Book Review Essay: Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup,The Olympics,and the Struggle for Democracy and The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil

Zirin begins Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy by repeatedly emphasizing a point made to him by Brazilian scholar, Dr Marcos Alvito – “Brazil is not for beginners” (Zirin, 2014: 7).

Kittleson’s The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil and Zirin’s Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy are two books written in the wake of Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

Kittleson, a historian and Brazilinist, in The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil uses the occasion of Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 World Cup to explain the role soccer has played in Brazilian efforts to construct a distinctive modern identity for itself as a nation. This national project – known as ‘tropical modernity’ – is a vision that adopts a European model of modernity but infuses it with select Brazilian features, particularly racial ones, to differentiate Brazil from its European counterparts. ‘Tropical modernity’ allows Brazilians to tell a strategic story about the nation, both domestically and internationally. Kittleson began researching this link after recognizing soccer as an under-recognized site for competing definitions of ‘tropical modernity.’ The more he looked the more he noticed how notions of tropical modernity animated how Brazilians – from political and academic elites to laborers living in favelas – perceived and talked about fútbol.

In Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy, Zirin, the Sports Editor of The Nation, details the human toll of the gamble made by Brazil’s neoliberal elite to host these sporting mega-events as a way for Brazil to become more influential on the global geopolitical stage. His book bears witness to the deleterious social and economic impacts that neoliberal privatization has already had, and will likely continue to have, on the everyday lives of poor, working class, and middle class Brazilians for generations to come. Zirin reminds us how in-depth, long-form sports journalism, when done right, reveals the inextricable links between sports, culture, politics, history, economics, and human rights.

In Carless Whisper: The Doubleness of Spanish Love, Grant Farred argues that analysis of the cultural politics of sport should interrogate more complexly the passions and pleasures of fandom utilizing “a methodology of passion” that is “part autobiography, unabashedly partisan, ideologically inconsistent and even contradictory, historically cognizant…and, most important, [they should] insistently [be] about the critical-effects that flow from sport-induced love” (Farred, 2008: 462).

As I read Kittleson’s and Zirin’s books, my mind wandered to my newfound love, FC Barcelona, and two of its contemporary stars: Argentine, Lionel Messi and Brazilian, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, or Neymar as he is more commonly known. Messi, of course, is considered the world’s best footballer today, while Neymar is vying to become his heir apparent.

My route to Brazil is through soccer fandom – through television and mediated fantasies and appropriations of jogo bonito.

I am a beginner.

Zirin’s tome is a wake-up call to those who have a tendency to overlook sports’ central role in the production of neoliberalism’s capitalist accumulation, state-sanctioned violences, fascistic tendencies, and social inequalities. Borrowing from Klein (2007), Zirin characterizes global sporting mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics as a new “sporting shock doctrine” (p. 116) and “neoliberal Trojan horse[s]” (p. 147) through which privatization projects are implemented with social, economic and political effects that last far beyond the staging of these month-long competitions. Ideally, Zirin aims to arouse folks of all nations and political stripes to mobilize to oppose neoliberal hegemony, especially as it manifests through the staging of global mega-sporting events.

Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy is more complex, nuanced, and mature and less flippant and superficially partisan than his first book, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports (2007). Whole chapters deeply ground Brazil’s contemporary struggle between neoliberalism and its discontents both within the larger context of Brazil’s history of colonization, slavery, oligarchical rule, dictatorship, and its experiment with democracy (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3), and within the broader history of the Olympics beginning with the 1936 Games when Hitler transformed the Olympics into a stage for hypernationalism, political opportunism, racial fantasies, capitalist expansion, and production processes that regularly abused human rights. Zirin argues that this Hitlerian Olympic paradigm remains – albeit in varying degrees – in contemporary Olympics whether in Salt Lake City in 2012 or Sochi in 2014. Further, FIFA now subscribes to it, as in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Qatar’s future World Cup in 2022, and, of course, Brazil’s World Cup in 2014 (see chapters 5 and 6).

As those familiar with Zirin would expect, the stars of Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy are the working poor and working class citizens of Brazil who quickly diagnosed and rose up against its State, FIFA, and the other private parties leading Brazil’s global neoliberal partnerships. For Zirin, they are worthy of public admiration because they are the canaries in the coalmine. They are the ones who endure the violence of neoliberal regimes whether through rubber bullets, eminent domain practices, or wrecking balls. So, he gives voice to those in favelas who have had their homes razed and their ways of life uprooted, all so a new neoliberal iteration of tropical modernity can be to sold to foreign cosmopolitans wanting to travel to Rio or São Paulo, or to Brazil’s own cosmopolitan elite whose modern-ness may be realized through their living in upscale, gated communities on land at least twice stolen.

I have spent far too many afternoons repeatedly watching Nike commercials on YouTube of Ronaldinho and his ‘samba-inspired skills’ longing to learn his infamous move, the elastico.

“Make magic with your soccer ball,” my white soccer coach used to tell my teammates and I in the late 1980s as we imagined Romário, Sócrates, and Zico.

I too have been seduced by tropical modernity.

I too am not innocent.

One of the joys of reading is reminding ourselves that “every time you look you notice something that affects what you thought you understood” (Zirin, 2014: 7).

“Consciously or not, the people discussing ‘their’ players and ‘their’ team ended up proposing new notions of who they were themselves” (Kittleson, 2014: 45).

I became a fan of FC Barcelona just after Argentine, Lionel (“Leo”) Messi, replaced Brazilian, Ronaldinho Gaúcho, as the Blaugranas’ coveted number 10.

But my affection for Messi felt different. And I fell fast and wholeheartedly.

In a previous life, I surely would have told most people it had something to do with Messi’s small stature, his being a predominantly left footed player like me, and the way in which his angular runs cutting across the field from right to left, looking to set up his teammates as much as scoring goals himself, reminded me, nostalgically, of my childhood sporting idol, Canadian hockey player, Wayne Gretzky. A route to innocence.

But, the deeper truth I have come to recognize is that, despite Messi and Gretzky’s respective national differences from one another and myself, it was their white skin, media-fashioned underdog stories, undersized bodily statures, and team-first humility that made it easy for me to select them as the sport figures whose sporting exploits I choose to live vicariously through.

My sporting identifications, borne of racialized tastes long nurtured in American soil and across my family’s dinner table, persist to this day, even if at a diminished level and, at times, despite my developing racial consciousness. They are proof of the way in which ‘the Dream,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) calls it, seeped into every crevice of my bodily/cultural habitus raised as I was through the sporting wing of Disney’s domestic propaganda. And it seems these racial identifications may always constitute the first bodily impulses I feel pushing and pulling me through my everyday life, despite my growing awareness of them.

Kittleson’s The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil is written for a more academic audience and should be a real treat for those who study the cultural politics of sports as well as those interested in learning about the cultural and political history of 20th century Brazil. It is an expertly conceptualized and historically grounded analysis – one that adds even more depth, detail, and nuance than Zirin’s own admirable history of Brazil, and is written with enviable clarity and complexity. Kittleson’s immense skills are announced through his very first authorial act: his choice of epigraph for the introduction. It is a telling quote taken from the late, well-known Brazilian soccer star, medical doctor, social activist, and everyman philosopher, Sócrates: “Nothing is cheaper as an education than sports, and nothing more political in this country than soccer” (p. 1). And the book only gets better from there!

Throughout the book’s five chapters, Kittleson documents how visions of, and tensions about, tropical modernity took shape amongst the Brazilian public, press, and polity, in explicit and coded ways whether through debates about the roster selections, playing style, and sporting performances of the Seleção (the Brazilian national team); through commentary about top domestic teams like Flamengo and Corinthians; or through popular discussions about the life stories and racial performances of well-known star players like Pelé, Garrincha, Zico, Sócrates, or Romário from the late 1950s to the 1990s and even to lesser known or forgotten players like Arthur Friedenreich, Domingos da Guia, Leônidas da Silva, Reinaldo, or Ademir da Guia who gained fame from the 1910s to the early 1950s as Brazilian football was first institutionalized. Especially fascinating was Kittleson’s discussion of “Corinthian Democracy” (pp. 151–164). Led by the maverick, Sócrates, the players of Corinthians demanded greater authority and control over how their bodies and voices were employed on the field in terms of team tactics, in training, and even off the field. Kittleson explains how Corinthian Democracy “linked soccer with politics more explicitly than at any other point in the country’s history” (p. 151). It directly challenged long-standing Brazilian practices of top-down control of cartolas (team officials) over players while symbolizing how Brazilian political elites treated common citizens and how the latter might fight back even if this sporting experiment in radical democracy existed “only briefly” (p. 151). I am hard-pressed to even fathom the possibility of an American National Football League team modeling radical democracy in 2016 America.

But throughout, Kittleson convincingly shows how domestic soccer matches and those involving the Seleção were “ripe for epic narration” (2014: 2) because they meant so much symbolically and economically to Brazilian elites and citizens alike. Even though the ideological value of fútbol was officially downplayed and denied by political elites as ‘just a game,’ Kittleson reveals how Brazilian dictators and democratically elected presidents both purposefully used soccer to discipline and control various Brazilian publics, particularly Afro-Brazilians, through their bodies while promoting evolving visions of tropical modernity (p. 35).

One particular virtue of Kittleson’s work is that he takes seriously the way in which everyday conversations and debates about sports and its stars function as “one way Brazilians think about the nation – and by extension their place in it – in the face of persistent social, economic, and political uncertainties” (pp. 2–3). His ‘data’ are the fodder of popular, everyday culture: “newspapers, magazines, memoirs, government publications, popular poetry and music, interviews, films and videos, and blogs and other internet sites” where Brazilian conversations about soccer took place (p. 9). To him, these sites are crucial places “marked by deep cultural work” that “touched at least implicitly and metaphorically on the composition and modernizing potential of the people and the nation” (p. 9). In particular, Kittleson keenly demonstrates how fútbol allowed Brazilians to “feel free to talk about politically dangerous issues in apparently apolitical ways,” particularly about race and racism (p. 2). Kittleson’s insights are as true in the contemporary United States, organized as it is by paradoxes of colorblindness and cultural diversity, as in the context of 20th century Brazil. In the contemporary US, everyday sports talk is filled with dog whistles (Haney Lopez, 2015) through which speakers regularly project their beliefs about race, gender, class, and nation onto the bodies of sport figures like Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, Manny Pacquiao, Jose Bautista, Jeremy Lin, or Cam Newton, in both intended and unintended ways (see Leonard, 2012; Nylund, 2004).

I was slow to embrace Neymar when he first moved to FC Barcelona. He seemed reluctant to adopt the team’s idiosyncratic tiqui-taca playing style orchestrated by Barca’s three maestros: Messi, Xavi Hernández, and Andrés Iniesta.

Barca’s triumvirate captured my heart because they played the beautiful game as dreamers still governed by boyish imaginations. Their sublime skills allowed them to seem to transcend limits of space and time. Artfully keeping the ball amongst friends, playing, seemed infinitely superior to striving toward the instrumental tasks of scoring a goal and winning. This playing style (buoyed by Barca’s ‘mes que un club’ [‘more than a club’] mythology) even seemed, at least to me, like a symbolic affront to neoliberal hegemony itself– evidence of how a communal dream could still emerge to contest neoliberalism’s narcissistic brand of individualism (even if this fantasy of Barca is itself branded, commodified, and consumed).

Neymar’s apparent valuing of ball-trickery over playing tiqui-taca football (along with his ever-changing flamboyant hairstyles) suggested, to me, he might prefer the company of global football’s ultimate narcissistic neoliberal, Cristiano Ronaldo.

In other words, I could not really see Neymar.

I am still a beginner, seeking a place of innocence.

The relations between sport, culture, history, economics, and politics in Brazil is deserving of the attention of sport scholars for so many reasons.

First, over the next decade the lasting socio-economic effects of the Brazilian elite’s decision to stage these sporting mega-events at the expense of providing much needed social services and infrastructure (i.e. education, hospitals, roads, etc.) will become evident. But, Brazil’s story is our story. Relatedly, the import of the Brazilian people’s protests will be measured by the extent to which others across the globe resist the “sporting shock doctrine” when future Olympic and World Cup bids are proposed in their countries and cities. Perhaps there is reason for optimism in the citizens of Massachusetts’ challenge of American neoliberals who wanted to wager Boston’s socio-economic future on the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. But we will not know the true impact of the Brazilian people’s example of resistance until more future Olympic and World Cup bids take shape.

Finally, as Kittleson’s analysis reveals, Brazil is important to critical race scholars in the US in particular, because they may find the more complicated and complex racial hierarchies constructed throughout Brazil’s history a fruitful comparative model for making sense of the potential ways United States’ racial hierarchies may shift as whites lose their demographic majority in the next few decades, and Hispanics (of European descent) are incorporated into shifting American definitions of whiteness so that a new form of whiteness, browner perhaps, but still likely to be anti-black in character, becomes normative. Surely, there is evidence in the US sport media and primetime television (among other cultural sites) that this process is already underway, but the Brazilian case shows how whiteness and anti-blackness are likely to remain features of future US racial formations.

After digesting Kittleson’s and Zirin’s books, I see Neymar with new eyes.

He is more human, less a fantasy of jogo bonito.

His long journey to Camp Nou seems clearer to me now – The way he clings stylistically to the streets to not lose a valued part of himself; the difficulties he’s bound to have when acclimating to a new team, teammates, culture, and to global superstar status, especially as a twenty-three-year-old more readily come to mind. I now see his recent travails in Spanish courts over his complicated transfer to Barcelona as evidence of how the tentacles of Brazil’s history of race, oligarchy, and corruption still reach and constrain his exceptional body half-way across the world. By 2016, Neymar has learned Barca’s ticqui-taca rhythm. I even recognize the pride of South American roots in his celebrations with Messi and Luis Suárez whenever one of them scores a goal.

I appreciate what I imagine those connections mean to him. I believe I now recognize Neymar’s ever-changing hairstyles as a bodily means of preserving his home identity and managing anxieties borne from the weight of history, race, dislocation, and the expectations of new statuses.

They even remind me that before there was the well-coiffed, refined, and self-assured Messi who wears the Number 10 and reigns over Camp Nou today, there was another awkward looking South American who struggled at first to learn the Barca rhythm.

He too managed the weight through long, unkempt, and unstyled hair and a superfluous, narcissistic ball-trick here and there. This Messi wore Number 30.

Re-imagining Neymar allowed me to remember a secret hope I harbored while watching Number 30 as he broke into Barca’s first team: a wish he would never lose touch with that boyish version of himself; he would always be driven by his own ambitions; he would always play with unreserved joy.

A wish he might keep alive the idea that love could conquer all.

Yet, in writing, I know I cannot ever fully see Neymar, or Messi for that matter. Perhaps this is true for all of us. Our visions of others are only complicated, coded reflections, refractions, and projections of ourselves. Or, perhaps I still am having trouble seeing, truly seeing.

Reading Kittleson’s and Zirin’s books together facilitates a long overdue realization for me – sport stars are celestial bodies upon whose flesh we project our hopes, fears, dreams, and anxieties. Perhaps they help us to keep alive the possibility we might someday be(come) our best self or we might someday experience a world we hope is possible – Or perhaps, in part, to seek our own innocence in a world/self we fear we cannot change.