Brazil have won five World Cups and produced more great footballers than any other nation, and yet the match that is most deeply etched in the collective imagination is a defeat. Everywhere has its irremediable national catastrophe, something like a Hiroshima, wrote the playwright Nelson Rodrigues. Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat to Uruguay in 1950.
He was exaggerating, of course. But only just. Brazil’s failure to win the 1950 World Cup at home by losing 2-1 to their much smaller neighbours is a memory that refuses to go away – and for many casts a shadow over next year’s tournament.
With one year until Brazil hosts its second World Cup, the reason why a match that took place so long ago still resonates with people who were not even born is because of the crucial role football had in the construction of a modern Brazilian identity.
Brazil imported more slaves than anywhere else and was the last country in the Americas to abolish the practice. In the first decades of the 20th century, the poor, black underclass was seen as a cause of Brazilian backwardness. It was not until the 1930s that a new, exciting style of football played by its black and mixed-race footballers began to make Brazilians feel proud of the country’s racial mix.
Brazil wanted to win the 1950 World Cup not only for sporting reasons but also because football unified the nation and best reflected its unique heritage. Victory would be a vindication of the Brazilian way.
The world’s then largest stadium, the Maracanã, was built in Rio de Janeiro to host the event, a declaration that Brazil was to be taken seriously on the international stage. Today Brazil has the biggest and most perfect stadium in the world, dignifying the competence of its people in all branches of human activity, a local paper wrote.
Brazil needed only a draw with Uruguay in the 1950 game to be champions. In the region of 200,000 fans crammed into the Maracanã, still considered to be the largest-ever audience for a football match. After winning their previous two games 7-1 and 6-1, Brazil were overwhelming favourites.
Brazil scored first. Uruguay equalised. And then, in the 79th minute, the Brazilian goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa was wrongfooted and Uruguay scored again.
It continues to be the most famous goal in the history of Brazilian football … because none other transcended its status as sporting fact … converting itself into a historic moment in the life of a nation, wrote the author Paulo Perdigão.
The defeat reinforced a feeling of inferiority – that Brazil somehow deserved the humiliation – and subsequently become a metaphor for a more general lack of self-esteem.
Even though Brazil finally won a World Cup eight years later, and a second four years after that, the victories did not extinguish the pain of 1950.
Barbosa became a pariah and died penniless in 2000. He said that his saddest moment was 20 years after the match when a woman spotted him in a shop. He overheard her say: He is the man that made all of Brazil cry.
According to the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta, the result was a national tragedy because it happened collectively and brought a united vision of the loss of a historic opportunity. Because it happened at the beginning of a decade in which Brazil was looking to assert itself as a nation with a great future. The result was a tireless search for explanations of, and blame for, the shameful defeat.
Brazilians have mixed feelings about the Maracanã, which will host the World Cup final next year. It is the spiritual home of Brazilian football, but it is also stigmatised by that fateful match more than six decades ago.
The only way to exorcise the ghosts of 1950 is for a win on 13 July 2014.
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