I became Vasco
when researching Temples Rio so that the working class, illiterate and
sub-altern could play football and receive something for their labors. The
all-white clubs of Botafogo, Flamengo ,
America Rio football federation which disguised its
racism and classism behind statutes of amateurism.
When Vasco won
the second division in 1922, the big four of the time decided that they wouldn’t
play against the blacks, mulattos, Portuguese and poor whites from São
Cristóvão, forming a separate league that lasted for TEN YEARS. This apartheid
system was only resolved with full professionalization in 1933, six years after
Vasco had built a monument to its project of social inclusion, the São Januário.
Vasco’s role in opening football to all social classes, the beauty and symbolic
power of the stadium and a wealth of other non-rational reasons made me Vasco.
That’s over.
I have long
argued that if there is going to be any meaningful change to and in the world
of football, we have to start understanding the acts of fandom as political.
Putting on a team jersey is never neutral but rather an incorporation of one’s
self into a larger community, a larger historical trajectory, a complex of
actors and agents that are invariably connected to political economies and
urban spaces that make one sleepy imagining their extent and intricacy. Nonetheless,
they exist. I would never,
ever pull on a shirt that had the letters CBF (the Brazilian football confederation)
on it because of all of the reasons I have explained ad nauseam in these pages. If there are to be political consequences
that result from our individual actions, football is a fine place to start
thinking more deeply.
 |
| São Januário loses his head. It appears not much has changed. |
The report that
Vasco has maintained a secret training ground where its young, poor,
semi-literate players are kept in conditions of slavery, with the full
knowledge and consent of the board of directors, after a year of negotiation with
public prosecutors after a 14-year old boy from Minas Gerais died because there
was no medical staff on site…it makes me sick.
Vasco has turned away from
everything that it stood for while at the same time using the words “inclusion”
and “democracy” to promote their brand on a uniform. In short, Vasco is selling
its history as a hollow commodity while at the same time exploiting the very
people this history pretends to connect with. I repeat: Vasco was trying to
hide their “slave-like” training camp for more than a year after one of their youth
players died from the conditions at a different site. The board of directors smiles
and struts around repeating the old mantras while marching to the drum of
maximum exploitation.
We know that
Vasco is not the only Brazilian team that engages in these kinds of practices.
Brazilian teams make 28% of their profits from the sale of players, most of
them never play a full professional season in their native land. The global
political economy of football begins with the pipe-dream of becoming Dani Alves
or Ronaldinho Gaucho, passes hopefully through concentration camps where swarms
of piranha-like agents and coaches break and bend Brazilian adolescents to be
fit for export while neglecting human rights and individual dignity. When those
unpaid, ill-treated adolescents do actually break, or don’t bend enough, they
are discarded on the scrapheap where tens of thousands just like them squirm
and cry, their young lives already wrecked by the impossibility of their own
dream that may not have even been theirs to begin with.
We prop up these dreams
every time we pull on that shirt.
I am saddened,
horrified and angered.
I am not this Vasco.
I reject this
club.
.
