Tim Vickery on Brazilian Soccer

When Tim Vickery went to Brazil in 1994 he was, like many people traveling to a new land, overwhelmed by a sense of “straight off the boat surprise.” Everything was new, and he loved the feeling of being immersed in it. Vickery, who had never left England until he was 23, quickly came to realize that “discovery is the best thing in life.”

Since 1994, Vickery has been discovering more and more about South American soccer and writing about it for the BBC, The World Game, Sports Illustrated, and World Soccer magazine. He was kind enough to take the time to speak with me recently about soccer in Brazil, the country where he is based.

Tim Vickery (photo: Tim Vickery)

One of the first games Tim Vickery went to when he came to Brazil was between two of the coutry’s biggest teams, Flamengo and Corinthians. At the time, Savio (who would later play for Real Madrid and earn 44 caps for Brazil) was playing for Flamengo. Vickery was amazed at Savio’s talent, and the fact that he had not heard of this player, who was clearly destined for great things. It was at that point, says Vickery, that he realized how strong the Brazilian “factory of players” was. Going to games, he says, was like “going to a movie and seeing the trailers. These are the forthcoming attractions of world soccer and you’re privileged to see them.”

At the same game in which Savio wowed Vickery with his skills, there was another player who also caught his eye, but for a very different reason. Corinthians defensive midfielder Ze Elías was, as Vickery describes him, “an awful, awful player, a bad, bad player.” Ze Elías subscribed to the “if it moves, kick it; if it doesn’t move, kick it until it does” school of soccer more often associated with Vickery’s homeland than Brazil. “It was a surprise to me that someone of this limited technical ability could be considered of great prominence,” says Vickery. Yet Ze Elías’s constant effort and his effectiveness had endeared him to many in Brazil.

Ze Elías was just as popular with Corinthians fans as Savio was with Flamengo supporters. Though he says it was a “huge surprise that a player such as [Ze Elías] could be lionized by the Brazilian public,” this taught Vickery an important lesson: Brazilian soccer has been “mythologized out of all proportion” and the reality is often far different from the stereotypes that most people have about it. Yes, there is jogo bonito, but that is not all to be said about Brazilian soccer.

Anyone who’s watched games from Brazil knows that violence is quite common in the Brazilian league. Vickery notes that games in South America’s largest country “can be played in a very violent atmosphere. It doesn’t take much for the fists to start flying.” A former coach told him simply: “football is survival.”

Brazilian coaches in general today don’t fit the vision many have of Brazilian coaches, encouraging creativity, flair, etc. Advocates of jogo bonito are few in number, having been overtaken by what Vickery describes as the “technocrats” that make up much of the ranks of Brazilian coaches. These men often have advanced degrees in physical education and work with a large team of highly specialized assistants. Like technocrats in any profession, Brazilian soccer coaches “live in a world of statistics. What they can’t measure, they can’t manage. They absolutely love breaking the game down into statistics.” Vickery recalls meetings of coaches he has been to as being incredibly boring, focusing on ideas such as whether moves that string together over seven consecutive passes are more likely to lead to goals.

Current national team boss Dunga is a good example of a new breed of Brazilian coaches. Dunga subscribes to the belief that “winning is everything,” and he is far from the only one in Brazil to believe this. Vickery says he “absolutely hates” the Brazil teams of 1982 and 1986, who played a more free-flowing game, and calls them “specialists in losing.” Dunga’s teams value winning over everything, even if that means leaving out players such as Ronaldinho and Kaká in favor of Josué or Mineiro, both players in the mold of Ze Elías (or, more generously, Dunga himself).

Tim Vickery’s most recent column focused on the touchy subject of race in Brazilian soccer. In that article, Vickery goes back to the 1950 World Cup to explain ways in which race remains important in Brazilian soccer today.

The 1950 team had several prominent black players. There was a widely promoted idea that Brazilians were a new “race,” distinct from the indigenous population, former slaves, and European immigrants who were their ancestors. The 1950 loss led many to question this idea and brought out what Vickery describes as Brazilians’ “racial phobias” about themselves. “The idea of being an inferior, mongrel race, which was very, very popular at the time, that really came to the fore. The players who were singled out for special scorn after that were the black players.”

These racial phobias were not put to rest until 1958, when Didi, Garrincha and a 17 year-old named Pelé won the World Cup for Brazil. They remained in place for goalkeepers until recently (some might say they still exist) and Vickery says the low number of black coaches is evidence they haven’t disappeared completely.The Brazil team of 1958 and many teams after them played a free-flowing soccer that gave rise to the typical “Brazilian” style (exactly which Dunga and the like have been fighting against in recent years). This style originally came about as soccer was brought to the country from England, explains Vickery. The sport there had been “forged by the values of the English industrial revolution … where the virtues of muscle power and reliability” were important. But most important of all in English soccer was the collectivity, everyone working together for a common goal. Factory workers were valued for their muscle power, reliability, and ability to work together during the worker; footballers were prized for the same talents on the weekend.

But in Brazil the game was reinvented. Vickery says that “[soccer] was reinterpreted by the South American masses from a game of straight running, muscular Christianity to a much more balletic thing full of twists and turns.” Playing this new style, Brazil was very successful and this “led to international triumphs and international recognition for a nation that [was] starved of both.”

In this reinterpretation, Brazilians came to value individual play over that of the collective. Despite the pragmatic shifts of recent years, this emphasis on individuality remains an important part of Brazilian soccer. Vickery attributes this in part to the social stratification, which has long been a part of Brazilian society.

“In Brazil, the football culture is much more individual. … Brazil remains semi-feudal and people are born serfs almost. Football is the moment where the serf can become a king. Say I’ve got the ball and you come and tackle me and I do a little shimmy and you fall on your backside. Even if that move serves no objective purpose and you’re on your feet instantly, I’ve made you look ridiculous, for that one little instant I have humiliated you. And that is the moment that will most get the Brazilian public up.”

Robinho (in white) becomes a king during his days with Santos (photo: Sydney Morning Herald)

I ask Vickery whether soccer is played more avidly among any class of Brazilians. Absolutely not, he tells me. Soccer is universal in Brazil and “all the other sports live on scraps.”

But Vickery does acknowledge that the make-up of professional players might be changing. Whereas before well-off Brazilians would have given up their passion for soccer in order to pursue a more stable career, today more are tempted to pursue a career in the sport. Especially with more and more players going abroad, the potential payoffs are just so great today, Vickery says. A player like Kaká, who comes from a quite well-to -do family, would never have tried his hand at professional soccer twenty or thirty years ago. Even Pelé, who came from anything but a wealthy family, was discouraged from going pro by his father, who was afraid an injury might ruin his son’s career, as it had ruined his.

Brazilian soccer was recently in the news when FIFA announced that the country will host the 2014 World Cup. Vickery has written recently about some of the potential problems the nation will have to overcome in order to stage a successful tournament. Given this, I was surprised when he told me that he has no doubt that the 2014 World Cup will be a success. “Football has a fantastic ability to assert itself in the most unfortunate circumstances,” Vickery says.

But that, he says, is not the real question. It is more appropriate to ask what the legacy of the World Cup will be for Brazil the country. “It’s a fantastic opportunity in terms of stadium and infrastructure improvement. I worry that the opportunity is not going to be taken to the fullest extent and the traditional pattern of Brazilian society will reassert itself once more. A small minority will do fantastically well and the great majority won’t get a great deal out of it.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 7:04 am and is filed under Economics, Ethnicity/Race, History, Interviews, Latin America, Nationalism/Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.