Although Brazilians are keen on sports in general, in terms of popularity there is one sport that stands out. It is played throughout the country and has become a source of great national pride. It is, of course, football.
For decades Brazil has produced an astonishing number of highly talented professional footballers, many of whom leave the country to spend at least part of their careers abroad. The Brazil national team, widely regarded as the finest exponents of 'the beautiful game', have won the World Cup five times - twice more than any other country. After victories in 1958, 1962, 1970 and 1994, the latest triumph came in Japan and South Korea in 2002.
Maracanã Stadium
The Maracanã Stadium, built in Rio de Janeiro for the 1950 World Cup, is one of the largest and most famous sports venues in the world, with a capacity of almost 100,000. Now virtually all-seater, the Maracanã used to be capable of holding even bigger crowds, the largest of which was almost 200,000 (still the world-record football attendance) for the 1950 World Cup final.
Even those who are not keen on football have heard of Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), internationally acclaimed the greatest footballer of all time, and the scorer of more than 1,200 goals during his 18-year career in Brazil.
Among Brazil's current crop of stars, Ronaldo (whose two goals sealed the 2002 World Cup final victory), Ronaldinho and Robinho are probably the most famous. They play club football in Europe for AC Milan, Barcelona and Real Madrid respectively.
Volleyball is the second most popular sport in Brazil. The Brazilian men's team won gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics for both conventional volleyball, played on an indoor court, and beach volleyball, played outdoors on sand. The women's teams, widely expected to do equally well, had to be satisfied with a single silver medal for beach volleyball.
Brazil is regarded as a major force in basketball, having produced impressive performances at many Olympic Games. In Athens, however, neither the men's nor the women's team won a medal.
Tennis is quite popular, and was given a boost in the late 1990s with the success enjoyed by by Gustavo Kuerten, known to all Brazilians by his nickname 'Guga'. Kuerten has won sixteen international men's singles competitions, including three victories in the French Open in 1997, 2000 and 2001. Before Kuerten, the biggest Brazilian impact on the international tennis scene had been made by Maria Ester Bueno, who won an astonishing seven ladies' singles titles at Wimbledon between 1958 and 1966.
Motor racing has grown in popularity since the late 1960s when Emerson Fittipaldi started accumulating Formula One victories. There have been a number of excellent Brazilian drivers, such as Nelson Piquet, world champion in 1981, 1983 and 1987, and Ayrton Senna, world champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991, who tragically died in a crash at Italian Grand Prix in 1994. Rubens Barrichello, number two to Michael Schumacher in the Ferrari team, and himself the winner of many races, has been Brazil's most successful driver over the last ten years.
Brazilians have also distinguished themselves in international rowing, sailing, judo, swimming and gymnastics competitions, while the country's extensive coastline and warm climate have encouraged ever-increasing participation in relatively new sports such as surfing, windsurfing and hang-gliding.
History of Brazilian football
Englishman Charles Miller was carrying a football when he landed in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, hoping to create interest in the sport that was rapidly becoming popular in Britain. No one could have imagined then that the seeds of one of Brazil's national passions were about to be sown, or that a hundred years later the country would be admired worldwide for the beauty with which its footballers played the game.
Football spread through Brazil like wildfire, and by the 1920s the country had established itself as a footballing force in South America. In the 1930s fans were enthralled by the skills of Domingos da Guia, a full-back with a talent for attacking and dribbling the ball out of his own area; Leônidas da Silva, who achieved international fame by inventing the bicycle kick; and Friedreich, a formidable striker who was said to have scored more than one thousand goals.
Brazil would have to wait some time for its first world title, however. Though Brazilian players were blessed with enormous natural talent, the sport remained in a state of administrative disarray.
In 1950 Brazil hosted the World Cup and built the largest stadium in the world, the Maracanã. The shock defeat by Uruguay in the final showed the true intensity of the national passion: the Maracanã fell silent, then erupted into sobs. There were heart attacks, brawls and even attempted suicides. Stars from the 1950 team such as the goalkeeper Barbosa, the full-backs Pinheiro and Juvenal and the attackers Zizinho, Ademir and Jair were greatly affected by what is still referred to as a national tragedy. Another eight years would pass before the golden age of Brazilian football truly arrived.
In 1958, in Sweden, Brazil won its first World Cup with a team featuring Gilmar, Djalma Santos, Bellini, Nilton Santos, Didi, Garrincha, Vavá and Zagallo - and of course a seventeen-year-old now considered the greatest footballer of the twentieth century: Pelé.
Pelé was injured early in the 1962 World Cup tournament in Chile, but Brazil, with Garrincha's dribbling skills deployed to devastating effect, had more than enough talent to win its second consecutive title.
Many football fans consider the Brazilian team that won the 1970 World Cup in Mexico - featuring Pelé, Carlos Alberto, Clodoaldo, Gerson, Jairzinho, Rivelino and Tostão - to have been the best of all time, responsible for producing some of the finest televised moments in the history of the sport.
Over the next 20 years Brazil continued to be a source of great players - Paulo César, Reinaldo, Falcão, Sócrates, Zico, Júnior and Cerezzo - but the national team failed to win the World Cup. The team which participated in the 1982 tournament in Spain won many admirers for its exhilarating attacking football, but was eliminated by eventual champions Italy in a game widely regarded as one of the most exciting ever.
The football tournament that forms part of the Olympic Games is taken quite seriously by Brazilian fans, perhaps particularly because it is a competition in which Brazil has not yet managed to stamp its authority. Twice in the 1980s Brazil fell at the last hurdle, winning silver in Los Angeles (1984) and in Seoul (1988). The best performance since then has been a bronze medal in Atlanta in 1996.
Brazil's fourth World Cup victory came in the United States in 1994. The team did not satisfy its fans' desire for 'football art', but was effectively marshalled by captain Dunga and spearheaded by the diminutive pairing of Bebeto and Romário, the latter widely considered the best striker in the world in the mid-1990s.
That mantle then passed to Ronaldo, a teenage member of the 1994 squad whose pace and finishing ability had already made him a global star by the time of the 1998 World Cup in France. Brazil's team in that tournament was good but not exceptional: weaknesses were exposed in the final against France, and a listless performance led to a 0-3 defeat.
Before the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea the customary confidence of Brazil's fans was somewhat lacking, the team having struggled even to qualify for the competition. When it mattered, however, the '3 R's' of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Rivaldo all began to click into gear, as did the two marauding full-backs, Cafu and Roberto Carlos. The team made impressive progress to the final, where they overcame Germany 2-0 with two goals from Ronaldo.
Four years on, Brazil arrived at the 2006 World Cup in Germany as favourites, with fans worldwide looking forward to enjoying majestic attacking football from the 'magic quartet' of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Kaká and Adriano. Disappointment was to follow, however: Brazil were beaten 0-1 by France in the quarter-finals without having registered a truly convincing performance in any of their games, although Ronaldo did become the record goalscorer in World Cups by taking his overall tally to fifteen. Their defeat appeared to give substance to the belief, widely held in Brazil, that there is an inverse relationship between the level of expectations prior to the World Cup and the team's subsequent performance on the pitch.
The fact that Brazil has achieved the status of pentacampeão, five-times winner of the most prestigious competition in the world's most popular sport, twice more than any other country, is an understandable source of national pride. The country continues to produce an extraordinary number of talented players, especially midfielders and forwards. However, the domestic game continues to be poorly administrated and most fans have little disposable income, so matches between all but the biggest clubs are watched by crowds which are small by European standards. Clubs lack the resources to keep their stars from pursuing most of their careers in other parts of the world, particularly Europe. Though most Brazilian fans wish it were not the case, footballing talent will remain one of the country's major exports for the forseeable future.
Related links
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BRAZILIAN FOOTBALL
FEDERATION
Website of the Brazilian Football Federation (Confederação Brasileira de Futebol - CBF). [pt] |