Outside a madhouse, in an empty lot in Buenos Aires, several blond boys were kicking a ball around.
“Who are they?” asked a child.
“Crazy people,” answered his father. “Crazy English.”
Journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly remembers this from his childhood. At first, soccer seemed like a crazy man’s game in the River Plate. But as the Empire expanded, soccer became an export as typically British as Manchester cloth, railroads, loans from Barings, or the doctrine of free trade. It arrived on the feet of sailors who played by the dikes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, while Her Majesty’s ships unloaded blankets, boots, and flour, and took on wool, hides, and wheat to make more blankets, boots, and flour on the other side of the world. English citizens — diplomats and managers of railroad and gas companies — formed the first local teams. The English of Montevideo and Buenos Aires staged Uruguay’s first international competition in 1889, under a gigantic portrait of Queen Victoria, her eyes lowered in a mask of disdain. Another portrait of the queen of the seas watched over the first Brazilian soccer match in 1895, played between the British subjects of the Gas Company and the São Paulo Railway.
Old photographs show these pioneers in sepia tones. They were warriors trained for battle. Cotton and wool armor covered their entire bodies so as not to offend the ladies in attendance, who unfurled silk parasols and waved lace handkerchiefs. The only flesh the players exposed were their serious faces peering out from behind wax-twirled mustaches below caps or hats. Their feet were shod with heavy Mansfield shoes.
It did not take long for the contagion to spread. Sooner rather than later, the native-born gentlemen of local society started playing that crazy English game. From London they imported the shirts, shoes, thick ankle socks, and pants that reached from the chest to below the knee. Balls no longer confounded customs officers, who at first had not known how to classify the species. Ships also brought rulebooks to these far-off coasts of southern America, and with them came words that remained for many years to come: field, score, goal, goalkeeper, back, half, forward, out ball, penalty, offside. A “foul” merited punishment by the “referee,” but the aggrieved player could accept an apology from the guilty party “as long as his apology was sincere and was expressed in proper English,” according to the first soccer rulebook that circulated in the River Plate.
Meanwhile, other English words were being incorporated into the speech of Latin American countries in the Caribbean: “pitcher,” “catcher,” “innings.” Having fallen under U.S. influence, these countries learned to hit a ball with a round wooden bat. The Marines shouldered bats next to their rifles when they imposed imperial order on the region by blood and by fire. Baseball became for the people of the Caribbean what soccer is for us.
Creole Soccer
The Argentine Football Association did not allow Spanish to be spoken at the meetings of its directors, and the Uruguay Association Football League outlawed Sunday matches because it was British custom to play on Saturday. But by the first years of the twentieth century, soccer was becoming a popular and local phenomenon on the shores of the River Plate. This sport, first imported to entertain the idle offspring of the well-to-do, had escaped its high window box, come to earth, and was setting down roots.
The process was unstoppable. Like the tango, soccer blossomed in the slums. It required no money and could be played with nothing more than sheer desire. In fields, in alleys, and on beaches, native-born kids and young immigrants played pickup using balls made of old socks filled with rags or paper and a couple of stones for a goal. Thanks to the language of soccer, which soon became universal, workers driven out of the countryside could communicate perfectly well with workers driven out of Europe. The Esperanto of the ball connected the native-born poor with peons who had crossed the sea from Vigo, Lisbon, Naples, Beirut, or Bessarabia with their dreams of building America — making a new world by laying bricks, carrying loads, baking bread, or sweeping streets. Soccer had made a lovely voyage: first organized in the colleges and universities of England, it brought joy to the lives of South Americans who had never set foot in a school.
On the playing fields of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, a style came into being. A homegrown way of playing soccer, like the homegrown way of dancing being invented in the milonga clubs. Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile and soccer players created their own language in the tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding the leather. On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.
At the same time, soccer was being tropicalized in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo by the poor who enriched it while they appropriated it. No longer the possession of the few comfortable youth who played by copying, this foreign sport became Brazilian, fertilized by the creative energies of the people discovering it. And thus was born the most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso, and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dance steps of the big-city slums.
As soccer became a popular passion and revealed its hidden beauty, it disqualified itself as a dignified pastime. In 1915 the democratization of soccer drew complaints from the Rio de Janeiro magazine Sports: “Those of us who have a certain position in society are obliged to play with workers, with drivers.… Playing this sport is becoming an agony, a sacrifice, never a pastime.”
The Story of Fla and Flu
The year 1912 saw the first classic in the history of Brazilian soccer: the first Fla — Flu. Fluminense beat Flamengo 3–2.
It was a stirring and violent match that caused numerous fainting spells among the spectators. The boxes were festooned with flowers, fruits, feathers, drooping ladies, and raucous gentlemen. While the gentlemen celebrated each goal by throwing their straw hats onto the playing field, the ladies let fall their fans and collapsed from the excitement of the goal or the oppression of heat and corset.
Flamengo had been born not long before, when Fluminense split after much saber rattling and many labor pains. Soon the father was sorry he had not strangled this smart aleck of a son in the cradle, but it was too late. Fluminense had spawned its own curse and nothing could be done.
From then on, father and son — rebellious son, abandoned father — dedicated their lives to hating each other. Each Fla — Flu classic is a new battle in a war without end. The two love the same city, lazy, sinful Rio de Janeiro, a city that languidly lets herself be loved, toying with both and surrendering to neither. Father and son play for the lover who plays with them. For her they battle, and she attends each duel dressed for a party.
The Opiate of the People?
How is soccer like God? Each inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.
In 1902 in London, Rudyard Kipling made fun of soccer and those who contented their souls with “the muddied oafs at the goals.” Three quarters of a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges was more subtle: he gave a lecture on the subject of immortality on the same day and at the same hour that Argentina was playing its first match in the 1978 World Cup.
The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their conviction that soccer worship is precisely the superstition people deserve. Possessed by the ball, working stiffs think with their feet, which is entirely appropriate, and fulfill their dreams in primitive ecstasy. Animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riffraff get what they want.