Brazil
From all-night leagues to Amazonian beauties, the home of Pele, the Maracana and the beautiful game
guarantees a football experience like nothing on earth
In Brazil, there is so much football to be seen. Since the sport permeates the culture like in no
other country in the world, often the most rewarding experiences – where you
get to the soul of what football means here – are the quirky, unexpected or
bizarre. Like the uniquely Brazilian Peladão – or Big Kickabout – the famous amateur
tournament in the Amazon rainforest city of Manaus, in which every competing
team must also submit a beauty queen to parade on the opening day.
One of the most exciting
spectacles to be seen in a football stadium, not a ball is to be seen, yet the
terraces are packed as a military band belts out a marching song and onto the
turf strut more than 500 Brazilian beauty queens wearing trainers, hot pants
and customised football strips.
Dates only get fixed a few
weeks before the annual competition and no tourists are expected. It’s a long
way to go – four hours by plane from Rio de Janeiro – but it is an
unforgettable experience, guaranteeing, at the least, several years of
anecdotes about getting to the heart of the beautiful game.
Of course, you don’t need
to go to the middle of the Amazon to soak up Brazilian passion for the world’s
most popular sport. Even if you never leave Rio de Janeiro there are enough
football-related sites to keep any aficionado happy. The most obvious primary
destination is the concrete behemoth that is the Maracana Stadium.
To get the best view
either go up to the Christ statue and look down, or take one of the helicopter
tours, and see how it overwhelms the cityscape as Rio spreads out between the
mountains. The Maracana was built when Brazil hosted the 1950 World Cup. It was
the biggest stadium in the world with a 200,000 capacity and holds the record
for the highest attendance of any game: the 1950 final attracted just 146 short
of a capacity crowd.
The Maracana has to be
visited because of its history – it has been the greatest stage for generations
of top Brazilian players, not least Pele, who scored his 1000th goal here – yet
there is something underwhelming about it. Plans for a half-decent museum have
never materialised and the exhibition that is there is barely more than a few
black-and-white photographs.
With seating that was
installed for the 2000 FIFA Club World Championship, the capacity is now about
70,000. Matches are still held here – Flamengo and Fluminense both use it as
their home ground – but they are almost always disappointing experiences.
League games rarely get crowds of more than 15,000, the lack of atmosphere an
insult to the memory of its majestic past.
Attendances are low for
several reasons – disorganisation, cost, the time of matches at almost 10pm –
yet the most important one is that because of the size of Brazil, bad transport
infrastructure and the relative poverty of its inhabitants, there are almost no
away fans. If you do choose to see any game, local derbies are always the
best. Which is why the state
championships – usually between January and March – are almost always the most
rewarding tournaments. If mid-table Flamengo and Fluminense meet in the national
league on a Wednesday night, the Maracana will be barely a quarter full. If the
same teams meet in a knock-out phase of the state championship, the Maraca will
be sold out with colourful, joyous fans, playing music, singing, jumping –
exactly the carnival scene you expect from Brazilians.
The most congenial stadium
in Rio is Vasco da Gama’s home ground, Sao Januario. Even with no away fans,
there is always a lovely atmosphere here.
Vasco are Rio’s Portuguese
team and the stadium was built in 1927 full of blue Portuguese azulejo tiles
and ornate ironwork. The capacity is just 35,000 and the main stand is usually
full. There is a community feel and the Portuguese influence can also be seen
by the fact that there is a chapel by the side of one of the goals – which
means the stands cannot go completely around the pitch.
On matchdays, the trophy
room is open, crammed with cups and medals, and there’s a meat barbecue
restaurant that has a homely, family feel. Unlike the Maracana – where you’re
so far away from the action it’s almost like watching it on TV – in Sao
Januario you’re right in front of the players.
If you’re not in Rio for a
match day, don’t worry, you can’t avoid football. Football buskers stand on
street corners performing keepy-uppies – Fabinho, one of the best known, is
often down on Ipanema beach and has a routine that includes ball bearings and
an egg. The beaches are also great to watch futevolei – footvolley – which is
beach volleyball where you use your feet, chest and head. Often big stars of
the past – such as Edmundo, and sometimes even Romario – will appear and play
futevolei with their mates. The game is a distilled version of Brazilian
control skills and, because there is no way to smash the ball down, rallies can
go on for a surprisingly long time – making it a bit like watching ballet.
At the other end of the
celebrity scale is the Aterro de Flamengo, where the state-owned pitches are
used almost 24 hours a day. Situated not far from the Sugar Loaf Mountain –
just by the main road that leads from the city centre to Copacabana – they are
worth visiting to get a feel for the importance of football to ordinary
Brazilians. It is here where, when the restaurants shut at night, teams of
waiters, hotel porters and other evening workers play in local leagues. The
games go all through the night, and in the morning are full of workers coming
off their night shifts to play competitive games, drink a beer and have a
churrasco barbecue. This would be the easiest place to join in and play with
the locals.
Rio is Brazil’s cultural
and tourist capital, but it is fading as a football power because of the
decline of its big clubs. The best players are in Sao Paulo, where salaries are
highest. It may be a claustrophobic concrete megalopolis of more than 20
million people, but it has the best bars, shops, restaurants and clubs – and
the football isn’t bad either. The antique Pacaembu, with its art deco
frontage, is a classic ground, and the Morumbi – another of Brazil’s giant
stadia – has the atmosphere of the Maracana when it’s full.
An hour’s drive from Sao
Paulo towards the coast is Santos, the port city whose club is most famous for
Pele. The ground, the Vila Belmiro, is in the middle of a residential area and
during match days the surrounding streets liven up with street stalls. The
Santos archive, open during the day, is the only proper homage to the Pele
years in Brazil and is probably the best stadium museum in the country.
Brazil has a larger number
of legendary footballers than any other country and some of them are
surprisingly accessible. Socrates, for example, can usually be found in one of
the Pinguim bars in his home town of Riberão Preto. Usually he goes to the one
in the shopping centre, since there are less tourists, but he is always very
friendly and will sign autographs and pose for pictures. It is also interesting
to discover the places where current footballers are from – Ronaldo is from
Bento Ribeiro, a working-class neighbourhood in Rio, whereas Adriano is from
the tough inner-city favela Vila Cruizeiro. Go accompanied by a Brazilian you
trust during the day and it is perfectly safe to visit, and worthwhile to
understand the hardship and poverty from which he came.
In the 1970s, when Brazil
was under dictatorship, mega-stadiums were built up and down the country. They
are shrines to football, but also to a certain state-sponsored arrogance: in
truth, political statements in ugly concrete. In the north east, each state
capital – Salvador, Maceio, Recife, Fortaleza, Sao Luiz and Belem – has a
stadium with a capacity between 50,000 and 100,000.
Because Brazil is the size
of a continent, each region has distinctive characteristics, which are
reflected in everything from the food you buy in the stadium to the behaviour
of the fans. In Salvador, for instance, the Brazilian city where the African
influence is most strongly felt, the drummers on the terraces play a much more
uplifting, syncopated sound than the bands in, say, Porto Alegre, in the more
European-influenced south.
The excitement and
eccentricities of the fans can also be greater the farther away you move from
the south east, the country’s centre of gravity. When Belem, on the mouth of
the Amazon, had a team in the first division it had the league’s highest
average crowd.
As well as the Peladão and
its football beauty queens, the Amazon is a rich source of alternative football
culture. Across the river from Belem is Macapa, famous for being the only city
in Brazil bisected by the equator. And how did its residents decide to mark
this fact? By building, perhaps, a Greenwich-style observatory? Absolutely not.
They built Zerão – Big Zero – a stadium that has each half in a different
hemisphere. Big Zero is full of local folklore and since it’s the only big
stadium in the state, it is always used during the state championships in the first
half of the year.
If you drive along the
Macapa esplanade at high tide you can make out two crossbars poking out of the
sea. When the tide is out, these mark the goals of a local invention, futelama,
or footmud – football on the slippy brown riverbed. It’s great fun as you carry
on playing until the sea is knee-height.
Wherever Brazilians are,
they adapt football for their own conditions – the more you travel in Brazil
the more you see this for yourself.