Fontes, Paulo and Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, eds.: Politics, Popular Culture and the Beautiful Game in Brazil: The Country of Football.

Lopes, Pedro

Fontes, Paulo and Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, eds. Politics, Popular Culture and the Beautiful Game in Brazil: The Country of Football. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2014. 274 pp. ISBN: 978-18-4904-417-2.

Politics, Popular Culture and the Beautiful Game in Brazil is a collection of nine texts edited by Paulo Fontes and Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda in which their respective authors offer us a comprehensive framework of the socio-political and economic realities surrounding football in Brazil--also known as soccer in the United States and Canada, a term derived from the early denomination Association Football. In the first essay, Fatima Antunes examines in detail the emergence of football in Brazil as a sport of masses since its introduction in the country in the 1890s. Over the decades, several historic milestones--including its first official match in 1895 and its professionalization in 1933--contributed to engrave the sport in the collective consciousness of the nation unlike in any other.

The historic roots of football in Brazil are somewhat akin to how it emerged elsewhere, including Europe, and are corroborated and summarized recurrently in the volume: a hobby of the elites upon its introduction, it eventually surpasses cricket, rugby, and tennis as the sport of choice among Anglo-Saxon expats in the country. Among these is Charles Miller, credited with the introduction of football in Brazil and with playing an instrumental role in the growth of the sport in popularity among his peers and beyond. From there, the pervasiveness of the game quickly reaches the urban blue-collar classes, as the emergence of industry-based clubs contributes as both cause and effect to this phenomenon. Factory-clubs, drawing the vested support of management, gain in visibility and notoriety over their community-based counterparts, giving rise to the sanctioned status of "player-worker." As these companies realize the marketing potential that the teams they endorse represent for their businesses, they are compelled to capitalize on this asset by engaging in hiring policies based no longer on labor ability, but rather on playing talent.

It is at this point where the role of football in society gains a distinctively Brazilian tone: if, on one hand, football made social mobility possible in ways that were out of reach before, on the other hand, even the most talented of players had to grapple with the downward pressures brought by issues of class and ethnicity. In addition, and no less importantly, the construction of a national identity assumes special relevance in a young and ethnically diverse country such as Brazil, especially when the notion of "Brazilianess" is associated with football and with the consolidation of the so-called "racial-democracy." This is certainly the case during the Getulio Vargas' presidency (1930-1945). Gregory Jackson demonstrates how football becomes part of a concerted effort to promote national identity and pride in that period. Unlike other dictators who notoriously strived to preserve racial homogeneity, Vargas embraced ethnic diversity as authentically Brazilian, shifting the discourse and rejecting the notion of Brazilian backwardness as rooted on the miscegenation of its demographics. Nevertheless, a delicate balance between skin tone and playing ability persisted beyond the Vargas period, where each of the factors continued to impose limits on the affirmation of the other.

The authors in the volume offer a vivid portrait of these dynamics at work, from the Sao Paulo factories at the turn of the XX century to the mining communities of Rio Grande do Sul today. Then and now, the potential for social mobility across ethnic lines is greater than in any other field of activity, although many players never benefited from it. In one of the essays, Jose Sergio Lopes retraces the life and legacy of a former football star--Garrincha--, as well as the circumstances surrounding his death and the eventful funeral that ensued, not only to underscore the importance of the sport in Brazilian society, but also to reflect on its social idiosyncrasies. In another piece, Jose Paulo Florenzano analyses how the beloved sport of the masses is used as a tool of social control during the military dictatorship (1964-1985)--whether for the acculturation of the Amerindian population or as a distraction to effectively demobilize May 1st protests and, therefore, defuse the onset of social unrest. In any case, football is closely interwoven with populism and nationalism, especially during this period, when a victory of the national team is immediately appropriated as a victory of the military regime itself.

The last two works focus on providing a depiction of the current state of affairs of football in Brazil mainly from the standpoint of fans and spectators. Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda uses the construction of the mythic Maracana stadium, the renovations that it underwent over the decades, and its more recent retrofitting for the 2014 World Cup as a metonym for the broad social, political, and economic process of transformation experienced by the sport in the country. The successive metamorphosis of this legendary space is a microcosm of the organic shift of football from a presential spectator sport to a remote-access viewership model. This brought with it the gentrification of the spectator spaces and an inevitable elitization of its local viewership, a symptom of the new "football-economy" capable of generating enormous profits at the global scale. The problem, points Christopher Gaffney in his essay, is that the application of this business paradigm in Brazil has disregarded lower levels of social development in the country, if compared to industrialized nations where the model has been most successfully implemented. In the context of the 2014 World Cup (then to be) held in Brazil, it soon became apparent that the burden of the costs associated with hosting the tournament would mostly fall on taxpayer shoulders that benefit just marginally from the event. In fact, the proverbial tendency for corruption on the part of officials connected to the sport in Brazil is, at least partially, to blame for most of its shortcomings in more recent years.

In spite of this, or maybe because of it, there has been a renaissance of amateur football in Brazil--a setting regarded as the cradle of great footballers and the essence of Brazilian football, as Paulo Fontes writes--, in clear counter cycle with the modern process of alienation of the humble masses who so enthusiastically embraced it for over a century.

Pedro Lopes

Lander University