FAIR & FOUL

An unflinching new account of how a game captured a nation

BRAZIL is the sixth-largest nation and boasts the seventh-largest GDP. But, argues David Goldblatt in his new footballing history of the country, it “has barely registered its presence globally”.

This is an overstatement, but the general thesis is sound: notwithstanding its recent economic rise, Brazil has underperformed on the global stage. No Brazilian has won a Nobel Prize. The country’s literary output remains undervalued, its film industry underwhelming, its cuisine marginalised. Even the nation’s “once hegemonic position in coffee production has been eroded. Starbucks serves cappuccino not cafezinho.”

And yet there is one area of human endeavour in which Brazil consistently excels. Just consider those famous yellow shirts, the five World Cup successes. Brazil is synonymous with football. The country is also, you might add, associated with gun violence, political corruption, sprawling favelas, natural beauty and sexual freedom.

Little surprise that bloodshed and fraud, as well as booze, glamour, poverty and sex, are all part of Goldblatt’s story — a narrative that begins when an Englishman named Charles Miller introduced football to the São Paulo Athletic Club in the 1890s. Rowing and horse racing were the order of the day; cricket an occasional diversion. But despite some early misgivings — “a bunch of maniacs”, said one newspaper; “a blind and barmy battle”, concluded another — football fever quickly settled in.

Goldblatt has little to say about why football gripped the nation, but he is thorough in his appraisal of its spread. A rash of clubs emerged, reflecting the population’s cosmopolitan character (Hespanha, Portuguesa, Syrio, Palestra Itália), and by World War 1 tens of thousands of spectators were going to matches. Professionalisation followed and a nascent national team united a diverse demographic around a single entity, though there was to be no room for black players at the 1921 Copa América. This racism was echoed three decades later when a disastrous performance at the 1950 World Cup final in Brazil led to the scapegoating of the team’s black contingent; the disappointing campaign in Switzerland four years later prompted the authors of the “official report” to blame “genetics itself”.

Goldblatt is an impressive cultural historian and his focus is firmer on the sociopolitical backdrop than on the game itself — which can make Futebol Nation a depressing book. Along with the feats of Pelé, the tortured genius of Garrincha and the recent promise of Neymar, we are confronted with a tale of bigotry, misconduct, megalomania, deceit, murder and charlatanism. Unlike in Italy, where cheating has tended to mean match fixing, Brazilian football’s con tricks are rather more grandiose: time and again the rules of the Campeonato have been retrospectively altered or inferior clubs spuriously penalised to prevent the big boys from going down. This occurred at the end of last season when Fluminense were saved from relegation at the cost of Portuguesa, harshly docked four points for accidentally fielding a substitute still sitting out suspension.

More distressing is the country’s wider record of football-related disgrace. All nations have their shadowy brown envelopes; the massive financial stakes and skimpy regulation are a breeding ground for sleaze. But Brazil’s history seems more villainous than most.

Goldblatt introduces us to a host of schemes and schemers, many of them reprised from the passages on Brazil in his global history of football, The Ball Is Round (2006). Now added to the tales of opportunistic dictators (General Médici called football “the highest form of patriotism”), shady club presidents and horrific fan violence is an eruption of fresh scandal in the lead-up to the 2014 World Cup.

There is Ricardo Teixeira, the former president of the Brazilian Confederation of Football, and his father-in-law, the former Fifa president João Havelange, described last year by Fifa’s Adjudicatory Cham- ber as “morally reproachable” after evidence of kickbacks. There are the unbuilt stadiums, dubious allocation of host cities, public discontent (“a bus was torched in São Paulo almost every day in January”) and detested reconstruction of the Maracana in Rio, with its abundant executive boxes and paucity of cheap seating: “A vast investment of public money had been used to exclude the public,” Goldblatt remarks.

Brazil, Goldblatt argues, has managed to recover from such outrages through a combination of popular inertia (not, it must be noted, currently apparent in its troubled urban streets) and pacifying on-field virtuosity. The performance of the Seleção will have wider ramifications than merely sporting ones. This is, after all, a nation whose media eclipsed reports of the Apollo 12 moon landing with news of Pelé’s thousandth goal.

Futebol Nation comes with its frustrations. Goldblatt can be too dogged in his cultural contextualisations, too partisan in his criticisms of the authorities, and there are occasional oddities of translation, but he has done the important work well. We all know about the silky skills; better to consider, amid the pleasures of this World Cup, the murky business interests that exploit them. — Toby Lichtig © The Daily Telegraph, London • Futebol Nation: a Footballing History of Brazil, by David Goldblatt, is published by Penguin