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• Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

  The New World

  Tags:

  Brazil,

  football,

  Napoleon,

  Portugal,

  Ronaldo,

  soccer

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  Among the spate of World Cup games pitting colonizer against colonized, Brazil’s match with Portugal is unique for pitting an erstwhile colony against an empire of which it was once the center. In the fall of 1807, Napoleon’s armies were driving across Iberia with Lisbon in their sights. (Portugal was allied to Bonaparte’s English nemeses.) Fearful of being deposed from his throne, Portugal’s young ruler, Joåo VI, chose to flee his capital rather than hand it over to the French. Ordering a wholesale migration of his court to Portugal’s prize colony across the sea (and unable to en-act the premise of the late, great Jose Saramago’s novel about Portugal floating off into the Atlantic), Joåo set sail for Brazil with 15,000 courtiers in tow. Protected by an escort from the British Royal Navy, Joåo’s fleet set course for Madeira, then continued on to Brazil, which they reached during the first days of January 1808.

  The impact of the Portuguese empire moving its seat to Rio de Janeiro was profound—beginning with hastening Brazil’s attainment of self-rule. (Joåo’s son Pedro, who remained in Brazil after Joåo’s return to Lisbon in 1821, declared his adopted homeland independent shortly thereafter.) Joåo’s first edict on arriving in the New World was declaration that Brazil’s ports would no longer be open solely to Portuguese ships, but other “friendly nations” as well (i.e. England). The move not only sealed the growth of Portugal’s erstwhile colony into an independent economic actor on the world stage. It also indirectly paved the way for the eventual arrival in the late 1800s, with British seamen and merchants alighting at Brazilian ports, of a game they called futebol.

  Over ensuing decades, Brazil made excelling at futebol a touchstone of its identity. Elaborating a style of play that, in the words of seminal Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, “rounds and sweetens the game the British invented,” as the Brazilians made their samba-suffused brand of o jogo bonito a kind of national faith. Portugal, if not boasting anything like Brazil’s litany of triumphs, boast a storied futebol history—though thanks, in large measure, to what remained of their old Empire in the twentieth century. Portugal’s most legendary player, Eusebio—who spearheaded their run to the semi-finals of the 1966 World Cup in England—was from Maputo; today he’d line up for Mozambique.

  Relations between Brazil and Portugal today, apart from some petty teasing over accents, are as copasetic as one might suspect given the length and depth of the two countries’ ties. (France v. Algeria this isn’t.) In the opening rounds of this World Cup, Brazil’s team—despite many Brazilian’s bemoaning the current side’s lack of customary Brazilian flair—has looked strong in its opening matches. Portuguese hopes, meanwhile, will rest on the lean shoulders of a starlet-shagging pretty boy from Madeira, whose ancestors may or may not have stood by to watch, two centuries ago, to watch Joåo VI’s fleet disappear over the horizon to bring the center of the Lusophone empire, for an epochal decade and a half, to the land that became o jogo bonito’s spiritual home.

  June 25, 2010
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