Last spring, Neymar, Brazil’s next great hope, decamped for Barcelona to join him. We associate Lionel Messi, by consensus the best player in the world, as much, if not more, with Barcelona, for whom he plays most of the year, as with his native Argentina.
Samba meaning soccer professional#
The top professional leagues have achieved such international reach, both in filling out their rosters and in the fan bases from which they draw their support, that the allure of ostensibly amateur spectacles like the World Cup and the Olympics (which Brazil will host, too, in 2016) is diminished by comparison. The New Statesman argument, perhaps overstated, that this might be the last significant World Cup reflects an increasing reality of globalization. True, the Brazilian professional league still had some kinks to work out, but even so, he said, “we’re easily going to surpass the European teams, and we will be the best championship in the world.” Europe was in decline, and it was only a matter of time-economic determinism, really-before its fabled clubs would cede their monopoly on the best players. Every square metre on the premises has been plotted as a “money-making scheme.” No stray dog, Sánchez likes to say that Corinthians has “changed the way Brazilian football thinks,” and, between cigarettes, which he tossed on the floor, half smoked, he argued with the conviction that history was now on his side. “The idea was to build the best, biggest shopping mall in the world, with a soccer field in the middle,” Andrés Sánchez, the former Corinthians president, who is supervising the construction, told me, sounding more like Donald Trump than like a steward of the jogo bonito, or beautiful game. The stadium, a monument to gentrification, will feature the largest digital screen on earth and lighting twice as bright as that used in Munich’s Allianz Arena, said to be visible, on a clear night, from nearly fifty miles away. Croatia-of what the New Statesman suggests may be the last World Cup that ever matters will be played at the Itaquerão, a new stadium going up in São Paulo for the storied Corinthians, a professional team known both for its historical ties to the proletariat and for its thuggish fans.
The economic boom that recently brought Brazil, with its burgeoning middle class, to the brink of First World respect has been dizzying. “You can’t entrust yourself to a football stadium-that’s the lesson that sunk in after 1950.” “When the players needed the Maracanã most, the Maracanã was silent,” the singer, songwriter, and poet Chico Buarque once declared. The novelist Nelson Rodrigues identified the moment as the source of his country’s “stray-dog complex”-“the inferiority with which the Brazilian positions himself, voluntarily, in front of the rest of the world.” In spite of the five World Cups that Brazil has won since-more than any other country-the Maracanã humiliation remains the most intellectualized aspect of its sporting legacy, if not of its modern history altogether. In the Maracanã, there was stunned, eerie silence, so unfathomable and disconcerting that it left a formative wound in the national psyche.
Back home, while listening on the radio, three Uruguayans reportedly died of excitement. They’d even, somehow, finished ahead of schedule. Some ten thousand men had contributed to its construction, practicing goal celebrations while they worked. A monumental concrete bowl, intended to rival the Christ statue atop Corcovado, the Maracanã resembled a spaceship and was meant to embody, as the British journalist Alex Bellos writes in “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life,” not only Brazil’s athletic ambition but also “the country’s place in the modern world.” Its capacity was greater by several magnitudes than any other Brazilian stadium. The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, two hundred thousand people-a tenth of the population of Rio de Janeiro-streamed into the newly completed Maracanã Stadium to watch their beloved national team, the Seleção, compete for the title against Uruguay.
0 kommentar(er)
