Brazilian Soccer Quotes

You can't hold a conversation in Brazil without jokes . . . you knowhow Brazilians are. Brazilians are women, booze, soccer, carnival, and dirty jokes.

It is often said in soccer that a country's particular style of play bears the fingerprints of its social and political nature. Thus the Germans are unfailingly characterized as resourceful and organized, while Brazilians are said to dance with the ball to the free-form, samba rhythms of Carnival. In the husk of cliche lies a kernel of truth. The Communist system of China had produced a collectivist style of women's soccer from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.

My personal war against the so-called “soccer menace” probably reached its peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousands of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is—admittedly—only half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a petition to have me removed as the newspaper’s sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting an “academic hearing” where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pelé. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as latently racist, although—admittedly—I’m not completely positive, as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode. But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or—at the very least—convinces people to shut up about it).

Before he left, Sartre took a small side trip to Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo state, where he had an unlikely encounter with a Brazilian of truly global stature. The episode is retold in Joseph A. Page’s fine book The Brazilians: As Sartre stood outside a building conversing with a cadre of intellectuals, down the street came Pelé, the world’s greatest soccer star, accompanied by several fans. The two groups converged on a street corner. When they separated, the intellectuals realized they were now following Pelé, and Sartre was walking alone. The intellectuals ran back down the street, a bit embarrassed, and rejoined their French hero. According to Page, many residents still refer to the spot as “Pelé-Sartre Corner.

What she revealed was not sexy lingerie, but a supportive piece of athletic equipment. After the consolation match that preceded the championship game, both Brazilian and Norwegian players removed their jerseys and exchanged them on the floor of the Rose Bowl. Chastain had previously removed her jersey after regulation to air it out. While training in Florida, the players frequently doffed their shirts after practice in the smothering heat, and they sometimes gave interviews in their sports bras, which were items of utility, not titillation. Chastain 'has brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and practical, not a traditional bra of shine and lace and cleavage, but a sturdy compression garment,' wrote Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post. 'The sports bra is the cloth symbol of Title IX's success.

In other words, Brazilian soccer is different from the rest of the world's because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent of a Link trainer. Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems.

The prize money certainly said something about FIFA’s priorities, though. The same week the 2015 Women’s World Cup kicked off, United Passions debuted in movie theaters. It was a propaganda film that FIFA produced about itself and bankrolled for around $30 million. That’s double the total amount of prize money FIFA made available to all teams participating in the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The film earned less than $1,000 in its debut weekend in North America, for the worst box-office opening in history, and it went down as the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history. Almost all the millions of dollars FIFA poured into making the movie was lost. The film has a 0% rating on the popular movie-review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, and a New York Times review called it “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory.” And remember the uncomfortable encounter at the team hotel between the Americans and Brazilians after the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinal? That would never happen in a men’s World Cup. That’s because FIFA assigns different hotels and training facilities to each men’s team, to serve as a base camp throughout the tournament. The women don’t get base camps—they jump from city to city and from hotel to hotel during the World Cup, and they usually end up bumping into their opponents, who are given the same accommodations. American coach Jill Ellis said she almost walked into the German meal room at the World Cup once. “Sometimes you’re in the elevator with your opponent going down to the team buses for a game,” Heather O’Reilly says. “It’s pretty awkward.

Back at the hotel, the turmoil was only getting started. The Americans and the Brazilians, who were staying at the same hotel, ran into each other in the lobby. The Americans cried as the Brazilians danced. “That was one of the most excruciating postgame hotel moments I can remember,” Heather O’Reilly says. “We were with family and friends, sobbing, and they’re trying to console us, and the Brazilians show up and are just relentless in their celebrations. I’ll confidently use the word obnoxious, because it was. It was pretty over-the-top and absurd. I remember them in the turnstile of the door, just going around and around.” *

A Brazilian soccer referee was murdered and beheaded during a match after he stabbed and killed a player.

And then there were Hernán and Rafa, muscular brothers who expressed most of their politics through soccer, moving smoothly back and forth between the two topics as if they were one. The character of other countries came out on the field, they said. The Brazilians presumed, the Uruguayans lacked heart, the more prosperous teams aped European styles, and the proletarian ones had the light footwork that you learn when you play on pitted dirt.

They were designed for people who did not believe and included no songs, no prayers, no jargon, no quick answers, and no calls for decisions. As those young believers realized that these sessions were indeed safe—that we would not invade the space the unbeliever needs to work through his or her unbelief—they increasingly brought their friends and peers around. The studies were reinforced by steady social involvement—barbecues, soccer games, anything where people could get a closer look at their Christian friends in a natural Brazilian environment. It was the gospel incarnated. The result was a “synagogue” of from forty to sixty people in various stages of interest in Christ. We had our rapport. It became a simple matter then to invite those individuals who were responding to take a closer look at Christ through the Scriptures. It was very fruitful. I describe this effort, not to offer it as a model, but as an illustration of the kind of innovation required to effectively field contemporary apostolic teams. We found that every step we took, at every stage, required equivalent creative effort. Local Expansion of the Gospel An apostolic team can go where a congregation cannot and make things happen that would

It is one of the eternal stories that are told about soccer: when Brazil gets knocked out of a World Cup, Brazilians jump off apartment blocks. It can happen even when Brazil wins. One writer at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 claims to have seen a Brazilian fan kill himself out of “sheer joy” after his team’s victory in the final. Janet Lever tells that story in Soccer Madness, her eye-opening study of Brazilian soccer culture published way back in 1983, when nobody (and certainly not female American social scientists) wrote books about soccer. Lever continues: Of course, Brazilians are not the only fans to kill themselves for their teams. In the 1966 World Cup a West German fatally shot himself when his television set broke down during the final game between his country and England. Nor have Americans escaped some bizarre ends. An often cited case is the Denver man who wrote a suicide note—”I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized and I can’t stand their fumbling anymore”—and then shot himself. Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an eighteen-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras–El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños “got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.” Her funeral was televised. El Salvador’s president and ministers, and the country’s soccer team walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Within a month, Bolaños’s death would help prompt the “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras.