by Zirin, Dave
There is one exception to Pelé’s history of tying himself to power—yet even this extraordinarily uncharacteristic act derived from dovetailing social justice with financial self-interest. It happened when he took on the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) and its entrenched, deeply corrupt president of twenty-three years, Ricardo Teixeira. Teixeira’s father-in-law happened to be the aforementioned president of FIFA, João Havelange. In 1993 Pelé and his sports company sought the TV rights for the Brazilian domestic soccer leagues. Pelé claimed that Havelange and Teixeira made it very clear during the negotiations that bribes and other assorted sleazy goings-on were a prerequisite to securing the rights. This was tradition, the sports version of the “Brazilian cost.” It also underlines the words of renowned soccer journalist Juca Kfouri: “I have always said that God put the best players here and the worst bosses to compensate.”37
As he explained to the public, Pelé resisted and lost the bid. Enraged, he went public with charges that the CBF was corrupt in a 1993 interview with Playboy.38 In retaliation, FIFA shut him out of the 1994 World Cup launch ceremony and celebrations. He was a pariah—not only as a public figure, but also economically. In 1995 he attempted to exact a measure of revenge, accepting an appointment from President Cardoso as Extraordinary Minister for Sport. Pele devoted his four years in the post to campaigning for what became known as the Pelé Law. This involved forcing clubs to open their books and converting clubs listed as nonprofit or charitable trusts into private limited companies. It also involved systematizing and regulating contracts in favor of the players as well as reorganizing domestic Brazilian soccer leagues and competitions. In proposing these reforms, “Pelé was attacking the interests that kept Teixeira in power. Pelé became the figurehead of football’s ‘modernizers.’”39 The Brazilian Congress passed an extremely watered-down version of the Pelé Law in 1998—so watered down, in its final version, that Pelé withdrew his name. It was a bitter and public defeat. In 2001, however, Pelé and Teixeira called a truce and shook hands, agreeing to work together. It is for this, perhaps more than anything else, that Pelé is criticized in today’s Brazil. Sports journalist José Trajano called it “the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive,” adding, “Pelé has let us all down. . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.”40 Kfouri wrote: “In Brazil there is still the ideology of ‘rouba mas faz’—it’s OK to steal if you get things done. In football this is stretched to its most far-reaching consequences. Everything is forgotten in the light of victory.”41
The Unity of Garrincha and Pelé
Garrincha and Pelé became known as the “golden partnership”: the tragic and the corporate, coming together. As long as they were on the field at the same time, the Brazilian national team never lost a match. It was also profoundly significant for the country that Pelé was of Afro-Brazilian and Garrincha of Afro-Indigenous heritage. Under their young leadership, Brazil became the first multiracial team to win the World Cup. If Garrincha is the Wren or the Angel with Bent Legs—miraculous but vulnerable, celestial but delicate—then Pelé’s other nickname reflects the distance he has created between himself and the masses: he is the “King.” Journalist Alex Bellos puts it perfectly:
There was no player as amateur in spirit as Garrincha. . . . Pelé, on the other hand, was unmitigatedly professional. . . . Whereas Garrincha indulged in most of the vices available to him, Pelé always behaved as a model player. He led a self-imposed ascetic life, concentrating on training and self-improvement. . . . Pelé had an athlete’s perfect body. Garrincha looked like he should not be able to walk straight. When Garrincha was still stuffing his wages into a fruit bowl, Pelé had registered his name as a trademark, employed a manager, invested money in business projects and advertised [international brands].42
After winning the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, the teenaged Pelé returned to São Paulo, where he was feted with a parade and given a luxury automobile. He refused to drive the car because he did not yet have a license. He told the crowd that he was grateful for the outpouring of love, but he had to go train for the upcoming season. Garrincha, on the other hand, returned to Pau Grande and drank a World Cup–sized amount of alcohol with his oldest friends. This would be a familiar compare-and-contrast throughout both of their lives. As Bellos summed up quite nicely: “Garrincha demonstrated, quite spectacularly, that there is no safety net in Brazilian society—while Pelé, unlike almost all his peers, found a career beyond football. Garrincha only ever thought of the short term. Pelé was—and is—always making plans. Garrincha argued with the establishment. Pelé became the establishment.”43
While Pelé has become Brazil’s symbol of individual success (and of using soccer to achieve that success), Garrincha symbolizes playing just for the sheer love of playing. Garrincha and Pelé: one amateur, improvised, creative; the other professional, regimented, formal, market-based—both of them fighting for the soul and the direction of their nation, long after hanging up their cleats. But perhaps the best way to understand their difference in the eyes of the country is to see how they are both immortalized at the Maracanã. The visitors’ locker room is called “Pelé.” Home is known as “Garrincha.”
The Wisdom of Sócrates
Both of these soccer legends evoke the arguments another Brazilian soccer legend, Sócrates, was making about the changing nature of the game before his death in 2011. But before I relay Sócrates’s critique of the homogenization of Brazil’s beautiful game in the twenty-first century, it is worth establishing just who this man was and why we should take his words to heart.
Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was the captain of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup squad, a team that did not finish first but whose players’ style was so beloved that they are remembered with more affection, arguably, than any of the country’s many World Cup victors. The masterful midfielder died from an intestinal infection at fifty-seven, but not before leaving a legacy that showcases the immensely powerful political echo of the sport in Brazil’s history. Sócrates was a rare athlete whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game. His interests, talents, and achievements were, frankly, staggering. He was a medical doctor, a musician, an author, a news columnist, a political activist, and a TV pundit. And somewhere in all of this, he managed not only to lead what may have been the most artful team ever to grace the pitch, but also, using his pulpit as a soccer star, to fearlessly challenge the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil for decades.44
Alongside the 1982 Brazilian midfield of Zico, Falcao, Cerezo, and Éder, Sócrates exhibited a combination of technical prowess, deadly goal-scoring ability, and blissful creativity that has never been matched. If ever the uninhibited joy of play has merged seamlessly with raw competitive dominance, it was in the squad that Sócrates led to the World Cup semifinals in Spain. Sócrates approached soccer with the same intensity and lack of restraint he brought to every aspect of his life. He drank, he smoked, and—perhaps most daringly—he played without shin guards. His impetuosity as a player and a person was embodied in his signature move on the field: the blind heel pass. Sócrates became a full-time professional player almost as an afterthought, signing with Corinthians at the relatively advanced age of twenty-four. And unlike so many of his fellow players, let alone top-level professional athletes, he refused to check his politics at the door.
Unlike the great Pelé, Sócrates never made financial or political peace with Brazil’s dictatorship. In fact, with his medical expertise, his flowing hair and full beard, and his politics of political resistance, he had less in common with Pelé than with Che Guevara. That is not hyperbole. Sócrates may be the only professional athlete ever to have organized a socialist cell among his fellow players. He helped to build Corinthians, a club team from São Paulo, on a radical political foundation. Under his leadership, cheering for Corinthians or even wearing their colors became a focal point for national discontent with Brazil’s military dic
tatorship.45
The military, as we saw in the previous chapter, had ruled Brazil since 1964, when it overthrew left-wing president João Goulart. Throughout the 1970s, it had used soccer as a way to showcase national pride. By the early 1980s, as the dictatorship was beginning to strain under the weight of mass repression and economic stagnation, Sócrates and his teammate Wladimir were not only playing for Corinthians, but turning their team into the time do povo—the “people’s team”— to demonstrate the power of democracy. With the blessing of club president Waldemar Pires, the players established a democratic process to govern all team decisions. As Sócrates explained, “Everyone at the club had the same right to vote—the person who looked after the kit and the club president, all their votes had the same weight.” The players decided what time they would eat lunch, challenged strict rules that locked players in their hotel rooms for up to forty-eight hours before a match, and printed political slogans on their uniforms.46
In this way, one of South America’s most popular teams became a beacon of hope not just to Brazilians but across a continent then stuffed to the rafters with US-backed dictators. In a country where a wrong word could have authorities knocking at your door, Sócrates was as bold as those national colors. On his way to 297 appearances and 172 goals for Corinthians, he was one of the most popular figures in the country and thus nearly unassailable, even by the military rulers. As he put it: “I’m struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for equality, for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a soccer player, preserving the ludicrous, and the joyous and pleasurable nature of this activity.”47
The tragedy of Sócrates’s death in 2011 lies both in his age—just fifty-seven—and in its timing. As the World Cup and Olympics thunder toward Brazil, his would have been a critical voice against the way these international sporting carnivals run roughshod over local communities for the benefit of the elite. When asked by the Guardian earlier in 2011 if the coming World Cup would help the poor of Brazil, Sócrates replied, “There will be lots of public money disappearing into people’s pockets. Stadiums will be built and they will stay there for the rest of their lives without anyone using them. It’s all about money. What we need to do is keep up public pressure for improvements in infrastructure, transport, sewerage, but I reckon it will be difficult.”48 But Sócrates, true to form in this interview, didn’t confine his commentary to soccer: “What needs to change here is the focus on development. We need to prioritise the human being. Sadly, in the globalised world, people don’t think about individuals as much as they think about money, the economy, etc.”49
In another interview near the end of his life, he tried to analyze why the sport in Brazil had made that journey from joy to fear; from a uniquely Brazilian rhythm to the more regimented style that has begun to redefine the sport.50 He began with the big picture, then worked his way down. He started by discussing the death of public space. “We’ve become an urban country,” he said. “Before, there were no limits for playing—you could play on the streets or wherever. Now it’s difficult to find space.” The price for this—and this will sound very familiar to basketball fans in the United States—is that the game does not develop organically or through improvisation, but instead through highly structured league play from the youngest ages. As Sócrates put it, if you are playing the sport in a serious way and have any kind of athletic gifts, you will be “involved some kind of standardization.”51 He also spoke about how even the most innocent-looking soccer contests have been regimented: “The barefooted tykes kicking footballs on Rio’s beaches are not doing so at liberty—they are members of escolinhas, Beach Soccer training clubs. . . . In São Paulo, children do not learn to play on patches of common land—because there is no common land anymore. . . . The freedom that let Brazilians reinvent the game decades ago is long gone.” He then put a stunning exclamation point on the project:
For many years soccer has been played in different styles, expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity is more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes: in this end of the century world, whoever doesn’t die of hunger dies of boredom. . . . Soccer is now mass-produced, and it comes out colder than a freezer and as merciless as a meat-grinder. It’s a soccer for robots.52
These days, if you want to find creativity in Brazilian soccer, you’d be much better off looking at an area of Brazil’s soccer world that has actually benefited from segregation and neglect—because no one has regimented its players with lessons about how they have to play. These are the women of Brazil.
Women and Soccer in Brazil
Can you imagine your son coming home with his girlfriend saying: “She’s the defender for Bangu”? No way, huh.
—Former Brazilian national coach João Saldanha53
Individual women and all-female teams were playing soccer in São Paulo and Rio by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, during the early years of the Vargas dictatorship, historian Fábio Franzini has identified as many as forty teams in Rio alone. Then came Article 54 of Vargas’s National Sports Council’s decree of April 14, 1941, stating that “women will not be allowed to practice sports incompatible with the conditions of their nature, and for this reason, the National Sports Council should issue the necessary instructions to sports entities in the country.”54 Although women did break these laws and organize their own games throughout the following decades, the ban stood for a generation. Even in the 1970s, when an international women’s movement was changing the relationship between women and sports, “Brazil reinforced the exclusion of women . . . [which] excluded them from a greater collective and a broad spectrum of social practices. Incapable of symbolically representing the nation, they were not only passive, silent and submissive, but also second-class citizens. To keep them from playing soccer was to exclude them from full participation in the nation.”55 As Roberto DaMatta noted, “In Brazil, soccer has a strong gender demarcation that makes it a masculine domain par excellence. It is a sport that contains all of the various elements that are traditionally used to define masculinity: conflict, physical confrontation, guts, dominance, control and endurance.”
By law, women’s soccer was banned in Brazil from 1941 until 1979. (Some sources even put that latter date at 1981.) Even when the ban was finally lifted, the National Sports Council implemented a series of rules to diminish both women’s abilities and their accomplishments, such as requiring breast shields and shorter game times. The São Paulo Soccer Federation maintained that “feminine” appearance and beauty would be prerequisites for making the team. Its president, Eduardo Farah, said, “We have to try to combine the image of soccer and femininity.”56 Renato Duprat, another of Brazil’s charming soccer bureaucrats, sniffed, “No one plays here with short hair. It’s in the regulations.”57 This shows that homophobia is also strongly intertwined with gender norms; like in the United States, it’s difficult to separate where homophobia ends and sexism begins when discussing women’s sports. Even with the growth of these highly repressive local leagues, it took until 1994 for a countrywide championship tournament of women players to be held. The 1996 Olympics and the international success of the US women’s team finally spurred a measure of national interest, investment, and respect. Despite its relatively new history, the Brazilian national women’s team won the silver medal at the 2004 Olympics, made it to the final of the Women’s World Cup in 2007, and even beat the powerful US women’s team 4 to 0 in the semifinal. Shortly after placing second in the 2007 World Cup, the Brazilian women’s team faxed a letter to the CBF, signed by all twenty-one of its players, demanding greater support for the women’s game. The widespread prejudice against women’s soccer in Brazil did not truly crack, however, until the national team won the Pan American
Games, held in Brazil in July 2007. Only then did the CBF announce that it intended to set up a women’s professional league.
The new women’s league is known as the Campeonato Brasileiro do Futebol Feminino. It is an annual Brazilian women’s club football tournament, contested by twenty clubs. Like its counterpart in the United States, Brazilian women’s club soccer has had a difficult time gaining a foothold, not to mention corporate sponsorship. Santos closed its women’s football club, which had been the most successful in recent years, in early 2012 in order to fund the male players’ payroll, which had ballooned in the club’s effort to keep budding superstar Neymar from leaving for Europe. The last women’s championship tournament was played in near-empty stadiums, with an average audience of just three hundred people per game. The media coverage it gets is pitiful: one study of the four leading Brazilian news magazines showed eleven articles about women’s soccer over four years.
Women have been historically discouraged not only from playing but even from attending men’s games. The implications of this are profound. If soccer attendance—being part of the multitude in the stands—is Brazil’s great cultural unifier, what does it mean to shut women out of that space? Symbolic of this is that the soccer fan clubs, the torcidas, exclude women from membership. Then there are the very terms with which the very ball is discussed: as if it is a woman to love or to ravage, depending upon who’s doing the talking. Even Eduardo Galeano does this in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow: “The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.”58 This is beautiful writing. It is also a ball. Little thought is given to whether this kind of discourse could alienate young girls from either playing or feeling like there is a place for them in the sport.