The Women of the World Cup
By B. Michael Rubin
With Brazil’s loss in the 2010 World Cup quarterfinals against The Netherlands, there were a great number of people, every Brazilian to be exact, who had an opinion as to what went wrong in the fabled soccer dynasty. Even before the World Cup began, Coach Dunga had a multitude of critics. The fact that Dunga was attempting to remake the entire Brazilian team and thereby change Brazil’s previously successful aggressive or beautiful “jogo bonito” soccer style was challenged by those who assume that some things should never change and dynasties never die.
With the hopes for Brazil’s sixth title behind us, I confess it’s fun, even for a foreigner like me, to play “armchair quarterback,” to borrow a phrase from American football. In retrospect, let’s analyze the defeat of the fallen heroes. Besides the vocal Dunga-haters, many Brazilians placed the blame on one player, Felipe Melo, who managed to defeat his own team by — take your pick: 1) Facilitating Holland’s first goal by blocking out the great goalie, Júlio César, and actually getting credited with the goal by Cup officials, thereby going down in the history books as the first Brazilian player ever to score a goal against his own team in the 80-year history of World Cup play; 2) Neglecting to properly block Holland’s Wesley Sneijder, one of the shortest men on the field, when Sneijder headed a corner kick to score Holland’s second goal; 3) Failing to contain his emotions after these two errors resulted in Holland’s only goals, and then committing a flagrant foul, which caused him to be ejected from the game and forced Brazil to play a man down for the final 17 minutes. From the Dunga detractors, we also heard, “Everyone knew Melo had problems controlling his temper. Dunga should have pulled him out of the game long before he was ejected.”
Experiencing the World Cup for the first time in Brazil, I was not prepared for World Cup fever. I was happy to see the US team even qualify for the World Cup and very much surprised they finished first in their group in the First Round. Brazilians, however, have far greater expectations for their team. Every store and business, large and small, closed down to allow the employees enough time to get home and watch Brazil play on TV. Even the banks closed 90 minutes before televised game time. (The idea of all US banks closing for a sports event being played on another continent is incomprehensible.) Brazilian people are bent on cheering for their country’s name, not only with their vuvuzelas, but with economic sacrifice as well. The financial loss to shop-owners here during the weeks of World Cup was in the millions of reais, (except for the guys selling vuvuzelas), yet I didn’t hear any complaints about the lost revenue, as nothing was more important than supporting the yellow-and-green warriors far away in South Africa.
What struck me as exceptional during World Cup fever was the way Brazilian women came out to support their team. In the US, it’s a plain fact — women do not watch sports on TV. Perhaps this illustrates that women in Brazil pay more attention to whatever their men are paying attention to than American women. The feminist revolution that swept the US a few decades ago, driving American women onto a path of independence, never reached full fruition here, stymied by the military government in power at the time, among other factors.
Revolutions are never perfect; for example, statistics show the majority of American divorces today are being initiated by the wives. This dramatic fact is certainly a direct outcome of feminism, but divorce is rarely seen as a positive indicator in any culture. I think women in Brazil are changing as well, albeit with less drama. Recent data suggest Brazilian women are getting married later than in previous generations, postponing marriage to begin their careers and save money for their future. But whatever their attitudes towards marriage, the Brazilian women were out in full force in June and July blowing their mini-vuvuzelas with the same World Cup fever as the men.
Although some things have not changed here, like World Cup fever, Brazil is changing, and probably faster than anyone had imagined. In its embrace of the future, Brazil has moved securely from a third-world nation into the “second world” as the BRIC countries (Brazil/Russia/India/China) are now referred to. Since 1980, the number of Brazilians benefiting from running water and public sewage increased from 50 percent to 75 percent. Similarly, the population with access to electrical power at home expanded from 66 percent in 1980 to 90 percent in 1993.
With the recent discovery of its vast deep-water oil reserves in the Tupi oilfield, Brazil is poised to bypass its new second world status and move into the first world. In the last census, 72.6 million Brazilians maintained a first-world standard of life. Another 25.4 million constitute a lower middle class on its way to prosperity. As for the poor, their numbers are still high, 48.9 million.
It remains to be seen whether President Lula, or his possible successor, Dilma Rousseff, will be able to tackle the problem of Rio’s favelas in time for the next World Cup in 2014. (Perhaps this scary blight on Rio’s beauty will be dumped into the lap of a different political party, one with less scandals haunting its past than PT.) Some Brazilians I’ve spoken to are even speculating that without a rapid influx of financial assistance from the federal government, FIFA, football’s international governing body, will take the World Cup away from Brazil for insufficient stadium sites.
Maybe with a woman as president, Dilma or Marina Silva, Brazil would be in a better position to shine on the world stage. It might take a woman to recognize the value of long-term planning, which has never been a strong point for Brazilians. Of one thing I am certain: the future of this country rests with its women.
Even if a woman is not the next President, the women of Brazil see what lies ahead. They recognize that if Brazil is to continue its forward march, it must conquer grand challenges that require long-term thinking. Additionally, Brazil must undergo the psychological transformation that has occurred in the US, EU, and other developed countries. This transformation includes facing the reality of feeding and housing large families. Brazil’s women are leading the way: While the average birthrate was about six children per Brazilian woman between 1940 and 1960, it has dropped today to a more sustainable number of 2.5.
Of course, there are greater problems in Brazil’s future than building new stadiums. There are still 17 million Brazilians living just above the starvation line. It’s going to take more than a World Cup victory inspired by 200 million vuvuzelas to end this sadness. The men of the Brazilian football team must learn to play with a more controllable strategy, planning for the future the way Brazil’s women are by lowering family size to a more controllable number. The team needs to play a cleaner, more disciplined game like the Europeans. Argentina, too, learned this lesson in its crushing defeat by Germany.
Hopefully, Brazil will learn. After all, Dunga wouldn’t have used the 2010 scapegoat, Melo, except he needed a replacement for Ramires, who was suspended from playing in the Holland game for his two yellow cards during Brazil’s destruction of Chile. Like Ramires, then Melo, Brazil fell in bitter self-defeat. Without changing old habits, history has a way of repeating itself.
Michael Rubin is an American living in Curitiba. He writes the Newcomer column and can be reached at rubin dot brazil at gmail dot com.
