A Short History of Brazilian Soccer

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Hi, I'm Franklin Forer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Here today with my colleague Clint Smith.

Hey, hey.

Hey, hey, we're here because we're going to spend the next month, which is going to be consumed by the World Cup, watching the game, not doing any of our staff work for the Atlantic.

This is why I joined the Atlantic.

This is when I signed me up three years ago.

I said, I just want to be on staff so that when it's time for the World Cup, I can watch eight hours of soccer per day for a month.

Yeah, we're going to hope that Jeffrey Goldberg is not listening to this segment of Radio Atlantic.

Right.

Clint, I suppose you're rooting for the U.S.

men's team in this tournament?

I am.

Yeah, it's a young team.

It's an exciting team.

It's our first World Cup in eight years.

I think there's a lot of excitement around so many of the players who are playing in Europe, who are playing in top leagues against some of the best players in the world.

The U.S.

soccer is in a different place than it was eight years ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty stoked for them as well.

But I have to say, one of the joys of watching a World Cup is that while I'm attached to the American team, I'm just as interested, if not more interested, in all the other matches that are unfolding.

And I think one of the pleasures of the World Cup is having other teams that you root for.

Do you have a second team, a second favorite?

Yeah, no, it's interesting to say that because I've been thinking about how the World Cup I probably enjoyed the most was 2018.

And the U.S.

wasn't in the 2018 World Cup.

But I think that that was, in terms of quality, in terms of entertainment value, in terms of the drama of the matches, I mean, that was a World Cup unlike anything that I remember in the 20-some-odd years that I've been watching.

As you know, I used to live in Senegal.

I still live there.

That's right.

I write about Senegal in my book.

I have like a very...

deep affinity for that place.

And it's a place that also completely recalibrated and in many ways made healthier healthier my relationship to the game.

Like I played soccer my whole life and it was always very competitive.

It was always very intense.

And then I got to college and I rode the bench.

And like that was a very new thing for me and it was a very unsettling thing for me.

I was a sort of 18-year-old exotic.

Well, let's just pause.

In this episode, we're outing Clint Smith as having been a very excellent soccer player.

I was.

But the problem is that when you...

are an excellent soccer player in Louisiana, you don't realize that Louisiana is not necessarily a hotbed of global soccer talent against which to measure one's skills.

It's not like the suburbs of Paris.

And so then I went to Senegal and I studied abroad there, and it was

so important for me because it just made me remember that the game was just supposed to be fun.

Like I brought a ball to the beach, and you know, you bring a ball to the beach in Senegal and you're everybody's best friend.

All to say, I'm going to be cheering for Senegal, even though I'm devastated that Sadio Mane is now injured.

And, you know, this is the reign.

For those who don't know, Sadio Sadio Mane used to play for Liverpool, now plays for Bayern Munich, the reigning two-time African player of the year.

And so I'm devastated, but I'm hoping that this is the year that an African team makes it past the quarterfinals.

Well, I wanted to take that image that you provided of playing, the simplicity of playing and the beauty of playing on the beach, because today I wanted to talk about...

my second team.

And I wanted to give a little bit of the context for why I love this team and some of the history.

And I think it's important for us as fans to take that beautiful simplicity, the idealism of the ball in the beach and the ball in the field, this game that is the lingua franca for the planet, and to also talk about the dark underbelly of the game.

Because as we watch this tournament, it's going to be impossible for us not to focus on the moral questions that are at the heart of this game, at the heart of this tournament, at the heart of the way this tournament was selected, that migrant labor was used in an abusive way to build the stadiums that the games are going to be played in.

The tournament's site itself was selected in a totally corrupt sort of way.

The good, the bad, the moral, the immoral, they're just shot through this tournament.

And we're all nevertheless going to watch.

every game in the tournament.

And so I'm just very mindful of the morality of the game.

My second team is Brazil.

And so I want to supply you with the baseline knowledge to transmit the things that I love about Brazil, but also to make sure that you're going into this eyes wide open about the way in which the good and the bad are really just part and parcel of the same thing that I'm so attached to.

Just given their history as the world's greatest footballing superpower, I think they're the easy overdog to root for, but my connections to the team are pretty personal.

My extended family emigrated to Brazil in the 1920s.

They were coming from Eastern Europe.

They were Jewish and they really wanted to go to the United States, but that wasn't a possibility because quotas at the time.

And as a kid, my family from Brazil would come visit and it was an event.

If I had been born in Brazil, like my cousins, I would have grown up in Sao Paulo in the late 70s and 80s at a moment when Brazil was arguably at the peak of its soccer powers.

And at that time, a very recent soccer memory would have been the 1958 World Cup, which was the moment that Brazil announced itself to the rest of the world.

But it's also a moment that I think encapsulates all the reasons why the world fell in love with Brazilian soccer.

This is happening against a backdrop where the world is falling in love love with a lot of other Brazilian exports.

It's a time when Brazilian music is starting to achieve global popularity.

1959 was the moment where the movie Black Orpheus was released and there was a whole

brand of cinema that started to emerge from the country.

Its architecture was the latest and greatest in modern architecture.

In the 1950s, you have this relatively democratic period in the history of the country where there's an incredible amount of social mobility relative to Brazil's historical standards.

And you can see it on the soccer pitch.

In the 58 tournament, you had a team that was filled with black and brown players.

And it really was a break in Brazilian soccer history.

You'd had black and brown players in the past, but you were coming off of an era of economic advancement.

And so the prominence of those players, I think, reflected something about Brazilian society itself.

And you have the 17-year-old who nobody really knew who went by a single name, Pele.

The thing that made Pele and this Brazilian team so extraordinary was that it seemed as if they were breaking every rule about the way that the game was played.

There was an inventiveness to the game as it was displayed by the Brazilians.

There were movements of the hip hip and the body that just were foreign to the rest of the world.

Soccer kind of fits right within the pantheon of all these other exports.

It does seem to be this exotic thing that has kind of a joyfulness.

There was some spirit to it that seemed lacking within European culture that attracted the rest of the world to it.

There are certain goals, like Pele's 1958 goal, that are so iconic that they can't help but merit a nickname.

And perhaps it says something about this nickname and the way that the world thinks about Brazil, that it was called the Sombrero goal.

Sombrero, of course, is Spanish.

It's not a Portuguese word.

But we can forgive that act of cultural ignorance because of the elegance of the goal that's described.

And so Pele...

is playing for Brazil in the 1958 finals against Sweden.

He chests the ball down.

He flicks it up over a defender, makes the defender look like an absolute ass as he's totally turned around, and then

launches it into the goal with incredible authority.

So much happens in such a compressed period of time.

It's a motion that's been invented on the spot, never really to be repeated again.

The other thing about the 58 World Cup that sticks in everybody's mind is there's a moment at the end of the tournament where Brazil triumphs, this unexpected 17-year-old hero is carried off on the shoulders of his teammates, and he's in tears.

But I think it also showed you something about what the world wanted to see in Brazil.

The emotion, the joyousness.

There was something that was kind of the antithesis of the stiff upper lip of the English game, which had been so dominant for so much of soccer's history.

You could see people connecting with the game on this almost spiritual level.

When I was first getting into the game, there was no YouTube.

And so I I had ordered a VHS cassette of highlights from the 1970 World Cup because I knew it was the greatest World Cup ever.

And I knew that the Brazilian team that played was regarded as the greatest team ever.

And if there was one moment in that tape that epitomized Brazil, it was the last goal of the finals against Italy.

It's played in Mexico City.

It was sweltering hot.

And the fact of the heat meant that defenders weren't able to really press up against players.

And so it just allowed more room for Brazil to do its Brazil thing, to get all the jukes, all the subtle hit movements, all the trickery and fakes.

And what makes this goal so spectacular

is just everything that happens as the ball travels up the pitch.

You have a series of defenders who are made to look like fools.

And then the ball is laid off to Pele, and Pele completes this spectacular no-look pass into the path of Carlos Abocho, who just slams the ball into the back of the neck.

And to me, it was the summation

of what makes this such a spectacular game to watch, but Brazil in particular such a spectacular team to watch.

It's not just Pele who is a genius.

There are about half a dozen acts of individual genius on the way to the goal being scored, and that it just the ball travels from front to back in this almost continuous elegant sequence as the ball is handed off from player to player

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I've just described to you what makes the Brazilian game so wonderful, all these things that are embodied in the young Pele.

But I would be totally remiss if I didn't explore the dark side of the Brazilian game with you, because at this moment where the Brazilian national team is at the peak of its powers, also happens to be a moment where Brazil surrenders its democracy.

In the 1960s, a military junta comes to power.

And if there's one thing that we know about soccer is that anything that engenders so much passion and enthusiasm among the masses is something that a politician is going to try to exploit.

And the Brazilian military junta did its best to try to attach itself to this spectacular natural resource that they had in the form of the national team.

The peak of the authoritarian exploitation of soccer is the 1970 World Cup.

You have this team that steps onto the global stage that asserts Brazilian dominance.

It's the third World Cup that Brazil wins out of four.

It's something that's completely unprecedented in the history of the game.

And it's this thing that becomes synonymous with Brazil internationally.

So there was a chirpy soundtrack to the 1970 World Cup team this march, Prafrente Brazil.

Forward Brazil.

And one of the lines in the song imagines 90 million Brazilians, the national team and the whole rest of the nation moving forward in harmony.

I mean, it was like a piece of propaganda for not just the team itself, but ultimately for the dictatorship.

And so the team goals that this World Cup squad produced became kind of a metaphor that the dictatorship tried to adopt for the nation itself, that everybody would be working in sync, there would be no dissent.

They were going to build the nation up in the same sort of way that the national team built the nation up.

And indeed, the dictatorship was super involved with the inner workings of the squad.

And just before the World Cup was about to start, they insisted on firing the team's head coach, who had communist sympathies.

And they installed somebody who they knew would be sympathetic to the dictatorship's mission as the team's manager.

The Americans had just sent the first man to the moon, and that became the metaphor that the dictatorship used for the team.

They were constantly comparing the national team to the American space program, that it was their own way of projecting their power onto the national stage.

It was their own claim to international greatness.

They went on a spending spree after the game, building these massive stadiums in every single city.

And it's hard not to see some of the strategy at work in what they were doing, that this is a classic example of the old bread and circus routine.

Distract the masses by giving the masses exactly what they wanted, this spectacle that was associated with nationalism and patriotism.

Go forward, Brazil, preferente paracio.

That was an anthem.

And Pele, I think to his shame and perhaps in some way to his credit as a player,

allowed this to happen.

He was actually declared an unexportable natural resource by the Brazilian state legislature because he was so associated with Brazil, the Brazilian government, Brazil's national prestige.

And Pele gave an interview in 1972 where he supposedly said, there is no dictatorship in Brazil.

Brazil is a liberal country, a land of happiness.

And he said this while there were thousands of political prisoners rotting in Brazil's jails for having the temerity to challenge the dictatorship.

Now, I'm willing to forgive Pele some of this because he's a sports figure.

He came from incredible poverty.

He's thrust into a position that he didn't ask for.

But on the other hand, he went from being just kind of a passive symbol of the regime to being somebody who was arguably an active apologist for it.

So, I think one of the clear themes of Brazilian soccer as I narrate this story is that there are these conflicting impulses within it.

And just as you have this impulse where it becomes identified with the authoritarian regime, really the country's rebellion against authoritarianism in some sense also originated on the soccer field.

And I just have to digress about this for a second because there was a great player who played the 1982 World Cup team called Socrates.

And he kind of exuded the spirit of the 1960s.

He was kind of shaggy-haired, insolent.

He hated authority.

And as part of his club team, Corinthians, he was part of a movement called Corinthians Democracy.

And so, in a way, they took the national political struggle and they installed it within their team.

And so, Socrates and his comrades at Corinthians chafed at the dictatorial practices of their coaches and kind of seized control over their team.

And he was a smoker.

He was somebody who just wanted to stick a middle finger at the authoritarians.

And the democratic spirit that Socrates represented, that was embodied in the 1982 World Cup team, I think was a powerful counter symbol to the dictatorship.

I think it showed that there was a space for resistance.

And I think it offered a model that civil society craved to embrace for itself.

One of the things that I find both lovable and maybe ultimately a little bit annoying about Socrates is his style of taking penalty kicks.

And in 1986, they're in an elimination game against France.

All comes down to a penalty shootout.

And Socrates has this habit of taking this kind of slow two-step run-up to his penalty kick.

And it's just, it's so arrogant.

It's like, there's something just so kind of wonderfully entitled about it.

And it's an assertion of his personality.

And usually it was effective or sometimes it was effective.

But in 1986, the goalkeeper just swipes it away in this stone-cold motion.

Socrates,

the two-step run-up, and what a good save by Joe Bats, who has now saved a penalty from Zico.

and one from Socrates.

But there's something about the elevation of style over substance or the way that he insisted that style was substance that I think felt both very Brazilian, but also just really did exude the rebelliousness that I've been describing to you about

Socrates.

Brazil in a way has been the victim of its own success.

The country is so identified with soccer that it needs continued success in soccer to justify itself in some way.

And so in its pursuit of victory, there's this running debate about whether the nation need to somehow abandon its traditional identity for playing the game in this cheeky, inventive, very Brazilian sort of way?

Or does it need to adopt more pragmatic tactics in order to compensate for those tendencies?

So, does it need to play a more defensive-minded, more physical game in order to counteract the fact that it's got these hugely inventive players who are basically passengers on the team and don't do a whole lot of defending.

And playing for the national team can become this total millstone for a player.

One of my favorite players who plays for my club team Arsenal is a striker named Gabriel Jesus, who emerged as this teenage savant in the tradition of Pele, or he was compared to the great Ronaldo.

So Gabriel Jesus ended up playing for Brazil in the last World Cup where he was the starting striker.

And he actually had a fairly good tournament.

He was very productive.

He was very useful in the buildup of the play.

But as a striker, your job is to score goals.

And Jesus went through the World Cup without actually having scored a goal.

It was just such a crushing thing for him to reach the pinnacle and to disappoint at the pinnacle that it really dampered his career.

It put him into this kind of long funk that took him years and years to recover from.

The experience was so rattling to Gabriel Jesus that he decided to switch positions.

He went from being a striker to a winger for his club team Manchester City because he found the experience of playing as a striker for Brazil to be such an emotionally exhausting and overwhelming experience.

Fortunately, in the years since, Jesus

has refound his confidence and he's moved back to the center of the park.

And when he plays for Brazil in this World Cup, it'll most likely be as a striker.

Lovely ball from Neymar.

The cross from Sarabia.

Wonderful pass from Neymar.

Neymar, right-footed, takes it and scores.

Jonathan for Neymar on the run trying to catch up to it.

Neymar

and he tears his way through.

Goodness he has.

He cuts it from Pakita, who scores.

Magic from Neymar.

We can't talk about Brazil and this current iteration of Brazil without talking about Neymar.

And Neymar is one of those figures in sports who everybody loves to hate.

Europeans tend to despise Neymar and especially casual viewers of the game tend to despise Neymar because when he's fouled, he's had this long history of writhing on the ground in exaggerated pain where you're like, come on, man.

Like there's there's no way it hurt that bad.

And so he would just roll and roll and roll and roll.

Herbs is looking for a red card here.

And Neymar's writhing on the ground was so exaggerated, so comical that it was actually sent up in an ad that KFC made in South Africa where a player rolls off the pitch, writhing in pain, keeps on rolling and writhing out of the stadium, through South African streets, writhes all the way up to a crosswalk, stops at the stop sign, continues writhing when the walk sign, and rides all the way up to a KFC counter where he stands up as if nothing's happened to him and orders some chicken.

But in Brazil, he was somebody who carried the expectations of his country on his shoulders.

He was seen as the one transcendent genius on the team, somebody who tapped into the legacy of Pele, somebody who had that kind of inventiveness.

And he was the Brazil part of Brazil.

You could just see when he played that he was crushed by the expectations that were placed on him.

And so this is now, we're going into his third World Cup.

It's happening actually a month after presidential elections in Brazil.

And the question with Neymar, just as it was with Pele, is where does he stand vis-à-vis Brazilian democracy?

And in the run-up to the most recent election, he sided on the wrong side, in my opinion, both morally and politically, and endorsed the country's proto-authoritarian incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro.

So Neymar endorses Bolsonaro in a TikTok video, of course, where he's sitting in recovery boots and does a karaoke to a rap that was produced in support of Bolsonaro.

And there was something just so feckless about the whole video because it's so

jocular.

He's treating Brazil's descent into autocracy and his own role in it in this very, very frivolous sort of way.

So he's placed himself, much like Pele did, on the wrong side of of history.

So I know that I have just loaded you down with a lot of the ugly part of what is Brazilian soccer, that there is this legacy of corruption, that there is the ways in which dictatorships have exploited the game.

Of course, that's just the flip side of everything else.

And there is this temptation as fans to ignore the dark side of the games that we watch, of the teams that we admire.

When I look at the players who step on the field, the fact that this history exists only makes me admire the accomplishments within the game itself even more.

The fact that with the weight of this radioactive yellow jersey that they put on, which means so much to the country that politicians are constantly trying to exploit it, the fact that they're able to achieve in spite of all that makes me admire the accomplishments because it's creativity, its innovation thriving in some ways in the most difficult of sporting circumstances.

This dialectical relationship between the beautiful and the ugly that exists within Brazil certainly exists within the entirety of this World Cup, but it also exists within any national team team that you could possibly be rooting for in this tournament.

Because those tensions are going to be so evident, it's incumbent upon us as fans to explore those tensions and also to enjoy them because the ugly part is part of what makes the beautiful part so beautiful.

This episode was produced by AC Milan Valdez with help from Kevin Townsend.

It was edited by Claudine Ebade.

Sam Fentress is our fact-checker.

For more big picture takeaways about World Cup 2022, from me and Clint and other Atlantic writers, check out our newsletter, The Great Game, at theatlantic.com/slash newsletters.