Since 1994, World Cups and presidential elections have taken place in the same years, creating an unintended but poetic synchronicity between football and politics. In 1994 the Tetra [the fourth time Brazil won the World Cup] was followed by the election of the centrist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a cosmopolitan former sociology professor, who served for eight years. In 2002 the Penta was followed by the election of the left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former shoeshine boy and lathe operator, who also served two terms.
As the first member of the povão, the downtrodden masses, to become president, Lula’s victory was hugely symbolic for Brazil. It also marked a change in presidential style. During the election campaign Lula told his closest associates that, if he won, he would put up goalposts in the gardens of the presidential palace. ‘That palace is sad because Fernando Henrique Cardoso never played football,’ he said. Lula was true to his word. On entering office in 2003 a pitch was installed on the presidential lawn.
The pitch was well-used. In the first months after taking office the president spent his weekends kicking a ball around with his fellow travellers, always followed by a barbecue and a beer. Lula’s preferred position was right midfield, the same role, he once said, as Zizinho from the 1950 World Cup, although his friends said that as president he behaved more like the veteran Romário – hanging around the area and waiting for the ball to be passed to him. One frequent guest at Lula’s presidential kickabouts was Carlos Alberto Grana, secretary general of Brazil’s largest union, who fancied himself as a dribbler. During one game the Finance Minister Antonio Palocci fell and fractured his fibula while Grana danced the ball around him. The comrades joked among themselves about the possible repercussions in the press: ‘minister falls after union clash’.
Lula had first gained a national profile in the seventies as the leader of the metalworkers union, the charismatic figurehead of the emerging anti-dictatorship movement. He was one of the founders of, and the first president of, the Workers’ Party, an agglomeration of intellectuals, artists, priests and union activists, which, during the return to democracy, established itself as the country’s serious left wing opposition. When presidential elections were reinstated in 1989, Lula was runner-up. He was runner-up again in 1994 and 1998, by which time he had a reputation as the rabble-rousing nearly-man of Brazilian politics. Only on his fourth attempt, with a slick campaign that airbrushed his radical past, was he finally elected.
Lula’s love of Corinthians, the São Paulo team whose support is traditionally identified with the disenfranchised working class, is an integral part of his public image. Corinthians is the club that failed to win a state title for 23 years, between 1954 and 1977, a painfully long drought that was a metaphor for Lula’s own political trajectory. Previous Brazilian presidents took an interest in football but only from the directors’ box. Lula brought to the presidency the passion of a long-suffering fan. ‘Supporting Corinthians is different from anything you might know about supporting any other team,’ Lula said. ‘Because being a Corintiano is not just about being a supporter… it is about being a militant, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. It is like you are defending a cause. And it doesn’t matter if things are going badly, because the worse they get, the more we have faith.’
Lula speaks with a lisp and makes grammatical mistakes, a constant reminder of his poor upbringing, yet he is a formidable orator, able to connect emotionally with listeners unlike any other Brazilian politician of his generation. He never liked giving press conferences when he was president. In fact, journalists quickly worked out that the best way to get to him was to shout a question about the latest Corinthians match as he was chaperoned between appointments. Invariably he would stop, offer his opinion, and the journalists would then follow up with a question about the political issues of the day. When he did speak to the nation he consciously adopted the language of football.Being president was just like being a football coach, he said: It doesn’t matter if you let in a few goals at the beginning of the match if you go on and win the game. Responding to calls in 2005 to dismiss Antonio Palocci, the finance minister, Lula said: “Why should I meddle with Palocci? It would be the same thing as pulling Ronaldinho from Barcelona. Every now and again Ronaldinho fluffs a kick but you have to let him play.”
In power, Lula lost his image of the luckless leftie, and Brazil also lost its image as the eternal country of the future. Under his watch Brazil’s economy grew an average of four per cent a year, jumping up the international rankings, and it is now the sixth largest in the world. An estimated 40 million people rose out of poverty, creating a newly solvent working class and reducing the country’s historic inequalities in wealth distribution. Huge oil reserves were discovered off the coast of Rio and Brazil was chosen to host the world’s two biggest sporting events: the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Even though his government became engulfed by scandals – Palocci, for example, was eventually sacked when it was revealed that he had been bankrolling a mansion in Brasilia used for parties with politicians and prostitutes – Lula managed to rise above the sleaze. During his last weeks in office his domestic approval rating was 80 per cent – a phenomenal figure after eight years in power. At a summit in London, US President Barack Obama said of his Brazilian counterpart: ‘Love this guy. He’s the most popular politician on Earth!’
Not only was Lula a demonstratively passionate fan but his legislative programme kicked off with a shake-up of the domestic game. The first law he signed was The Fan’s Charter, a bill of rights for football supporters, which stipulated, among other things, that, if a championship has more than one division, it must observe the principle of promotion and relegation. It may have appeared excessive to enshrine such a condition in law – rather than relying on the regulations of the local football federation – but the only way to force the CBF to organize a tournament well was by making it a crime to organize it badly. If that was not enough, the second piece of legislation Lula signed also concerned football. The Law of Ethical Organisation in Football required that clubs publish independently audited accounts.
Reacting to the new political climate, the CBF [Brazilian football’s governing body] introduced a league system in 2003 based on the European format for the first time. The winner was decided on league position, rather than on an end-of-season play-off. Initially the top division had 24 teams but by 2006 the number had been reduced to 20, making it like the leagues in England, Italy and Spain. The stability has enabled the construction of a larger league system and there is now a Série B and Série C also with 20 teams each and a functioning Série D, which has different rules to cope with the expense for small clubs of flying continental distances.
The Fan’s Charter meant that certain bad habits became a thing of the past. No longer can the CBF introduce last-minute rule changes to save the richest clubs from relegation. The first of the big beasts to spend a season in the second division was Palmeiras, followed by Corinthians. ‘It is important to realize,’ joked Lula, ‘that the reason we went to the second division was because it was a championship that Palmeiras had won, but we hadn’t. So we went there to get it, which made it all the sweeter.’ But while the round robin league system was a powerful declaration of equality with old-world Europe, some Brazilians found it hard to adjust, arguing that it was not as exciting as the old system that culminated with a knock-out phase.
The new football legislation also led to better-run clubs. As the country became richer, club revenues boomed. In fact, for the first time since the mass migration of Brazilians to European leagues began in the eighties, former stars of the national team found it more lucrative to come home rather than playing out their careers in Europe’s lesser leagues, or in the Middle East or Asia. The first A-list returnee was Ronaldo, to Corinthians. He was overweight and slowed by injuries and yet over two seasons he still managed to score 29 goals in 52 league matches. Other stars followed, such as Ronaldinho, Luís Fabiano, Fred, Deco and Alexandre Pato. Promising youngsters were also offered increasingly competitive deals to stay. In 2010 the 18-year-old Neymar established himself as the most exciting young player in South America. Santos were able to pay him a salary, which, together with his marketing deals, made Neymar the fifth richest footballer in the world – before he left for Barcelona in 2013.
The first World Cup of Lula’s presidency was Germany 2006. A week before the first match a video conference call was arranged between Lula in Brasília and the squad at their base in Königstein, so he could wish them the best for the tournament. Yet the media opportunity did not go as planned. “In the papers we’re all reading that Ronaldo is fat. At the end of the day is he fat or is he not fat?” he asked the coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira. Lula behaved more like a football fan than a statesman, asking the question that all of Brazil wanted to know but that the team did not want to answer. Parreira replied calmly: ‘Ronaldo is very strong. But he’s not the little boy he once was and his build has changed.’ When Ronaldo – who was resting and did not take part in the video conference – heard the comment he snapped back: ‘Just as it’s said that I’m fat it is also said that the president drinks a hell of a lot. And just like it’s not true that he drinks a lot it’s not true that I’m fat.’ Rather than instilling the squad with encouragement, Lula’s intervention wound them up – and dominated the press coverage in the days before their first game.
In his exchange with the squad Lula also said that no one could possibly imagine that Brazil would not win in Germany. ‘I have never seen such unanimity in my life.’ The team certainly had grounds for optimism. Alongside the World Cup winning veterans Ronaldo, Cafu and Roberto Carlos the line-up included Ronaldinho, the two-time reigning Fifa World Player of the Year Kaká, the best player in the Italian league and Juninho Pernambucano, the best in the French. The Brazilian national team had turned into a footballing version of the Harlem Globetrotters and this was reflected in the hype. The streets of Weggis, a tiny Swiss tourist town chosen as the pre-tournament training base, turned into a Brazilian carnival during the team’s stay, visited by more than 100,000 fans. Yet Germany 2006 was a disappointment. Ronaldo kept his first team place, and with his three goals became the all time top scorer of goals at World Cups, with a tally of 15. But the team never really gelled. Carlos Alberto Parreira was unable to impose discipline on his millionaire celebrity charges and the team fell at the first serious challenge, eliminated 1-0 by France in a quarter-final.
In 2010 Brazil were again knocked out at the quarter-final stage, this time in a strange match which they lost 2-1 to Holland. Brazil had been 1-0 up at half time and dominant. Yet from the moment that Felipe Melo headed an own goal shortly after the break, Brazil suffered such a disquieting loss of confidence that within a quarter of an hour Holland had scored again. Lula told the nation not to linger over the defeat but to think about the future and prepare for the home World Cup in 2014: “Crying over spilt milk is for people who aren’t used to winning,” he said, reassuring them that football’s world order had not changed: ‘Brazil is used to winning, we’ve won the Cup five times and we’re the country that has the best football in the world.’ It was what people needed to hear but it also sounded hollow. For the first time in a generation the Brazilian team was no longer the dominant international force – that role had been taken by Spain, and it was also producing fewer world-class players. In 2007 Kaká was voted Fifa’s World Player of the Year, culminating a glorious period of 8 wins for Brazilians in the previous 14 years. In the five years since then no Brazilian has come close.
While its football was languishing internationally, however, Brazil was on the rise. International policy was not high on Lula’s list of priorities when he became president, yet he became a figure of global stature, better known around the world than any previous Brazilian leader. Not only was he a symbol in his own country of how a poor man could reach the top, but his Brazil became a symbol of the increasing might of the developing world. In his eight years in the Alvorada Palace Lula spent 470 days abroad – equivalent to more than a day per week of his presidency. Brazil was no longer a geopolitical backwater but a prominent member ofBRIC – the fashionable acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China – the big four emerging economies that were reshaping geopolitics and global trade. Awarding the World Cup to Brazil and the Olympics to Rio de Janeiro was the icing on the cake and the clearest vindication of the new world order.‘Today is the day that Brazil gained its international citizenship,’ Lula said, dabbing tears from his eyes, shortly after the IOC announced its decision in favour of Rio. ‘Today is the day that we have overcome the last vestiges of prejudice against us…Brazil has left behind the level of second-class countries and entered the rank of the first-class countries ... We have proven to the world that we are citizens too.’ The national sadness of World Cup defeats was mitigated by the realization that Brazil was now winning internationally in ways it never had before.
Hosting sporting mega-events, however, is a double-edged sword. The prestige and attention are tempered by greater international scrutiny and the preparations for both the World Cup and the Olympics have been a showcase for the worst as well as the best of Brazil. Host cities have been chosen based on the exchange of political favours and promised improvements to transport infrastructure have been shelved. Construction work has been and subject to suspicious increases in budget. If it wasn’t for personal interventions by Lula, Corinthians’ new stadium in the São Paulo suburb Itaquera, where the opening World Cup match will be played, may have been mothballed half way through construction. Of course, mismanagement and corruption are not unique to Brazil, but for many Brazilians the World Cup and the Olympics have been a reminder of the country’s limitations rather than its strengths. An ironic catchphrase “Imagine na Copa!” – or, Imagine what it will be like during the Cup! – emerged that reflected this national lack of self-confidence. If it is bad now, think how much worse it will be then!
In June 2013 Brazil hosted the Confederations Cup, FIFA’s mini-tournament that marks one year to go before the World Cup, and is used to practice logistics. A few days before the opening match a few thousand protesters marched in São Paulo against a rise in local bus fares. Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas, a disproportionate response that was reminiscent of the dictatorship, which brought out thousands of others in sympathy. The protests quickly spread to more than 100 towns and cities throughout Brazil, by which time grievances had expanded from public transport issues to a generalised dissatisfaction with the political establishment, in particular ire at the lavish funding of World Cup stadiums in places where the communities needed basic services like schools and hospitals. When the Confederations Cup began, the brand new stadiums became the sites of street protests and violent clashes with the police. Football was again uniting Brazil, but this time against its own elected leaders.
The scale of the demonstrations – by far the largest since the return of presidential elections in 1989 – took everyone by surprise, especially President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s former chief-of-staff, who succeeded him in 2011. Dilma, who is Brazil’s first woman to hold office, had been a guerrilla during the dictatorship, imprisoned and tortured. Yet even though she was, like Lula, elected on a platform of progressive social and political reforms, the protests showed that the public had lost faith in the entire political class. Her Brazil was not changing fast enough.During the Confederations Cup, the players of the national team voiced their sympathies with the demonstrators, and so did the crowds in the stadiums. At the beginning of each match, as usually happens in international games, an abbreviated version of the national anthem of each country is played. But this time the Brazilian fans did not stop when the music stopped, but continued to sing the entire anthem a cappella, thus delaying the beginning of the game. It was a moving gesture of togetherness and national pride, and also a grassroots rebuke against FIFA’s strict rules about how host countries must submit themselves to corporate demands. (One of the most outspoken voices against Fifa was Romário, now a member of parliament representing Rio de Janeiro.)
Public anger at politicians contrasted with joy at the performance of the national team. Brazil, once again coached by Luiz Felipe Scolari, played magnificently and won the tournament.
In 2011 Dilma appointed Aldo Rebelo as minister of sport. Aldo is familiar to readers of this book. He is the Communist Party congressman who led the parliamentary inquiry into Nike and the CBF, which led to Ronaldo having to testify why Brazil lost the 1998 World Cup final.Lula had invited Aldo to his weekend football sessions at the Alvorada Palace and also brought him into the heart of government, first as Minister for Political Coordination, and then as leader of the government in the Lower House. Aldo proved to be a dependable and competent member of the Workers’ Party coalition. His appointment as sports minister also represented a remarkable turn-around: only a decade after he was the scourge of the sporting establishment, he was now overseeing the world’s two biggest sporting events.
In 2013 I visited Aldo in his ministerial office in Brasília.He still wears a moustache, but he has aged in a way politicians often do – drained by the responsibilities of power rather than by the passing of the years. An arrangement of objets d’art dominated the room: the display shelf contained busts of Karl Marx and Winston Churchill, religious figurines and a model of the mythical one-legged saci-pererê. There was also a wooden model of the Brazilian three-banded armadillo, a hard-backed mammal that defends itself by curling up into a ball, and is the World Cup mascot, and a caxirola – a percussion instrument made from recycled plastic that looks like a yellow grenade with a green ring pull. The caxirola was designed as the official World Cup instrument, but it was banned from stadiums after the first test-game, since fans unhappy with their team’s performance threw them on the pitch.
Aldo’s elevation to Sports Minister was a vindication of the work of his parliamentary inquiry, which shaped the discourse of how to tackle corruption in sport, leading to Lula’s two football laws. His appointment also coincided with the demise of his nemesis, the long-standing CBF president Ricardo Teixeira, who resigned in 2012, citing ill-health. In fact, the net was tightening around him. Allegations that Teixeira and others had received millions of pounds in bribes from the defunct Swiss sports marketing agency ISL, who were sold World Cup broadcast rights, were being investigated by Fifa’s ethics committee. Its final report would eventually confirm his guilt – and that of his former father-in-law, João Havelange (who would resign as Fifa’s honorary president in 2013 two weeks before its findings were announced). Teixeira was replaced by the eldest of the CBF’s five vice-presidents: José Maria Marin, aged 79, a footballer-turned-politician who had been a high-ranking official of the party that propped up and defended the dictatorship.
I asked Aldo how he felt having to stand on the same platform as someone like Marin, who as a relic from the dictatorship represents everything that he fought against. ‘In this battle we were the winners,’ he said. ‘We won freedom of expression, freedom to have trade unions, political freedom, press freedom. There is no point having a clash because our ideas won out.’ Nevertheless, being sports minister means that he must defend Brazilian interests, even when backing questionable CBF management or decisions. When stadiums are running late, or are over budget or beset with legal complications, Aldo must take the flack. It is a difficult, compromising job, and the stakes are high. ‘[The events] need to go right. There cannot be mistakes. The perception of the country will depend a lot on these events. We need to show that Brazil is capable and efficient.’
We talk about how Brazil has changed since we last met. The increase in wealth – ‘the proletariat has a bit more spending power’, as he describes it – has clogged up the roads with new cars, led millions of people to fly by plane for the first time and meant that the country has almost full employment. We also talk about how Brazil, a country famed for its attacking footballers, is now providing more top defenders and goalkeepers than strikers. I wonder if these represent superficial or deeper changes. Does the self-image of a poor nation redeemed by its ‘futebol-arte’ have any more stock when the nation is richer and the football less beautiful than it was? Maybe Brazilians are not so bothered by winning the World Cup? Does football even retain the importance it once had?
“Brazil is diversifying its recreations, its religiousness. This is fact,” Aldo retorts. “But I don’t think this has changed the interest in football. Presumably there is some university somewhere verifying if interest in football is decreasing, but with my naked eye I don’t see it. What I see is that on Monday morning the janitor is talking about football, and the head of the company is also talking about football. The guys in the lift here comment about football, and the ministers comment about football. Football is still the soul of Brazil, because – as Nelson Rodrigues said – ‘Football helped Brazil be rediscovered from the inside and the outside.’”
Nelson Rodrigues was the playwright who described the defeat by Uruguay at the Maracanã in the 1950 World Cup final as Brazil’s “irremediable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima”. Rather than knock down the Maracanã, it has been refurbished and it will host the final of the 2014 World Cup. It could be the site of another tragedy or the triumphal stage of national redemption. “We are going to run the Cup professionally. We will have beautiful stadiums,” says Aldo. “But whether we like it or not the greatest legacy of the World Cup will be winning the tournament. If Argentina wins, no one will be persuaded that this is a good legacy! The main legacy of the World Cup is not achievable by the government. It is in the hands of the coach and the players.”
The parallels with 1950 are strong. Brazil has more swagger than it did but it remains an insecure country, desperate to show the world that it is a serious, competent and modern nation. Its own self-image could again depend on a single goal.
Roll on the Hexa! Futebol by Alex Bellos is published in paperback by Bloomsbury
