘Visions of gender justice: untested feasibility on the football fields of Brazil’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 37(1), 8–30.
9Quoted in T. Azzoni (2012), ‘Fans turn threatening as Brazilian team struggles’, Associated Press, 9 November, see http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fans-turn-threatening-brazilian-team-struggles.
10J. Longman and T. Barnes (2013), ‘A Yellow Card, Then Unfathomable Violence, in Brazil’, New York Times, 31 October.
8. Copa das Manifestações: Civil War in the Futebol Nation, 2013–2014
Epigraph. Pelé’s remarks were made during an interview with TV Tribuna de Santos, a Brazilian television station, and widely reported.
1Statement of the Chairman of the FIFA Adjudicatory Chamber, Hans-Joachim Eckert, on the examination of the ISL case, 29 April 2013, p. 3.
2Quoted in D. Conn (2012), ‘Fifa corruption intrigue deepens as Brazil’s Ricardo Teixeira resigns’, Guardian, 12 March.
3Quoted in L. Rother (2007), ‘For Pan-Am Games, the big race is to the starting line’, New York Times, 22 May.
4T. P. R. Caldeira (2000), City of Walls: Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 258.
5Quoted in R. de Almeida (2007), ‘Brazil: the shadow of urban war’, Open Democracy, 18 July, see http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/brazil_shadow_urban_war.
6That’s certainly how the UN General Assembly sees it. See Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, A/HRC/14/24/Add.8
7José Roberto Bernasconi quoted in A. Downie (2013), ‘As Brazil World Cup nears, public transport worries mount’, Reuters, 5 March, see http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/soccer-world-brazil-idUKL1N0BW1DL20130305.
8Alberto Murray Neto quoted in J. Andersen (2013), ‘The battle of Maracaña’, 10 May, see http://www.playthegame.org/knowledge-bank/articles/the-battle-of-maracana-5598.html.
9Ibid.
10C. Gaffney (2013), ‘Chega de bullying’, 21 June, see http://www.geostadia.com/2013/06/chega-de-bullying.html.
Coda
1Quoted in BBC News (2013), ‘Brazil World Cup: opening match venue “ready mid-April” ’, 5 December 2013, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25244199.
Select Bibliography
This list includes a number of books already cited in the notes as well as many books and articles that have not been cited but that I have drawn on heavily in both constructing the book’s narrative and fleshing out key issues or incidents.
Alvito, M. (2007), ‘Our piece of the pie: Brazilian football and globalization’, Soccer & Society, 8(4), 524–44.
Anderson, P. (1994), ‘The dark side of Brazilian conviviality’, London Review of Books 16(22), 24 November.
—— (2002), ‘The Cardoso legacy: Lula’s inheritance’, London Review of Books 24(24), 12 December.
—— (2011), ‘Lula’s Brazil’, London Review of Books 33(7), 31 March.
Bellos, A. (2002), Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, London: Bloomsbury.
Castro, R. (2004), Garrincha: The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil’s Forgotten Footballing Hero, London: Bloomsbury.
Curi, M. (2008), ‘Samba, girls and party: who were the Brazilian soccer fans at a World Cup? An ethnography of the 2006 World Cup in Germany’, Soccer & Society, 9(1), 111–34.
Curi, M., J. Knijnik and G. Mascarenhas (2011), ‘The Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro 2007: consequences of a sport mega-event on a BRIC country’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 46(2), 140–56.
Gaffney, C. (12/2013), ‘Virando o jogo: the challenges and possibilities for social mobilization in Brazilian football’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues (0193–7235).
Gaffney, C. T. (2008), Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Gordon, C. and R. Helal (2001), ‘The crisis of Brazilian football: perspectives for the twenty-first century’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 18(3), 139–58.
Hamilton, A. (1998), An Entirely Different Game: The British Influence on Brazilian Football, Edinburgh: Mainstream.
Hollanda, B. B. Buarque de (2003), ‘O descobrimento do futebol: modernismo, regionalismo e paixão esportiva em José Lins do Rego’, Masters thesis, Programa de Pós-Graduação em História Social da Cultura, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
Knijnik, J. (2013), ‘Visions of gender justice: untested feasibility on the football fields of Brazil’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 37(1), 8–30.
Knijnik, J. and P. Horton (2013), ‘ “Only beautiful women need apply”: human rights and gender in Brazilian football’, Creative Approaches to Research 6, 60–70.
Leite Lopes, J. S. (1997), ‘Successes and contradictions in “multiracial” Brazilian football’, in G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti (eds.), Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football, Oxford: Berg, pp. 53–86.
—— (1999), ‘The Brazilian style of football and its dilemmas’, in G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti (eds.), Football Cultures and Identities, London: Macmillan, pp. 86–98.
—— (2000), ‘The People’s Joy vanishes: considerations on the death of a soccer player’, Journal of Latin-American Anthropology 4(2).
see also Lopes, J. S. L.
Lever, J. (1995), Soccer Madness: Brazil’s Passion for the World’s Most Popular Sport, 2nd edn, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Levine, R. (1980), ‘Sport and society: the case of Brazilian futebol’, Luso-Brazilian Review 17 (2).
Lopes, J. S. L. (2000), ‘Class, ethnicity, and color in the making of Brazilian football’, Daedalus 129(2), 239–70.
—— (2007), ‘Transformations in national identity through football in Brazil: lessons from two historical defeats’, in R. Miller and L. Crolley (eds.), Football in the Americas: Fútbol, Futebol, Soccer, London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, pp. 75–93.
Manco, T. and C. Neelon (2005), Graffiti Brasil, London: Thames and Hudson.
Mason, T. (1995), Passion of the People: Football in South America, London: Verso.
Melo, V. de and J. Mangan (1997), ‘A web of the wealthy: modern sport in the nineteenth-century culture of Rio de Janeiro’, International Journal of the History of Sport 14(1), 168–73.
Pereira, L. (2000), Footballmania: Uma História Social do Futebol no Rio de Janeiro, 1902–1938, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira.
Rodrigues Filho, M. (1964 [1947]), O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira [Preface by Gilberto Freyre]
Shirts, M. (1988), ‘Sócrates, Corinthians, and questions of democracy and citizenship’, in J. Arbena (ed.), Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture, Westport, CT: Praeger, pp. 97–112.
—— (1989), ‘Playing soccer in Brazil: Socrates, Corinthians, and democracy’, The Wilson Quarterly 13(2), 119–23.
Skidmore, T. (1967), Politics in Brazil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (1988), Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (2010), Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, C. (1998), The Beautiful Game: A Journey through Latin American Football, London: Victor Gollancz.
Votre, S. and L. Mourão (2003), ‘Women’s football in Brazil: progress and problems’, Soccer and Society 4(2–3), 254–67.
Young, J. (2012), ‘ “The Far Corner”: how football in the north-east of Brazil struggles to
keep up with the giants of the south’, The Blizzard 6, September.
Acknowledgements
This book ought to have been written by someone else, preferably someone Brazilian, at the very least a person with a good command of the Portuguese language, at best someone coming to the task after a long period of study in the field. I could claim none of these. In fact, I feel like one of the least Brazilian people in the world, my Portuguese is poor and, though I have been thinking and writing about the history of football for over a decade, I was hardly an expert in Brazilian football history. My best defence, I think, is that someone had to write it. There is no single social and political account of Brazilian football history available in the English language. Tony Mason’s Passion of the People has the spine of such a book within, but it is predominantly concerned with Argentina and Uruguay and almost twenty years old. Alex Bellos’s Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life opened up a lot of new historical and cultural territory for English readers, but for those who require a serious political reading of the sport, it is too journalistic and episodic. Although Brazilian football historians and social scientists are producing more and better research than ever before, no one has synthesized this new work into a single, considered social and political narrative.
It was out of these resources that I created my own thin narrative spine of Brazilian football history in The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football. In some ways Futebol Nation fills out the details of that book’s arguments, and in places I have used some of its words. There were paragraphs that I knew I would never write so well again and I have used some of them in this book. Forgive me, I could have rewritten them badly, but I’m not sure how that helps anyone. In other ways, the process of researching and writing Futebol Nation has made me take those arguments apart and refashion them.
My time in Brazil, notable for the warmth with which I was received and the forbearance shown to my relentless questioning, made me appreciate its charms, its generosity and the joys of its flexible and circuitous way of being. As a witness to the demonstrations in Belo Horizonte and Rio in June 2013 my hopes for a new Brazilian civil society and my worst suspicions of the old Brazilian state were confirmed. This book is hardly the last word on the subject. It feels to me like an exploratory essay, but one that has convinced me that Brazilian football’s cultural and political significance demands that its history be written.
Above all what has made this book possible has been the time and generosity, the memory banks and intellects, of dozens of people. So it’s a very big thank you to: Alex Koch for getting me out to Brazil in the first place and igniting my imagination; Bruna Bastos for being a guardian angel; Luíz Gustavo Leitão Vieira and Élcio Loureiro in Belo Horizonte for a lovely evening of drinks and conversation that turned into a lot of reading; the Paul Weller of South American football, Tim Vickery, who says he won’t write a book but knows enough to fill a dozen. In Rio, thank you to Juliana Barbassa, Misha Glenny, James Young, Rodrigo Ferrari, Leonardo Perreira and Martin Curi. In São Paulo, thank you to José Paulo Florenzano, Newton César de Oliveira Santos, Enrico Spaggiari, Sérgio Settani Giglio, Matthew Cowley, Andrew Downie and Tom Hennigan, and Daniela Alfonsi, Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda and all the staff at the Museu do Futebol – unquestionably the best institution in all of Brazilian football. In Durham, North Carolina, thank you to Laurent Dubois for having me over and giving me a place to think, Joshua Nadel for sorting me out in so many ways, and John French for stern unbrazilian words. Back in the UK, the thanks go out to Sally Holloway, Tony Lacey, John English, Ben Brusey, David Wood, David Brookshire, Luciana Martins, Tristan Manco, Matthew Brown, Jean Williams and the ICSHC at De Montfort University. And to Gregg Bocketti in Transylvania and Jorge Knijnik in Australia.
Special thanks to Chris Gaffney; my guide to the protests was also a generous host and an endless source of information and ideas. His blog Hunting White Elephants (www.geostadia.com) is the place to get informed about Brazil’s sporting mega-events. And, of course, the biggest thanks and the most love to the people who lived with me while I wrote this: Sarah, who has shown me the way of the lark, Molly and Luke.
Photo credits
Introduction: © Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images; Chapter 1: © Exeter City Football Club Trust; Chapter 2: © Fluminense Football Club; Chapter 3: © Cândido Portinari © DACS 2014 Chapter 4: © AFP Photo/Distrito Federal; Chapter 5: © Bob Thomas/Getty Images; Chapter 6: © Press Association; Chapter 7: © Ricardo Stuckert/PR/Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Brazil (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/br/deed.en); Chapter 8: Reuters Ueslei/Marcelino.
Index
‘A Taça do Mundo é Nossa’ (song) 114
AA Palmeiras 8, 65
Abdul-Hak, Samir Jorge 173
Abreu, Josemir Santos 221
AC Bauru 102
Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB) 58
AEG 239
Afonsinho 148–9
Água-mãe (Lins do Rego) 86
Aguilar, José 114
Albert, King of Belgium 39–40, 65
Alberto, Carlos 29, 216
Aldeia Maracanã 236–7
Alex 203
Aliança Nacional Libertadora 58
Alma e Corpo de uma Raça (film) 79–80
Almeida, Geraldo de 76
Alvarenga and Ranchinho 77
Alves, Ataulfo 78
Alves, Renata 168
Amado, Jorge x
AMEA league 48
América 11–12, 21, 48–9, 131, 211
Amsterdam Olympic football tournament 1928 52
Andaraí 19, 48
Andrada, Esteban 132
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de 118
Andrade, Jorge Luís 216
Andrade, Mário de xx, 2, 36–8, 84
Andrade, Oswald de 38
Apollo 12 space mission 132–3
Aranha, Citro 61
Aranha, Graça 36
Aranha, Luiz 61
Aranha, Oswaldo 61
ARENA 125, 139–40, 143, 227
Arena Multiuso 229
Areno, Walter 146
Arubinha 180–81
Atletas de Cristo 181
Atletas de Cristo exhibition team 182
Atlético Mineiro 21, 129, 149, 181, 211
Atlético Paranaense 219, 247–8
Avelar, Antônio Gomes de 54
Babo, Lamartine 79, 253n.8
Baggio, Roberto 164
Baleiro, Zeca 209
Bangu AC 18–19, 48, 107, 131
Barbosa, Moacyr 94–5
Barbosa, Ruy 116
Barbuy, Amílcar 53
Barcos, Hernán 220
Barreto, Luiz Carlos 135
Barroso, Ary xx, 71, 75, 77, 112
Barroso, Benjamin 44
Batignani, Fausto 53–4
Batista, Eike 239
Batista, Wilson 79
Bebeto 166
Belo Horizonte 21
Ben, Jorge 136, 166–7
Benfica 102
Bernardes, Artur da Silva 34–5, 45
Bigode, M. F. 94
Bilac, Olavo 11
Black Bloc 245
Blatter, Sepp 235, 241
Blota, Geraldo 76
Boleiros – Era Uma Vez o Futebol (film) 178, 180
Bolsa Família 194–6, 198, 224, 235
Bolshoi Ballet 155
Bonsucesso 106
Borges, Celso 209
Bosman ruling 202
Botafogo 12, 48, 120, 130, 131, 148, 156–7, 175, 205, 219–20
Botafogo rowing club 11
Bozsik, József 95
Braga, Eduardo 232
Brasilidade 59, 62, 68, 83, 92, 97
Brazil
amateur leagues 46–9
and CBF issues 170–76
challenges to the ruling order 1970s/1980s 145–51
cinema of 41–2, 79–81
Cold War years 87–92
Confederations Cup and discontent 239–44, 245–9
> domestic club culture 105–110
economic crisis of 1980s 152–7
economic disaster/military government in 1960s 120–21
end of magic and dreams 159–70
establishment of teams 19–21
falling match attendances 185–90
football and art/culture/technology x–xi, 22–8, 34–8, 76–9, 84, 85–6, 112–19, 207–218
football mania in 1920s 45–6
football a multi-media experience 110–21
football origins 4–15
football and racism 28–31
football truly at home xx, xxi–xxii
football under democracy 177–84
football under dictatorship 123–9, 130–37
football under Lula 192–7
and football violence xxii–xxiii, 218–21
France as guiding compass xvii–xviii
international relations 43–5
leading supplier of playing talent 201–7
multi-racial democracy 15–18, 39–40, 83–4
national politics 50–55
nationalism xviii–xix
new president, new capital 96–9
New State 57–62
and radio 46
size of viii, xv–xvi
small global presence viii–x
a Supporters’ Charter 197–201
two greatest footballing sons 100–105
World Cup 2014 and other issues 227–39
World Cup campaign 1958 99–100
World Cups 1970/78 137–45
Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) 35, 87–8
BRIC nations 194
Brito, Waldemar de 102
Buarque, Chico 136
Burle, José Carlos 80
Bus 174 (film) x
CA Paulistano 8, 10, 29, 47, 65–6
Cafu 183
Caju, Paulo César 145, 179–80
Caldeira, Oswaldo 148, 230
Campeão de Futebol (film) 38, 79
Campeonato Brasileiro 143, 149, 189
Campos, Eduardo 210–211, 232
candomblé xviii, 180
Canhoteiro 209
Cantanhede, Otávio Jordão da Silva 221
Capanema, Gustavo 62, 79
capoeira ix
Capovilla, Maurice 117
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (FHC) 160, 163, 165–7, 169–70, 176, 197, 214
Futebol Nation Page 25