Soccer in Sun and Shadow

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.”