It is in this context that Pelé and Brazilian soccer assumed a social as much as a sporting signifi cance for British football fans of the 1950s and 60s. At a time when black players were ‘rare, exotic sights’ on English football grounds, and regularly the targets of racial abuse when they did appear, Pelé’s rise to wealth and fame, and the dazzling skills that had taken him there, constituted an eloquent condemnation of the unrefl ecting Victorianism which blighted the English game and the society it so depressingly mirrored (Walvin, 1986: 70).20 A decade later, as the technocratic ascendancy was throttling the last gasps of individualism out of English football, Brazil seemed to be the fi nal outpost of a natural untutored game. According to Eduardo Galeano, Brazil’s triumph in Mexico in 1970 demonstrated that in spite of the crabbed professionalism of the modern game it was still possible to play beautiful football and win:
Brazil played football worthy of her people’s yearning for celebration and craving for beauty. All the world was suffering from the mediocrity of defensive football, which had the entire side hanging back to maintain the catenaccio while one or two men played by themselves up front. Risk and creative spontaneity weren’t allowed. Brazil, however, was astonishing:
a team on the attack, playing with four strikers, Jairzinho, Tostão, Pelé and Rivelino, sometimes increased to fi ve and even six when Gerson and Carlos Alberto came up from the back. (Galeano, 1997: 137)
Brazil’s victory over Italy in the fi nal occasioned scenes of wild jubilation, ‘a joyful, dancing invasion of fans milling around their victorious players’ in which Brian Glanville detected an affi rmation of the Dionysian approach to the game, ‘a refl ection of the way Brazil had played; and played was, indeed, the word.
For all their dedication, all their passion, they and their country
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had somehow managed to remain aware that football was, after all, a game; something to be enjoyed’ (Glanville, 1984: 184–5).
As seductive as these descriptions are, they suggest more about the global yearning for a celebratory style of football than they tell us about the history of the game in Brazil:
In Britain and around the world, there is a need to believe in Brazil as the repository of football’s soul. If Brazilian football did not exist, you feel it would be necessary to invent it. In the process the reality of Brazilian football can be hard to discern behind the myth. (Taylor, 1998: 15) What this representation of football in Brazil fails to acknowledge is its place in the nation’s complex ethnic mix and its resulting role as a locus for disputes about national identity. Despite the efforts of British commentators to portray Brazil as a football utopia, the social functioning of the game there is similar to its role in Britain, with matters of race imbricated over relations of class.
The struggle between opposing styles and philosophies of play in Brazil offers a mirror image of the British experience. Brazil’s distinctive identity, Freyre argues, has come from its uniquely varied racial heritage, which has made it a ‘tropical hybrid (European technology infused with Amerindian and African psychic forces)’. These diverse characteristics are visible on the football fi eld where their struggle for supremacy is refl ected in the form of contrasting and alternately dominant styles of play, one
‘dionysian’, spontaneous and individualistic, closely associated with blacks and mulattoes, the other ‘apollonian’, centred on teamwork, tactics, strength and organisation, closely linked with European dominance of the game in Brazil (Freyre, 1964: vii–viii).
Robert Levine notes that:
The fi rst Brazilian team to tour Europe, São Paulo’s Paulistano in 1926, represented the old, fascinating spectators with its fl uid, ballet-like play and its elegance; but by the mid-1930s fl uid spontaneity began to give away [sic] to European training methods and more ‘scientifi c’ forms of strategy. (Levine, 1980a: 455)
This change of style was linked to the professionalisation of Brazilian football in 1933–4 which, while it brought more poor,
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black players than ever before into the game, also reinforced their economic and tactical subjection to the Europeanised elite who ran Brazilian soccer (see Taylor, 1998: 82, 84). In the decade after its professionalisation the dominant fi gure in Brazilian football was not any of its galaxy of black stars but Flamengo’s Hungarian coach, Dori Krieschner, the high priest of a disciplined, apollonian style. Uncompromising and autocratic, Krieschner demanded absolute obedience from players whom he regarded with genial contempt. He routinely referred to his black players as ‘crioulos’ or ‘moleques’, Brazilian approximations of ‘nigger’.
Brazilian football, he pronounced, had great promise, but it would achieve international success only when its raw (black) talent was harnessed to (white) European tactics and discipline (see Levine, 1980a). This sort of racism exercised a considerable infl uence over the selection of the Brazilian national team until well into the 1950s. Robert Levine notes that the Confederação Brasileiro da Deportes (Brazilian Sports Confederation)
displayed nervous interest in the racial composition of teams chosen to represent Brazil abroad. The Seleção chosen for the Rio Branco Cup (the South American Championship) always seemed to have more non-white players than the Brazilian teams sent to compete with the Europeans...At the World Cup matches in France [in 1938] the two best blacks, Leonidas and Tim (Elba Vargas Lima), were without explanation kept out of the semi-fi nals against Italy, and Brazil lost 2–1...In 1950, the Seleção’s loss to Uruguay was blamed on three of its black players (Barbosa, Juvenal, and Bigode) and, as late as 1958, the CBD hesitated before fi elding a predominately [sic]
non-white squad. Both Pelé and Garrincha, in the end the heroes of Brazil’s fi rst World Cup championship, were added to the Seleção only at the last minute by worried offi cials. (Levine, 1980b: 239)
The successes in Sweden, Chile and Mexico compelled the Brazilian football establishment to acknowledge the centrality of the Dionysian style to the national game and embrace its mainly black exponents. Celebrated by the media, intellectuals and the dominant classes, football emerged as one of the few genuinely integrating forces in the vast geographical and ethnic sprawl of modern Brazil, a vital agent ‘for bridging social distance
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and encouraging national pride...heightening local identity and reducing intra-class hostility’ (Levine, 1980b: 248).
Yet as Ilan Rachum has shown, football’s status as an emblem of unity did little to alter the conditions of most of its black professionals. Football continued to refl ect
more of the old than the new. Coaches lacked authority and were subject to the whims of the club directorates. The paternalistic come e dorme tradition persisted: athletes were housed in special barracks and kept under surveillance lest they partake in drinking or macumba rituals, practices believed common to (and harmful for) the lower classes. Salaries remained low. (quoted in Levine, 1980b: 241)
Despite the offi cial celebration of Pelé, and of football itself as an emblem of egalitarianism and national integration, the racist attitudes which had shaped the administration of the game in Brazil remained largely unchanged, rudely surfacing whenever the team failed to meet the high expectations of offi cials, the media and the public:
When the 1966 Seleção began to play sloppily, it was subjected to a barrage of attacks, ranging from allegations that its members were ugly and too fat to a published remark that the team was the ‘best ever – since not a single case of syphilis was discovered among the players’. (Levine, 1980b: 247) Clearly, football in Brazil was no model of meritocracy. It served instead, as in England, to reinforce the established structures of power and was consistently used ‘by the elite to bolster offi cial ideology and to channel social energy in ways compatible with prevailing social values’ (Levine, 1980b: 233). In the late 1960s, with his popularity waning, Brazil’s President, General Emiliano Garrasatzu Medici, developed a sudden taste for football. He attended Flamengo’s home games, took a close interest in the training and selection of the Seleção and personally intervened on the eve of the 1970 World Cup to fi re its outspoken coach, João Saldanha. After its victory the whole team was fl own directly from Mexico City to Brasilia where Medici received them, appearing on the balcony of the President’s offi cial residence with Pelé and the Jules Rimet Trophy. The regime identifi ed the team’s slogan,
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‘In sport as in life, integration brings victory’ with its own efforts to foster national development through discipline. Indeed the team’s song, ‘Pra Frente Brasil!’ (Forward Brazil!), was brazenly appropriated by the military and used as the theme tune at political rallies and even in television commercials.21 Pelé was shamelessly used by the football establishment, itself an arm of the military regime as of 1970, to endorse its doctrines, embody its values and to rally national pride. Not that he needed much persuasion. A vociferous patriot, when questioned by a Uruguayan journalist in 1972 about his country’s military dictatorship, Pelé observed:
‘There is no dictatorship in Brazil. Brazil is a liberal country, a land of happiness. We are a free people. Our leaders know what is best for [us], and govern [us] in a spirit of toleration and patriotism’
(quoted in Levine, 1980b): 244). Meanwhile he counselled that his poor black brothers should in no way aspire to the wealth he enjoyed, for God himself had made them poor and black, just as he had given Pelé unmatched athletic prowess so that he might bring them joy.22
These facts are well known and widely documented, yet they play no part in popular British accounts of Pelé and Brazilian football. This is because for British critics it is not the objective accuracy of accounts of Brazilian football that matter but the uses to which they might be put – their purpose is functional and not representational. When in 1516, stirred by early accounts of the New World and its exploration, Sir Thomas More published his account of an ideal commonwealth off the coast of America, his Utopia was not intended to propose a blueprint for the foundation of any such society. More’s Utopia (1516) was a vehicle by which he might critique the shortcomings of the political and social order within which he lived. He invented the Utopia that his society’s failings demanded – its functioning systems and enlightened policies a subtle accounting of his own society’s defi ciencies.23 Similarly in the 1950s and 60s, English fans and the media invented the Pelé and the Brazil, the football Utopia they needed, to critique the dourness of the domestic game and the prejudice which impeded broader social progress. Pelé served both as a stick with which to beat the administration of the domestic game
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and as an ideal of what local potential, freed from the shackles of bigotry, might look like should it ever be realised. Pelé and the football he championed thus serve as the locus for a muted protest against the disappointments of Britain in the 1950s and 60s, whose public, promised a brave new world of equality and plenty by its post-war leaders, found itself still chafi ng against the restrictions of the old world. If the Beats railed against the orthodoxies of 1950s America by hitting the road and the bottle, the British registered their disappointment at the negligible pace of social change in post-war Britain more passively, by standing in the rain at a football match and dreaming of Pelé.
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