Futebol Nation Read online

  Futebol Nation

  Note for the US edition:

  Soccer is referred to as football

  throughout this book, apart from the subtitle.

  Copyright © 2014 by David Goldblatt.

  First published in 2014 in the UK by the Penguin Group

  Published in the US in 2014 by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group 116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor

  New York, NY 10003

  The photo credits on page 269 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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  Set in 11/14.75pt Garamond MT Std

  Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

  Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number: 2014934947

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-468-3 (EB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Introduction: The Curious Rise of the Futebol Nation

  1Champagne Football: The Game of the Belle Époque, 1889–1922

  2Modern Times? Football and the Death of the Old Republic, 1922–1932

  3Brasilidade: Football and the New Order, 1932–1950

  4Brasília and the Ball: Inventing the Beautiful Game, 1950–1964

  5Playing the Hard Line: Football under the Dictatorship, 1964–1986

  6Magic and Dreams are Dead: Pragmatism, Politics and Football, 1986–2002

  7Futebol Nation Redux: The Game in Lula’s Brazil, 2002–2013

  8Copa das Manifestações: Civil War in the Futebol Nation, 2013–2014

  Coda: February 2014

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Introduction

  The Curious Rise of the Futebol Nation

  ‘Football is played in the stadium? Football is played on the beach’ – Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

  The Futebol Nation: Ipanema Beach, Rio.

  Brazil does not want us! It is sick and tired of us!

  Our Brazil is in the afterworld. This is not Brazil.

  There is no Brazil. By any chance, are there Brazilians?

  Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 1934

  Brazil is empty on a Sunday afternoon, right?

  Look, sambão, here is the country of football.

  Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant, 1970

  I

  Brazil, by both area and population, is the fifth largest nation on earth. Its economy is perhaps the sixth or seventh largest and will soon surpass those of France and Britain. Yet this great continental state has barely registered its presence globally. In the complex flux of globalized popular cultures or the rarefied circuits of high culture and the sciences, Brazil is an undercurrent.1 Brazilian cuisine, or rather its beef-heavy southern regional variant, can be found in the global cities of the north and the few urban enclaves where a recent Brazilian diaspora has emerged (like Massachusetts and London), but it is a small side order compared to the truly global reach of Chinese, Thai and Indian cooking. Even coffee, with which Brazil was once synonymous, has been culturally colonized in the global north by its Italian variant. The nation’s once hegemonic position in coffee production has been eroded. Starbucks serves cappuccino not cafezinho. Brazil, at its height, supplied 70 per cent of the global market; now it supplies less than a third.

  Music and carnival are, in their picture-postcard form, perhaps the most widespread if glib images of the nation. Denuded of their social and political context, they serve, alongside Copacabana and the other palm-fringed beaches of the Atlantic coast, as code for languid tropical hedonism, the brand identity of Brazil in the global tourist market. Alluring as these traditions might seem, the global popularity of samba and its valence for crossovers with other musical forms are dwarfed by that of salsa or Jamaican reggae, a now global musical genre from an island with 1 per cent of Brazil’s population. In the late 1950s and early 1960s bossa nova found a small market niche and considerable critical acclaim in the United States, before it was tragically rendered down by the music industry into the staple saccharine groove of 1970s lift muzak. The complex constellation of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) has given the world Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, but the world music audience has vastly preferred the rhythms of the Caribbean and Africa. Capoeira, the nation’s Afro-Brazilian martial art, has been gaining in global popularity since the 1970s and has established beachheads across the world, but it is almost a century behind the globalization of judo, and is still catching up with the post-war East Asian export drive led by karate, ju-jitsu and taekwondo.

  We need not take the views of the Nobel Foundation and its judges as the definitive word on the nation’s sciences and the arts, but it is notable that not a single award has been made to a Brazilian. In the social sciences and humanities, Brazil’s extensive university sector and wide arc of well-funded research foundations are primarily in conversation with themselves. On the global stage perhaps only the work of Roberto Unger, the political philosopher, has been widely recognized. The nation’s literary traditions are unquestionably rich; a canon which includes the brilliant short stories of Machado de Assis and the widely translated novels of Jorge Amado is not marginal. Yet the global appeal and standing of Spanish-language writing from Latin America – a roster that includes Borges, Allende, Neruda, Márquez and Fuentes – exceed Brazil’s.

  Despite being an early adopter of celluloid technologies and creating, at times, a sustainable national film industry, Brazil’s only cinematic movement of international note was the Cinema Novo of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even then, outside the country it only registered with the small art-house audiences and cineastes of Western Europe. More recently, the very best of Brazilian movies, like Bus 174, have made the same journey, but only City of God has troubled the world’s box offices. While Brazilian cinema has yielded most of its home market to Hollywood, the Brazilian television industry has proved a very different competitor. Dominant at home, technically polished, it may speak with a narrow range of political and social voices but they are unambiguously Brazilian. In the telenovela the sector has forged its own unique mass popular genre in parallel with the Anglo-Saxon soap opera rather than simply imitating the European version.

  In the visual arts, Brazilian painting and conceptual art in the last century developed their own variants on the dominant movements of Europe and North America, but rarely made an impact in the auction houses and galleries of London or New York. The nation’s single most famous sculpture, Cristo Redentor – standing, hands outstretched, on Corcovado above Rio’s beaches – is the work of a Franco-Polish sculptor. Only the sinuous tropical modernism of Brazilian architecture has acquired a truly global profile, and even this rests overwhelmingly on the work of one architect – Oscar Niemeyer – and one complex – the federal government buildings in Brasília.

  In one realm, however, Brazil is not only visible but ubiquitous, not merely competitive but the clear winner: football. Nike, whose commercial judgement on the value of global brands should be respected, have been prepared to pay m
ore money than any other company for any other kit deal in pursuit of the yellow and green shirt. The Brazilian football authorities can charge more for the presence of the Seleção, as the national team is known, at an international friendly than anyone else. Since the 1970s, when film and television coverage of the team first reached Africa and Asia, the Brazilians have been supported across the global south, often alongside or even in preference to national teams. In the Gulf and South-East Asia, where the English Premier League and the Spanish duopoly of Real Madrid and Barcelona have made deep advances into the market for consumer loyalties, their respective national team shirts are a sideline. Brazil is the tribune of those football cultures that have never qualified for the World Cup. Except in Argentina and Uruguay, Brazil is almost everyone’s second team when the tournament rolls around.

  Rio hosted the United Nations’ most important environmental conference in 1992, but for most of the twentieth century Brazil’s contribution to international institutions was invisible. By contrast, FIFA, although founded and run by Europeans for almost seventy years before the presidency of João Havelange, is now a global player built in the country’s image. Primarily responsible for the massively increased media profile and economic worth of the World Cup, as well as the growing cultural capital of FIFA in the global political arena, Havelange brought to the institution the unique imprimatur of Brazil’s ruling elite: imperious cordiality, ruthless clientelistic politics and a self-serving blurring of the public and private realms, institutional and personal benefit. Havelange stepped down almost two decades ago, but business at FIFA is still conducted in the mould which he cast, though without a fraction of his discretion or style.

  In this realm Brazil’s standing rests not merely on the value of the brand or the breadth of its support, but on the fact that Brazilian football has become, in the collective imagination if not the daily practice of professional football, the gold standard of the game. Since 1938, when Brazil dazzled Europe at the World Cup in France, the European and then the world’s media have framed Brazilian football as exotic and other-worldly, musical and terpsichorean, a unique blend of the effective and the aesthetic. Cliché it may be, but very few Brazilian phrases have entered the global lingua franca like the phrase popularized by Pelé, O Jogo Bonito – the Beautiful Game.2 Hugh McIlvanney’s elegiac account of the 1970 final in Mexico City is among the best of simply thousands of similar paeans to Brazilian football that have secured its place in the global imagination:

  Other teams thrill us and make us respect them. The Brazilians at their finest gave us pleasure so natural and deep as to be a vivid physical experience . . . the qualities that make football the most graceful and electric of team sports were being laid before us. Brazil are proud of their own unique abilities but it was not hard to believe that they were anxious to say something about the game as well as themselves. You cannot be the best in the world at a game without loving it and all of us who sat, flushed with excitement, in the stands of the Azteca sensed that we were seeing some kind of tribute.3

  In the stands of British football Brazil’s football pre-eminence is invoked as both praise and sardonic comment on incompetence when crowds sing, ‘It’s just like watching Brazil’. In Belgrade, the fearsomely nationalist Serbs of Red Star named their ground the Marakana in honour of Rio’s great stadium. These tributes do not stand on mere invention or orientalist fantasy. The World Cup may only happen once every four years, just twenty occasions since its inception in 1930, and it may only be a football tournament, but for much of the twentieth century it has – alongside the Olympic Games – provided a rare and genuinely cosmopolitan cultural moment that reaches a global public like no other spectacle. Brazil is the only country to have participated in every one of them. It has won the World Cup five times and lost two finals. As well as being the most successful nation, Brazil’s style of play and the manner of its victories and its disasters have been seared more deeply into global football culture than any other. As importantly, long before the rest of the world came to consider football the exemplar of Brazilian national identity, Brazil had done so itself.

  II

  It took less than four decades for Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazil’s mid-century poet laureate, to get an answer to his question posed at the beginning of this Introduction. Milton Nascimento’s much-recorded song ‘Here is the Football Nation’ replied, ‘At the match’. It was, from the 1960s onwards, a commonplace of Brazilian culture that football was the national ritual. When the Seleção took the field at the World Cup and over 95 per cent of the population were watching them on television, Brazil existed in a more complete way than at any other moment. This was not just a symbolic practice; the demands of football could produce tangible material change too. The 1970 World Cup in Mexico was not only the occasion of Brazil’s third, and most scintillating victory, but also, to ensure nationwide coverage of the games, the first time that a comprehensive north–south telecommunications infrastructure had been built; just one of the many ways in which the Brazilian state has tried to use football to create the nation.

  The creation of a Brazilian nation-state and a living sense of the Brazilian nation or people has been a long and arduous process, for both tasks began with the most meagre of resources. Although the country notionally acquired independence from Portugal in 1822, it entered the post-colonial world without experiencing the defining break that characterized the emergence of nations in Spanish-speaking South America. First, the Portuguese court decamped en masse from Lisbon to Rio, fleeing Napoleon’s invading armies. Settling in for almost two decades, the royal court ruled the Lusophone empire from Brazil. When, reluctantly, Dom Pedro I returned to take up his throne in Europe, he left behind his son Dom Pedro II as emperor of a now independent Brazilian Empire. Thus Brazil’s life as a nation rather than some unusual imperial specimen began only in 1889 when the army deposed the emperor in a brief bloodless coup and declared the first Brazilian Republic. Nation in name, the Brazilian republican state was a fragile creature. The nation’s borders were only finally resolved in the early decades of the twentieth century and they remained, if geographically defined, virtually unpoliced. The federal state and the presidency, whatever their constitutional prerogatives, lacked the reach and power to govern a nation that stretched from the capital Rio over 500 miles south to the Uruguayan border and more than 2,000 miles to the depths of the Amazonian basin and the Caribbean coast of the far north. In effect, enormous autonomy was ceded to the states and their local elites.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, economically and topographically Brazil might as well have been four or five nations. In the south an almost completely European population presided over rich cattle ranching; in the south-east, in the most important and populous states of São Paulo, Rio and Minas Gerais, a world-beating coffee plantation economy was at its peak. In what is now known as the centre west, the inland states of Mato Grosso and Goiás were still a refuge for indigenous Brazilians. A future inland capital had been located there on the maps, but the area was virtually uninhabited and unworked by Europeans. In the north-east, along the Atlantic coast, the remnants of the sugar plantation and slavery complex were combined with the vast, harsh-ranching latifundia of the dry interior, where the same families that had personally commanded these states for centuries remained firmly in control. In the north, but for Manaus, Belém and the short-lived rubber boom that created them, Brazil had barely scratched at the surface of the vast Amazonian rainforest. Moreover, until the advent of reasonably regular air transport in the late 1940s and 1950s, these regions were connected by the thinnest of threads. Coastal shipping remained the most reliable and the fastest way of communicating between the south and the north, roads were poor, and the country began the century with fewer railway tracks than Belgium.

  Over the next half century or so Brazil would be transformed from an overwhelmingly rural to a predominantly urban society, and in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo it acquired cities of tru
ly metropolitan magnitude. Brazil’s agrarian economies, while remaining significant, were now joined by a rapidly growing industrial sector centred on the south-east. Both of these processes were driven by migration, internal and external. With the end of slavery in 1888, a vast Afro-Brazilian population of landless peasants was created which, along with the many poor whites and mulattos of the north-east, began heading for the coastal cities of the country. Simultaneously, millions of Europeans – predominantly Italians, Portuguese and Germans – crossed the Atlantic and stayed in Brazil. Among the many social and cultural transformations wrought by these changes perhaps the most significant was the emergence of the urban working and middle classes and the slow spread of literacy down the social hierarchy. In an electoral system where literacy was the key qualification for voting, this began to produce a larger and more complex electorate.

  Brazil’s flimsy federal state and its antiquated military would eventually acquire significantly more power at the expense of individual states, making a national government a reality, but who and what was this geographically and socially fragmented nation? In the century after independence, Brazil’s tiny intelligentsia had looked to Europe for inspiration. Portugal itself proved as hopeless a source of cultural ideas as it had of both capital and labour, so the guiding compass for Brazilian high culture was France. The decorative architecture of the Parisian Belle Époque was reproduced with considerable flourish in Rio, and French novels and poetry were widely read. Auguste Comte, the founder of the discipline of sociology, provided the intellectual inspiration for the cabal of modernizing junior officers that drove the republican revolution. It is, after all, a Comtean notion of ‘Order and Progress’ that is spelt out on the Brazilian flag; a reminder of a time when it was thought that the European sciences could diagnose a nation’s ills and produce rational and effective interventions to deal with them. Alongside this kind of absurdly optimistic positivism, Brazil drew upon European biological theories of race and eugenics. On the one hand, they provided an apparently legitimate scientific explanation of white European superiority. On the other, they made their Brazilian advocates worry about the declining demographic position and racial health of European Brazil, and advocate the whitening of the nation. What didn’t make the journey across the South Atlantic were the more radical and democratic dimensions to the French Republic, the concept and indeed the practice of universal citizenship. This carefully edited cluster of ideas and imagery might have been enough to create a notion of upper-class, white European Brazilianness, albeit one constantly threatened by the demographic and racial realities of the country, but as an exercise in popular nationalism under conditions of rapid industrialization it was going nowhere.