And my main question so far is this: what has happened to Brazil women’s soccer?  Brazil crashed out in the first round at this World Cup. Well, to be fair, they didn’t exactly crash out: they came third in a group containing two countries very strong in women’s soccer, Sweden and North Korea (champions of the 2006 U-20 Women’s World Cup, and finalists in 2008).  But their only win came against New Zealand, who lost all three of their games.

This from the country that has produced in recent years Marta, Cristiane and Formiga, to name three of the best women’s players in the world over the past half-decade.

But it appears the development of women’s soccer in Brazil has completely stalled, from the available evidence. At the first U-17 Women’s World Cup held in 2008, Brazil finished bottom of their group, failing to win a game. Brazil did better at the 2008 U-20 Women’s World Cup, topping their group, then losing to a strong German side in the next round. Brazil finished third in 2006. The trend, though, is clearly one that’s gone dramatically downwards for Brazil in youth competition in the past few years.

The senior team, inspired by the remarkable crop of Marta, Cristiane, Formiga, Fabiana et al, had up to 2008 a remarkable record in recent years: silver at both the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, and second place at the 2007 World Cup. Seven of their 2008 Olympic team currently play in WPS, arguably the world’s leading professional women’s league.

However, it appears that production line is stalling, judging from international youth results. Indeed, the problem perhaps is it’s not really a production line at all: women’s soccer in Brazil lacks any kind of structure, with no national league (hence why so many of their national team plays abroad), and a haphazard method of discovering young talent. And that talent has to overcome a considerable stigma against women participating in soccer, as the well-known story of Marta reminds us, from this interview with her from the New York Times last year:

“I had to do all of it by myself,” she said through a Portuguese interpreter. (She speaks Swedish fluently and, according to her new teammates, is rapidly picking up English.) “There wasn’t anybody for me to follow, or anyone to say to me, These are the steps you must take. First of all, I was almost always the only girl playing with boys in a small town. Some boys accepted me, some didn’t. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?”

And even Marta, four-time FIFA World Player of the Year, cannot seem to lead change in Brazil, with the authorities remaining resolutely opposed to supporting women’s soccer. As John Turnbull at the Global Game tells us:

Marta and her teammates have been advocating for a Brazilian league, but they are battling institutional inertia and a history that banned soccer for women until 1979. The federal government beginning in the 1980s limited sponsorship opportunities for women and prevented their competitions from being held at athletic grounds, consigning them to, in many cases, the beaches in Rio.

Copacabana Beach, in fact, in 1981 served as the venue for the first women’s tournament. The strongest women’s side through much of the 1980s, Esporte Clube Radar, used the beach as its home ground. Opposition to women playing football has been constant. The challenges range from the physical—Marta reports that her brother hit her when he found she was playing, and BBC columnist Tim Vickery‘s girlfriend says she got similar lashings from her father (BBC Sport, Sept 10)—to the subtly patronizing gender stereotypes that frame women, in the main, as an object of the male gaze or as devoted disciples of home and church.

“Today, when I came into the field, I heard a guy say that I should be at a laundry sink, washing clothes,” said a Radar player in 1984. “But I did not bother to reply to him, although I was angry. My reaction came later, with the ball at my feet.”

Female soccer was banned entirely by law between 1964 and 1975 in Brazil.  Since then, the successful team led by Marta that developed from that point on, culminating in second place at the 2007 Women’s World Cup, ought to have presaged change, one would think: except that the Brazilian national women’s team, as far as I can tell, hasn’t actually played a game for around two years.

To see how poorly the national team is organised and treated in Brazil despite being one of the top three or four in the world, we can look back to a dispute following that 2007 World Cup, where the players felt they weren’t renumerated fairly for their performance that earned the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) almost $1 million in prize money. This resulted in the national team sending a collective letter to the CBF asking for support:

In the World Cup, for example, the Brazilian federation received $850,000 (US) from FIFA for the team’s second-place finish. The players say they are still unaware how much each of them will receive from that amount. The players are also demanding bonus money for their gold-medal finish at the Pan Am Games, which they say they still have not been paid. According to O Globo, it took two years for the 2004 Olympic team players to receive their bonus money for the silver medal at Athens.

The Brazil women are asking for a raise in their daily expense stipend from the current $35 (US) when playing abroad; a restoration of the team cook, a position that was left vacant at the start of the year as a cost-cutting measure (supposedly the absence of typical Brazilian foods like beans while the team were in China lengthened Formiga’s recovery time from leg cramps); and a greater number of matches for the national team, which currently has nothing scheduled until April.

At the conclusion of the letter, the players said that they have fulfilled their duty and have always given the maximum for the national team, Globo reports. The letter ends with the following phrase, in capital letters: “We need support”.

This raises a local and a broader point: more widely, once again there is evidence for why FIFA needs to pay players directly at the World Cup, to ensure they are paid on a fair and timely bass.

The local point is that the CBF, under Ricardo Teixeira’s corrupt leadership, is doing a remarkable disservice to one of the greatest women’s national teams of all time, missing a massive opportunity to use the starpower, skill and style of the likes of Marta to develop women’s soccer domestically in Brazil.

Brazil’s president Lula, following the World Cup pay dispute in 2007, made the same point:

“I think we have to prepare other matches. In other words, these girls can’t play only every four years or play now and then,” he said.

“I think these girls, who are not as valued as they should be by the entities that deal with women’s sports in Brazil, need to raise their heads and know that we are at the beginning a very long process and that they are valued, and have made Brazil proud.”

It appears, three years on, little has changed. Brazil’s top players are abroad; there is no domestic league (a national cup competition, Copa do Brasil de Futebol Feminino, has at least been created, upon FIFA’s request); and the Brazilian women’s national team is essentially disbanded aside from major tournaments. It may well reassemble and perform well at next year’s Women’s World Cup in Germany, given the talent it still has now, but how it will fair in the future given the lack of investment in the sport that is showing at youth international level is seriously open to question. This is a tremendous waste of an opportunity by the CBF (who are, unlike national associations in many countries, more than rich enough to be unable to claim poverty as an excuse for not developing the sport).

There is no doubt women’s soccer in Brazil has made extraordinary progress since the 1970s, when even playing the game was illegal for Brazilian women. Yet at the same time, Brazil risks falling behind the rest of the world as the next Marta still faces an uphill battle to play the game.

View from a steep stand at Estádio da Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, nominal home of Flamengo — who actually play most of their games at the Maracanã.

Photo credit: schijvenaars on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

This is, of course, the same question that exhausted South African ears over the past several years. It turned out that South Africa was prepared and that Danny Jordaan, CEO of the World Cup Local Organising Committee, had done a tremendous job. Jordaan, briefly a professional soccer player himself in the early 1970s ahead of his time as an anti-apartheid activist, is by all reports tough, humble. and hugely capable. The whiff of corruption does not follow him around as it does so many connected to FIFA (OK, there is one very faint whiff).

The man in charge of the 2014 World Cup, Ricardo Teixeira (president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF)), has spent the past two decades doing little but generating suspicion of corruption in many of his dealings running Brazilian soccer. Teixeira is head of the Local Organising Committee, and also sits on FIFA’s 24 man Executive Committee.

Brazil’s Congress extensively investigated the corruption impeding the domestic game in Brazil at the highest levels in 2000-01: Teixeira, president of the CBF since 1989, was forced to admit he had lied about having only one bank account (conceding he had a second, operated out of the Cayman Islands at Delta Bank, at the time under investigation by the US government for money laundering). This Independent newspaper report on the Congressional investigation paints a picture of Teixeira struggling to hide his corrupt dealings, and making a promise to resign from his post in 2003 that he has yet to fulfil:

The president of the CBF was once the son-in-law of the former Fifa president, Joao Havelange. Teixeira has none of his mentor’s aristocratic bearing and has been regarded as an arrogant bully boy, yet even he has embraced humility as the inquiry has progressed. Even before his long-awaited appearance at the commission last week, Teixeira declared that he would leave the post at the end of his current mandate in 2003 and spoke openly about his mistakes. He admitted that some of the clauses in the Nike contract had needed correcting, and he agreed that he had erred in selling dairy produce from his farm to the CBF. As he shuffled through his files last week he gave the appearance of a schoolboy trying to cover up the fact that he had not done his homework. He had not brought an up-to-date version of the Nike contract and could not recall to how many politicians the CBF had made donations.

Ah, yes, João Havelange: the corrupt FIFA chief and the father-in-law of Teixeira at the time of the latter’s sudden elevation from obscure lawyer to head of the CBF. Soon, Teixeira was rich, with a condo in Miami, bodyguards, and an ever-increasing salary.

That CBF deal with Nike mentioned above left many wondering where all the money had gone: it certainly hadn’t filtered into development of the domestic game. The results of the Congressional investigations were damning for Teixeira:

The probe that exposed Teixeira began with a Brazilian congressional investigation (aka CPI) into a $4 billion, ten-year contract the Nike Corporation had with the Brazilian football conference (CBF). The investigation, as is the wont of many investigations, discovered a network and underlying web of deceit, lies, and illegal dealings that ran the gamut from forgery to outright theft of funds and bribery. The first CPI was in fact brought to a close with many of its investigative discoveries squashed because the committee itself voted to keep the report of its findings secret from publication. The reality was that many of the members of the investigative body were tied in with the CBF. Men such as Eurico Miranda were on the committee. Miranda also happened to be an owner of a team in the CBF, the Vasco da Gama club.  But Miranda, and others like him with CBF tie-ins, saw no reason to recuse themselves from the investigation or any ensuing votes because of this obvious conflict of interest.

It was a second CPI that the Brazilian congress convened that did trap Teixeira and others that were involved with the illegalities involving the soccer industry in Brazil.

Among the discoveries involving Teixeira were (1) he as the president of the CBF took on loans for over $30 million for the organization from a New York bank at the interest rate of about 53% annually; (2) he received from this same bank a personal loan but at the rate of 10% annually; (3) he supposedly helped to broker a $9 million fee to Jos Hawilla for acting as a go-between for the CBF and a Nike deal. Hawilla was a journalist for the Traffic Company. (That name Traffic sound familiar?) and (4) falsifying an expense of $8 million to be paid to a former partner, Marelo Tiraboschi, for being a supposed middleman for a ten-year sponsorship deal worth over $175 million with a company named Ambev.

The investigation was a humiliation for Teixeira, as it concluded that “Lack of control, disorganisation and bad management reign rife in the CBF. Mr Ricardo Teixeira, as president, is directly responsible for creating an environment which is ripe for an administrative disaster.”

The hundreds of millions of dollars that poured into the CBF’s coffers in the 1990s due to their lucrative deals with Nike and television company Traffic (run by a close ally of Teixeira) were spent without a budget, while expenditure on hotels and transport for officials rose 600%, and junket trips to the ’94 and ’98 World Cup were given to many people who had nothing to do with the sport, the investigation found.

Amazingly, Teixeira was reelected for a seven-year term as head of the CBF in 2007.

Last year, Teixeira was convicted of avoiding customs taxes, after returning home from the 1994 World Cup in the United States with 17 tons of imported goods that he failed to pay tax on.

Indeed, to go back to 1994, Teixeira had a run in with Pelé ahead of the 1994 World Cup that saw the star banned from the World Cup draw in Las Vegas, as Rob Hughes wrote in a 1994 New York Times article on Pelé’s elevation to Sports Minister in the Brazilian government:

And while Pelé, to my knowledge, has had a public run-in with only one man, that man happens to be Ricardo Teixeira, who presides over the CBF, Brazil’s soccer federation. More than that, Teixeira is the son-in-law of João Havelange, the Brazilian president of FIFA who single-handedly barred Pelé from the World Cup draw in Las Vegas a year ago.

It was an horrendous example of Havelange’s vindictiveness, and an early warning that the aging president intends to maneuver his son-in-law into becoming his successor in charge of the world game.

Pelé, then as now, was the catalyst between soccer and the American people; Havelange the autocrat blankly refused to speak Pelé’s name, or to discuss with his FIFA executive his reason for banning from the ceremony the greatest player the game has known.

We knew the reason. Pelé had accused Teixeira of corruption, of accepting a million-dollar bribe to favor one television contract over another, and Teixeira was suing Pelé in the Brazilian courts. So Havelange, having installed Teixeira on FIFA committees, shut out Pelé.

The backstory was that Pelé had attempted to purchase the broadcasting rights in Brazil to the 1994 World Cup, but had refused to pay $1m into a Swiss bank account as ordered by the CBF, under Teixeira’s direction. And then he had refused to keep quiet about it.

But Teixeira eventually won back the support of Pelé, whose attempts to lead reform of the Brazilian game in the 1990s failed. And that support from Pelé, coming right after the results of Brazil’s Congressional inquiry came out in 2001 and threatened to skewer Teixeira’s career, saved Teixeira, as they shared the stage to condemn the inquiry’s results. In Soccer Explains The World, Franklin Foer cites a columnist for the Brazilian sports daily Lance! on this sad moment for Brazilian soccer: “The union of Pelé and Teixeira is the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.”

This man, then, Ricardo Teixeira, is responsible for organising the 2014 World Cup, an organisation already described as “amazingly” behind schedule, and subject to Teixeira’s political needs, according to Tim Vickery:

Teixeira’s need to keep his power base onside has already affected the organisation of the tournament. Many state presidents wanted 2014 games to be staged in their domain, so the CBF successfully lobbied Fifa to have 12 host cities, rather than the original plan of between eight and 10. Seventeen cities applied – one later pulled out – and, to save Teixeira from the political embarrassment of excluding some of them, the final decision was pushed to Fifa.

Vickery, the most accomplished observer of the South American game we have in the English-language, concludes that the Teixeira-led power structure is the main danger to the preparations:

For all its progress, the moment in Brazil is very different [from South Africa]. Its football administrators could not be further removed from activists. They represent the old, semi-feudal Brazil.

Federal Deputy Paulo Rattes wrote a Congressional report on 2014 planning. “What struck me about South Africa,” he said, “was that there was participation from society and political leaders.” In Brazil, meanwhile, “it is a black box that no one enters, only Ricardo Teixeira and his friends.”

That black box of Teixeira is where the World Cup is headed in four years, sad to say.

AD, published in Rotterdam, Netherlands. 2 July, 2010.

Courtesy of newseum.org.

Univision, who have the Spanish-language rights, might be even happier, though, having invested even more in the World Cup: they had an additional 4.5 million tune in for the US-Ghana game, but more notably, 9.4 million for Mexico’s loss to Argentina on Sunday — the highest-ever television audience for any Spanish-language programming in the United States. On ABC, meanwhile, a further 6 million tuned in for Mexico-Argentina, giving us a total of 15.4 million viewers for that game on both networks: the Mexican national team continues to grow as a massively valuable television property in the United States.

It’s worth noting Univision paid $325m for their package, while ESPN/ABC paid $100m for the same rights. ESPN, incidentally, is also getting very strong ratings in Hispanic households, up 29% from the 2006 World Cup.

The demographics will delight the networks and bode well for the growth of soccer in the United States, with the 18-34 age group extremely well represented amongst the viewing audience. Reportedly, the median age for World Cup television viewers is 39, while for the Olympic Games, it’s 52.

The total number of viewers for the U.S.-Ghana game, combining ABC and Univision, was 19.4 million: breaking the previous record for a soccer game on television in the United States, the 18.1 million for the 1994 World Cup final, and also becoming the most-watched American national team game, beating the 18 million who tuned in to see the United States against China in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final.

All this, of course, has both ESPN and Univision salivating for the 2014 World Cup, for which both already have the television rights as part of their current deals (along with the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany), especially as the tournament will take place in a much friendlier timezone for the United States.

It’s interesting to note, though, that each time the World Cup has been held in the Americas in the modern television-era, kick-off times have been arranged to primarily suit European television, even at the expense of forcing players out in the afternoon heat: in Mexico at the 1986 tournament, all games began at either 12pm Central Standard Time or 4pm CST. The final was at noon in the central United States, early evening in Europe. The 1970 World Cup in Mexico followed exactly the same timing.

The 1994 World Cup in the United States saw most games kicking off in the late morning or afternoon in Central Standard Time, with a few taking place later. The final kicked off at 2.30pm CST. The 1978 World Cup in Argentina was a little more friendly to local time, but still saw an afternoon kickoff.

It will be very interesting to see what times games take place at during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, though regardless, they are guaranteed to be more favourable for television viewing in America, with Rio de Janeiro only one hour ahead of New York City. And if Mexico ends up playing the United States in primetime at the World Cup — well, we’ll no longer have to have the interminable debate about whether soccer is popular in this country or not.

Correio*, published in Salvador, Brazil

[Image courtesy of Newseum]

A Notícia, published in Joinville, Brazil

Lance! – Rio de Janeiro, published in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/20/front-page-awaiting-elephants-in-brazil/feed/ 1 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/14/world-cup-fever-in-brazil/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/14/world-cup-fever-in-brazil/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:32:04 +0000 Tom Dunmore http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=10840

The streets of Florianópolis in southern Brazil.

Photo credit: a roving eye on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Photo credit: a roving eye on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

A somewhat bizarre clip from the game: