The Beautiful Game

Lives Here

In Brazil, soccer was initially played among elite clubs behind closed doors. Blacks were excluded. Outside the confines of formal championships, however, the sport was quickly taken up as a game played in abandoned lots, meadows and urban gaps. Balls were improvised, fields were improvised, and the game was fertile ground for the spirit of improvisation.

No other activity brought over from Europe took root so widely and so immediately. This resulted in an imaginative style of play that made competition and gratifying playfulness inseparable, with blacks and people of mixed race rising from exclusion and becoming its main protagonists.

Outside the confines of formal championships, the sport was quickly taken up as a game played in abandoned lots, meadows and urban gaps.

This style of play took over the championships and official clubs in the 1930s and gained international recognition for the first time during the 1938 World Cup. At the time, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre believed soccer confirmed his own thesis, explored in two classic tomes on Brazilian culture, “The Masters and the Slaves” and “The Mansions and the Shanties.”

Brazilian soccer style transformed the “British and Apollonian” game into “Dionysian dance”; straight and angular European soccer became sinuous and curving as it took on the body movements of samba dancers and the martial art dancers and fighters of Brazilian capoeira. Freyre saw in it an affirmation of a tropical and mestizo culture that would enable it to reverse the stigmas of a heritage of slavery.

Whether these ideas were conscious or not, the style prevailed throughout the triumphs in the 1958, 1962 and 1970 World Cups, when Brazilian soccer became renowned. It brought together competitive efficiency with inventive and beautiful moves. Pelé and Garrincha soared during the golden phase of soccer’s high modern form.

To the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Brazilian style was “poetic soccer” based on dribbling and a nonlinear opening of unforeseen spaces, as opposed to the linearly responsible “prose soccer” prevalent in Europe.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that, at that point, mass culture worldwide was becoming North American or provincial, with the exception of the Brazilian national team. And it is only fair to add that the same thing could be said of bossa nova, Tom Jobim and João Gilberto (as well as the Beatles, of course).

Let us say that at least at its foundations, Brazilian soccer did not obey Anglo-Saxon pragmatism nor any form of Cartesianism. Instead, it took advantage of a margin of relatively gratuitous unproductivity allowed in soccer, the least numerical of all ball games, to open the way for a culture of the periphery — a culture that is elliptical and festive and in which “carnaval” is a verb.

CLASSIC GOAL 1970 BRAZIL vs. ITALY Alberto Brazil’s last goal in the World Cup final, one of the most famous in the tournament’s history, showcased the Seleção at its fluid best. Andrew Das 2. Jairzinho drives at the Italy captain, Giacinto Facchetti, and feeds Pelé, who coolly rolls the ball into the path of the onrushing Carlos Alberto. He hammers it over Enrico Albertosi to cap Brazil’s victory. Final score: Brazil 4, Italy 1. Pelé Rivelino 1 1. The nine-pass move is just a series of short exchanges until Roberto Rivelino’s sharp pass to Jairzinho suddenly makes it dangerous. 2 Jairzinho

This phenomenon, this wide recognition, has also always been seen as a factor of political alienation, perpetuating backwardness, and the failure to tackle the real problems of an unequal society. Soccer is seen ambivalently in Brazil both as a model of possible achievements, since the nation succeeded with its own winning style of play, and as an emblem for all that the country fails to accomplish in education, health, distribution of wealth and political transparency.

We could say soccer achieves in the playing field a racial democracy that Brazilian society does not. It showcases the proliferation of talent as well as the inability, the irresponsibility and the narrowness of the private interests that manage them.

Over the past few decades world soccer has become more athletic, more in demand, more planned, collective and mercantile. The old “poetic soccer” lost much of its leeway, although it has not ceased to exist, nor, more important, has it ceased to be an object of desire in Brazil.

José Miguel Wisnik is a Brazilian musician, composer and essayist who writes frequently about soccer. He is the author of “Poison Remedy,” a book about soccer in Brazilian society.