CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Brazil Fizzles Again: the Capitalist Rot at the Heart of Brazilian Football

Endrick after missing an opportunity versus Norway. (Screen capture from video posted to X.)

After years of waiting for a small lawsuit from a car accident to settle, I moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1991. I had never visited Brazil before, but I was not there as a tourist. As a young man, I had made a decision that I did not want to spend the rest of my life living in a country where you only got 2 weeks of vacation a year. After a lot of informal research talking to fellow bellhops at the Palmer House in Chicago, mainly immigrants from all over the world, I decided on Rio de Janeiro.

I arrived and, after blowing my small lawsuit settlement on restaurant food, drinks, and taxis in the first month, got a job teaching conversational English to business executives. There, I met a coworker from Sweden named Bo and we started having a few drinks together from time to time. One day I arrived at his apartment and he sent me up. He answered the door completely naked, in the Swedish tradition, and said, “I’m going to get ready in a few minutes. I just want to watch the end of the Flamengo game.”

“OK,” I said, “I have to admit that I’m not much of a fan of soccer, though.”

He looked shocked. “Fucking hell, Brian!” he said, “if you are seriously thinking of living in this country, you have to learn how to love football.” As the shock of sitting in the living room with a naked Swedish guy wore off, he began explaining the game to me. Bo was a former back who played professionally in the second division in England and first divisions in Sweden and Greece, whose career was cut short by a knee injury. He’d moved to Rio de Janeiro because of his psoriasis after doctors told him he needed to get more sunlight, deciding on Brazil because of its football tradition.

“Look how they move the ball up the field. The Brazilians’ problem is that they love the ball too much. A Brazilian will kick the ball four or five times before passing. If you watch the Germans play, for example, they will only kick the ball once or twice. Nevertheless, on any given year, any list of the world’s best players will be made up mostly of Brazilians. They are the best individual players in the world, and any time they get a manager who can get them to play together as a team, they win the World Cup.”

That Summer Bo made it a personal project to get me to love football. He took me to watch legendary midfielder Junior play football for fun in an amateur league, barefoot on Copacabana beach, to the delirium of the hundreds of fans who came out to cheer him on. Then, in an act that caused me to really fall in love with football, he invited me to the Brazilian championship finals in the cheap seats in Maracana stadium, where 168,000 people had come out to watch Junior lead Flamengo to victory over Botofogo in the last great game of his career. Brazilian football was a lot different then. There was no wall separating rival fans, just hundreds of riot control military police standing in the aisles. We were in the Botofogo section near the dividing line between the two groups in solidarity with a Brazilian friend, and every time Flamengo scored, their entire fan section stood up, dancing and giving us the middle finger.

I was lucky enough to be live in Brazil for both the 1994 and 2002 World Cups, and being able to experience both of those victories on days when the entire country shut down, buses stopped running, and banks and schools closed, rank among the greatest experiences of my life. For the first 15 years I lived in Brazil, it really did seem like Brazil always had the best individual players in the world and all it needed was a manager who could get them to play together as a team for them to win the World Cup. Then things started going awry. Here are a few things that I have observed during my decades living in Brazil that have contributed to the decline of football.

Samba is a genre of Afro-Brazilian music that was first mentioned in the 1840s in Pernambuco that was modernized and urbanized in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s through fusion of musical traditions of people who had migrated to the city from places like the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo and the towns and quilombos in the Sao Francisco river valley. Over the years, it has branched out into different subgenres, and in 1991, when I first moved to Rio de Janeiro, two of its subgenres, Samba Canção and Pagode, were among the most popular forms of music. Brazilian football developed hand in hand with samba. As anyone who has ever been to a football match in Brazil knows, all of the organized fan groups have their own samba drum groups that beat out syncopated polyrhythms during entire games.........

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