“IN BRAZIL, it starts before you’re born. At the baby shower, your fanatical aunt gifts your mother football-themed onesies and bibs, as if being near the right colors, watching your mother wipe your vomit with them, could influence your development, making you choose the right side of the stadium in some future game”
“As a child, you learn to improvise. You make a ball out of newspaper and masking tape or your mother’s old tights. You demarcate two goals with your Havaianas flip-flops. In case what you’re missing is players, you practice dribbling by yourself. Even if, by a miracle, you happen to develop no interest in the sport, you pretend to care”
“I was only nine years old in 2002. I had little knowledge of history and geography, but I knew that Brazil was at the bottom of both — except for football. I had heard of the United States and Europe because people always talked about them. The lucky ones visited them on vacation and bragged about their newly acquired goods: Hollister shirts, GAP sweaters, Nike shoes, and a 212 Sexy perfume. They told me that Americans had fancy cars, big houses, money, and Disneyland. Europeans had culture. Brazil had samba, Carnival, and endless summer, which have unfortunately made us lazy and underdeveloped, as I was told by other Brazilians”
“The day I understood our predicament, I was watching TV at home before going to dinner with my parents. The main character on this particular show seemed singularly obsessed with a place called Harvard, which is supposedly the best school in the world. She had spent most of her life preparing for it. She was part of social clubs; had read Henry James, Sylvia Plath, and Voltaire; and still feared a rejection. I remember looking around our living room, in the periphery of São Paulo, in the periphery of the world, a living room that looked nothing like hers, and realizing that I would never in my life attend Harvard”
“Still, I will never forget the excitement I felt in 2002, watching out my window as three images — a flag, a football, and a trophy — slowly took shape on the street below my building just before the sidewalk turned yellow and green. It was an excitement that carried through every game as we beat European teams to reach the final, where the full joy of Ronaldo’s smile after scoring the winning goal against Germany infected every person in Brazil”
“Sick with passion, we stopped traffic, hugged strangers, and danced from morning to evening. We were, if only briefly, the best in the world, and I was, for the first time, proud to be Brazilian”
“That same year, I watched Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) win the presidential elections for the first time. He was the first person to become president who had been born into poverty and lacked a formal education — a tale of hope and social ascendancy that resonated with many, but which also attracted criticism from those who believed only the educated could be qualified for the position. His campaign denounced neoliberalism and promised to address social inequalities that had plagued Brazilian society for decades. He vowed to govern for the people and end hunger and poverty in Brazil”
“A little over a year in power, Lula took on another task — to increase the self-esteem of Brazilians like me. His government launched a campaign called “The Best of Brazil Is Brazilians,” with slogans like “I’m Brazilian and never give up” that played on TV and radio stations all over the nation”
“This campaign told the tale of the country Lula had promised to create — one where belief is possible — and it must have struck the right note at the time because a lingering hope colors my memories of that period. For many years after, it was common to hear Brazilians repeat “I’m Brazilian, and I never give up” in casual conversations”
“Yet, when I recently rewatched the ad, I noticed its delusional undertone, as if belief and persistence alone are enough in a country like Brazil”
“In his 1983 book of the same title, the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote that nations are “imagined communities.” He argued that, to some degree, nations exist and are maintained by a shared collective illusion — the belief that strangers who would otherwise have nothing in common share “a deep, horizontal comradeship.””
“Members of a nation buy into the idea that they are a collective because they believe that they share a common heritage, history, and traits. In Brazil, football is one of the pillars sustaining our collective illusion”
“The sport arrived in Brazil in 1894, thanks to a young Scottish Brazilian man who, after studying in the United Kingdom, returned to São Paulo carrying a football, a pump, and the rules of the game in his suitcase”
“The country was just then beginning to define a national identity separate from Portugal and in relation to the rest of the world. Six years before, Brazil had finally abolished slavery. This overhaul in the labor system brought an influx of immigrants to now-sprawling cities. In 1889, a coup d’état overthrew the monarchy and established a republic, forcing the imperial family to flee”
“With the new republic came the need for a unified national identity. The state gained a new constitution and a flag — with a green background, a yellow rhombus, and a blue circle filled with white stars and a stripe with the words “Ordem e Progresso” (Order and Progress).”
“But Brazil remained confused about itself, forced to deal with the push and pull between modernity and conservatism”
“On the line were questions about miscegenation and the role of Black and Indigenous people in Brazilian society. As Marcos Guterman writes in his 2009 book O futebol explica o Brasil (“Football Explains Brazil”), Brazilians had to contend with a popular eugenics movement that saw the country as fundamentally inferior because of its intermixing of races”
“In 1930, the year of the first World Cup, Getúlio Vargas, a populist leader, became president. He saw the beloved sport as an opportunity to unite the nation’s races and classes behind a nationalistic project. He wanted to create a modern, homogeneous, patriotic country — a true “Brazilian race.””
“To the surprise of Europeans, Brazil reached the semifinals, playing a strange type of soccer — it was the first time the world saw bicycle kicks, invented by Leônidas da Silva, a Black Brazilian player”
“That same year, the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre — famous for his seminal defense of miscegenation in the book Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) — published an article entitled “Foot-ball mulato.” In it, he argued that the team arrived at the semifinal “thanks to the courage we finally had to send Europe a team that was deeply Afro-Brazilian.””
“He then attributed our football style — cunning, agile, spontaneous — to what he called our “mulatismo” as opposed to the Aryan football played by Europeans”
“Through football, Brazilians finally began associating their “Brazilianness” with grandiosity. Football became a unifying force — our way out of the shame of being Brazilian and into the hope of becoming a great nation”
“By December 2010, the end of Lula’s second term in power, nobody could deny the positive changes in Brazil — about 20 million people had escaped poverty, and 30 million had moved into the middle class. The value of our currency had more than doubled against the US dollar”
“I still remember the happiness that I felt watching the news back then, learning that Brazil was on its way to becoming the sixth-largest economy in the world — we’d even beat England”
“We joined them, anxiously waiting for the start of the FIFA World Cup semifinal game against Germany; Brazil was hosting the tournament that year”
“A good result would take us to the final at the famed Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Winning the title for the sixth time would also justify the over $11 billion spent to host the tournament at home. For the players, it would mean living up to the legacy of idols that came before them”
“Germany scored their first goal in the 11th minute. A corner kick came across the box connecting with Thomas Müller’s right foot, firing straight to the back of the net. This was the first of five goals within 30 minutes — possibly the most humiliating minutes in football history”
“Protests that began in 2013, with a simple demand to stop the increase of bus fares in many Brazilian cities, had grown by this time into a shapeless and confused beast. These were the largest demonstrations that Brazil had ever seen, yet a year into the protests, nobody could agree on what exactly they were for”
“Some angry Brazilians called for an end to corruption and demanded more government investment in healthcare and education. Others wanted to cancel the World Cup. The radical ones wanted a complete overhaul of our political system and a return to a military dictatorship”
“Watching my country, already on the verge of collapse, become an international joke in front of millions broke me down. Germany won 7–1 — a loss that erased many victories”
“The only other time that Brazil hosted the World Cup was in 1950, the first tournament after a 12-year hiatus caused by the Second World War. Getúlio Vargas was still in power and hoped to use the event to showcase Brazil’s potential to other nations. He built the largest stadium in the world at the time, the Maracanã, where Brazil played the final against Uruguay”
“In the old World Cup point system, the country only needed a tie to win the tournament, but Uruguay managed to score two goals and win. The loss was considered — at least before the 7–1 — one of the most tragic events in Brazilian history. Some refer to it as the “game that never ended.””
“As the anthropologist Arno Vogel put it in 1982, it was as if the motherland had died, and we were having “a funeral procession.””
“people burned down 26 buses in São Paulo alone after the game. Protests not only continued in the following months but were also co-opted by a radical and fast-growing right-wing movement”
“Unsatisfied with the political establishment, they rejected the existing political parties and hoped to change Brazil through a conservative nationalist agenda. They took to the streets wearing the national jersey and flags — now the symbols of their movement”
“In 2014, Rousseff won reelection in one of the closest contests in Brazilian history, but her second term didn’t last long. Then, in 2016, I watched on TV, afflicted, as Brazilian senators voted to impeach her. Of them, one stood out: the retired military officer Jair Bolsonaro, who dedicated his vote to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, head of the torture unit where Rousseff had been imprisoned during the dictatorship”
“Benefiting from the fallout of the Car Wash investigations, Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018, a surprise result to most”
“As he celebrated his victory, he was surrounded by a sea of people wearing the yellow and green jerseys — co-opting what used to be a symbol of national hope”
“Lula’s supporters wore red, an homage to the worker’s movement, the ghost of communism, and PT’s flag, but also, I think, as a joke that said to bolsonaristas, Here come the boogeymen”
“I avoided talking about the upcoming second round of the elections with my family. I talked about the World Cup instead”
“My father, with whom I have watched many World Cup games, surprisingly claimed not to care about the national team. “I cheer for Palmeiras,” he told me. My brother expressed similar sentiments and justified this by telling me that these players aren’t our players”
“And in a way, he is right. Unlike Pelé or Garrincha, both of whom played in Brazil for the majority of their lives and are considered akin to national heroes, most of our players today move away before they have cultivated a Brazilian fan base”
“As a result, our football has also become gentrified — we play more and more like Europeans, to the point that the “beautiful game” is a dying art”
“In November, days before the beginning of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, hundreds of Brazilians gathered in a small town in the state of Santa Catarina to dispute the presidential election results that made Lula victorious for the third time, defeating Bolsonaro. The national anthem blasted on loudspeakers while an ocean of people in green and yellow jerseys, holding Brazilian flags, sang along. One could have mistaken the crowd for football fans if it wasn’t for the fact that their hands were raised in a Nazi salute”
“Despite my excitement about the match, I couldn’t help but think about the jerseys people were wearing — what they had symbolized just a few weeks before. I kept looking at the strangers around me, thinking about election day and what side of the fence they had stood on. Did they, like Neymar, support Bolsonaro? Would they have joined in the Nazi salute?”
“The strangest and perhaps most dystopian moment came when Brazil won the game. As people cheered in unison, the bar began to play “Pra frente, Brasil,” a jingle created by the military regime during its most oppressive period to celebrate the 1970 World Cup”
“We couldn’t have imagined then that, less than two months later, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters would invade the National Congress, the Supreme Federal Court, and the presidential offices, calling for a military takeover of Brazil — perhaps our most unoriginal and pathetic attempt at making history. Wearing football jerseys, bolsonaristas smashed windows, slashed famous paintings, attacked journalists, stole classified documents and weapons, and defecated in rooms and hallways”
“Perhaps it will be impossible from now on to accept symbols that reduce the complexities of our country, that try to unite those who are simply too different to agree”
“After Lula was elected, he made a speech in which he said: “There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation. Nobody is interested in living in a family where discord reigns. It’s time to reunite families, rebuild the bonds broken by a criminal spread of hatred.””
“But maybe we’re better served thinking of Brazil as a multitude. There are not two Brazils. There are many Brazils within a great nation. And then there’s football.”