Football in Brazil

For Brazilians, football is not so much the national game, more the stuff of life. And now they are preparing to host the World Cup. In our photo essay, CHRISTOPHER PILLITZ captures a society at play. MICHAEL REID sets the scene



From Intelligent Life magazine, March/April 2014

At five o’clock on Thursday June 12th, if all goes to plan, a whistle will blow in São Paulo and the 20th World Cup will begin. It will be hard to hear, because no fans in the world are as passionately noisy as Brazil’s. They see it almost as a right that their team, the seleção in their famous canary-yellow shirts, will emerge a month later as the winners. For them, this is not just a football tournament, but an opportunity to exorcise a ghost from the national psyche.

The World Cup has been held in Brazil only once before, in 1950, and it turned into a national humiliation. On paper Brazil had the best team in the world. The government rose to the big occasion by building the Maracanã stadium in Rio, in two years flat. Brazil duly reached the final, where they faced Uruguay in front of an estimated 200,000 spectators, a world record. But the unthinkable happened: after Brazil had taken the lead, Uruguay stole two late goals. An anthropologist, Roberto DaMatta, described it as “perhaps the greatest tragedy in contemporary Brazilian history”.

In a country that suffered dictatorship and hyperinflation a few decades ago, you might think this was an exaggeration. Yet many Brazilians would agree. Not for nothing does Brazil like to call itself o país de futebol—the football country. If France expresses itself through cuisine and Italy through art, Brazil does so by kicking a ball. Of course there is much more to it than sport: the world’s seventh-largest economy, a powerhouse of energy and agribusiness, a vibrant democracy that has lifted tens of millions out of poverty. But it is on the pitch that this nation lives out its qualities and its defects. No Brazilian has ever won a Nobel prize, but their footballers have won the World Cup five times—more than any other country.

Pictured: ROCINHA, RIO DE JANEIRO

“This is the largest and oldest favela in Rio. About 150,000 people live in a horseshoe that wraps around the mountain, and every green space has been overtaken by brick shacks. There are, at best, four or five of these spaces where people can play football. I found that the word ‘football’ was a magic passport to get access. I managed to find a roof-top vantage point to photograph these boys, who all live near this little pitch, having a kickaround one evening. There isn’t much else for them to do”