Neglect, greed and guilt: THE TRAGIC TALE OF FLAMENGO FIRE
For the Flamengo fans, here for the Club World Cup final, it has been a week of high spirits in the Doha souks, singing their song about defeating Liverpool 38 years ago to become the world’s top club side. ‘ In December ’81, we ran rings around the English. 3-0 against Liverpool. It went down in history...’
But it will be a different anthem they stand to sing after 10 minutes of today’s meeting with the same opponents, just as it is at that juncture of every game they play. This one tells of supporters ‘never forgetting’, of how there are ‘ 10 stars to shine’ and how ‘ we will always play for them, under my Flamengo sky’.
It is a valediction for 10 members of the Brazilian side’s young players, aged between 14 and 16, who died in February when fire swept through grossly inadequate accommodation at the academy facility known as ‘Vulture’s Nest’, named after Flamengo’s emblem.
The details are irredeemably and unimaginably grim. The fire, probably caused when an air conditioning unit short-circuited following a power surge during the night, spread to the polyurethane foam insulation packed into the walls of the makeshift dormitory, which was little more than fused together steel cargo containers.
The foam emits hydrogen cyanide when it burns and can kill within two minutes. More than 20 boys were sleeping in the units, which had only one exit, windows which allowed no means of escape and which had never been submitted to a fire inspection.
In the days after the disaster, the full scale of negligence of those in charge gradually became clear.
The rio de Janeiro city authorities had fined Flamengo 31 times for failing to get a fire certificate for other buildings at that site. They even ordered the training centre to be closed in 2017.
But the club was in the final stages of a £4.6million upgrade to the facility, so ignored the edict, housing the boys — remembered as the
Garotos do Ninho, or ‘Boys of the Nest’ — in the temporary units until the new building was finished.
Club executives with questions to answer — such as how could a club with projected £ 153m revenues this year allow boys to be kept in a death trap — would usually disappear into obscurity and be hard to locate. But
Sportsmail this week found former president Eduardo Bandeira de Mello, one of eight people charged with manslaughter over the fire, mingling with fans in the souks.
When questioned about his personal culpability, de Mello’s answers suggest he will attempt to avoid blame by arguing that he had left the club weeks before the disaster happened.
‘I was no longer the president,’ he said. ‘ But we did not know it could happen. It is the worst episode of our 124-year history. Two months earlier I was giving those boys their medals for winning the Brazilian Under 15s championship. It was very sad.’
De Mello’s lack of contrition was astonishing, though the parents of the boys believe this fits a pattern in which the lives of impoverished children like theirs count for little. ‘First of all, we’re black,’ said Sebastiao rodrigues, a garbage company manager and an uncle to right back Samuel rosa, who died. rodrigues was interviewed as part of a forensic ESPN investigation into the tragedy. ‘Flamengo, the best of the best, a millionaire team, putting our children to sleep in a container?’ OTHER victims included rosa’s great friend Christian Esmerio, a 15year- old goalkeeper whose performances had seen him selected for Brazil’s national youth team; forward Samuel Barbosa from Piaui, in north- east Brazil; and midfielder Dias Sacramento, nicknamed Pitbull because of his no-nonsense approach on the field. All three had been on the team who beat rivals Fluminense to become state champions.
The tragedy reveals far more than the painful social divides in a country where hosting the 2014
World Cup has never been the panacea for regeneration that struggling communities were promised. It exposes the way that young boys have become pawns in a vile trade of young players who are Flamengo’s lottery ticket to millions in transfer fees.
The international player market is worth £5.3billion a year according to FIFA, and Flamengo is more relentless than most at shipping teenagers in on the small percentage chance that a European club will one day pay out for one. In 2017, the club spent £3.3m on its youth programme. An estimated five per cent of boys recruited turn professional. Sales of players developed at the Vulture’s Nest topped £53m in the last five years.
No one is sure how many boys are washing through the Brazilian youth football system because the national federation doesn’t track them. The figure may be 15,000. Flamengo were previously prosecuted in 2015 over conditions at their academy, which were described in legal papers as ‘even worse than those currently offered to juvenile delinquents’.
De Mello, president from 2013 until this year, goes unchallenged by fans as he walks the souks. Some even pose for pictures with him, which suggests an infinitely less inquisitorial culture than the one which has seen Liverpool fans in a 30-year fight over hillsborough.
‘We lost 10 of our stars who all had potential to be great,’ says Leo da Silva, one of the many Flamengo fans in Doha’s Souq Waqif. ‘one of the players in the first team, our midfielder renier, had only just left the academy a few weeks before the fire. he’s 17. he was one of the lucky ones.’
other fans speak of the tragedy as Flamengo’s own hillsborough. ‘It is something which will be written through our history, always,’ says one. ‘It will never leave us.’