The first round of voting in Brazil’s presidential elections was looming and Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the polarising incumbent, had a message for his followers.
“Vote this Sunday wearing the yellow shirt,” the 67-year-old president declared ahead of the voting in this month’s elections. “Vote with the yellow shirt!”
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In any other country, turning the national football team shirt into a political weapon would sound absurd. But this is Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and this is a World Cup year; normal rules do not apply.
As Sunday’s runoff vote between Bolsonaro — the right-wing leader whose policies include threatening to disregard election results, pushing for more liberal gun laws, opening up indigenous land to mining and a gung-ho handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the left-leaning Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva looms closer, the president’s followers will don the most famous jersey in world football to show their support. They did the same in 2018, a few months after that year’s World Cup in Russia.
Neymar Jr, Brazil’s talisman, is probably the most high-profile bolsominion – the name given to Bolsonaro’s devotees. Yet for those opposed to his agenda, the weaponisation of the Selecao shirt has prompted anguish.
Bolsonaro and Neymar (with english subtitles). 🇧🇷🇺🇸
Compartilhem esse vídeo, é muito importante. pic.twitter.com/HomkPvQDas
— Tradutor de Direita (@TradutordoBR) October 23, 2022
“Our failure was in letting it get kidnapped,” Walter Casagrande Jr, who played in the 1986 World Cup and is now a prominent TV pundit, tells The Athletic. “We messed up. No one took a stand. There’s no way of going out with the yellow shirt because this absurd colour division exists. At this moment, there’s no way of wearing it.”
But how has Brazil managed to turn what should be their ultimate symbol of national unity into the next front of an increasingly toxic political culture war, just weeks before a tournament many expect them to win?
Football, as Jorge Chaloub, a political sciences professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, points out, “is one of the key strands in Brazilian identity”. And it is certainly true that the politicisation of the Brazilian national team jersey is not a new phenomenon.
Chaloub traces the trend back to 2013, when protests initially born out of anger at failings in public transport mutated into something more fundamental.
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“Studies on the 2013 protests point clearly to the use of national symbols by many protestors — ideas like, ‘my flag will not be red’ and ‘my party is Brazil’,” Chaloub says. “You have this language which is supposedly patriotic, which starts to bind the flag to the right. And the Selecao shirt became part of it.”
Protestors donned the shirt again when they took to the streets after the launch of ‘Operation Car Wash’, the world’s largest government corruption investigation which led to the arrests of key politicians. This, too, however, was more an act of defiance, aimed at expressing national pride. As Juca Kfouri, the country’s most respected football writer of the past 40 years, rationalised: “The Brazil shirt is in people’s wardrobes.”
It took the 2016 impeachment of Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff, as well as Lula’s own imprisonment a year later, to make the national jersey a totem for Brazil’s right wing. “Before then, it was used by the left and the right,” Chaloub says. “But in 2016, the Brazil shirt became a symbol of the right.”
For Bolsonaro, co-opting Brazil’s yellow shirt is simply the natural next step in a career in which he has consistently used football for his own ends. The former army captain has worn a bewildering array of shirts, from Palmeiras to Flamengo, United States to Lazio, as well as a number of fake tops, perhaps to appeal to the many Brazilians who cannot afford an official club shirt.
Vendo um bom e velho futebol de domingo ao lado do PR @jairbolsonaro
Que jogo, meus amigos! E meu fogão ainda ganhou de virada!
Será que temos um Presidente pé quente? pic.twitter.com/AhHDfifT3d— MarioFrias (@mfriasoficial) June 19, 2022
“Bolsonaro explicitly uses football as a political instrument,” Chaloub analyses. “There was a report recently saying that Bolsonaro has worn 86 different football shirts and he’s been in office for about 1,300 days. It’s an identity. It generates relatability with people.
“But this Bolsonaro tactic feels insincere when you see that he’s worn shirts from all the Rio clubs. His image is of someone who has little problem saying one thing today and another thing tomorrow. He sells it as impulsiveness.”
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Bolsonaro is also known to have close relationships with several senior football executives in Brazil. He nominated Flamengo president Rodolfo Landim for presidency of the state-owned oil company Petrobras, before Landim curiously rejected the offer after Fluminense beat Flamengo in the Rio state championship final. Bolsonaro is also on good terms with Palmeiras president Leila Pereira.
It is with Brazil’s players, however, that Bolsonaro’s most significant relationships lie. Lucas Moura, Daniel Alves and Romario, who was re-elected as a senator for Rio de Janeiro under the same party as Bolsonaro’s Partido Liberal, have all publicly declared their support for him. Thiago Silva used Bolsonaro’s slogans on a social media post, while Ronaldinho and Rivaldo’s backing for him in 2018 led to Barcelona watering down their ambassadorial roles.
It is Neymar, however, whose support matters the most. Last month, just days before the first round of votes, the Paris Saint-Germain striker posted a video of himself on TikTok dancing in a chair to a ‘Vote Bolsonaro’ song. In recent weeks, he has flooded his Instagram stories with pro-Bolsonaro posts, one of which was a video of an evangelical pastor claiming to have been ordered to read out a series of statements by Brazilian electoral authorities, subsequently labelled as misinformation by Instagram.
@neymarjr 22
To seal his endorsement of Bolsonaro, Neymar last week appeared as a special guest on the president’s live stream, speaking about wearing the yellow shirt and Palmeiras’ upcoming fixtures. When asked what his celebration will be for his first goal at the upcoming World Cup, Neymar replied that he would dedicate it to Bolsonaro. “The president will have already been re-elected,” Neymar said. “We will meet again with the trophy in our hands.”
If Bolsonaro loses to Lula, there will need to be bridges rebuilt, given the challenger recently claimed that Neymar supports Bolsonaro in return for tax-debt exemption.
Not everyone in the Brazil camp — around 80 per cent of whom are reportedly not even eligible to vote — is comfortable with the politicisation of their World Cup campaign.
Tite, the national coach, has already announced that should Brazil win in Qatar, they will not travel to Brasilia to visit the presidential palace, which would be a break from what has happened every other time Brazil have become world champions. He, and a million others, also signed an open letter defending Brazil’s voting system and democracy in August.
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Tite, however, is an outlier where football is concerned – a point not lost on illustrious figures in Brazil’s past who became crusaders for political reform.
Casagrande, who helped to lead the Democracia Corinthiana movement at his old club Corinthians in the early 1980s — an act of democratic defiance against the country’s ruling military dictatorship — is especially downbeat.
“After that period [of Democracia Corinthiana], no other team has taken that kind of stance or been part of a movement of that kind,” he says. “No other players have been as strongly engaged with sociopolitical matters as we were. A legacy within football? There was none. The legacy is historical.
“Footballers are too comfortable and prefer not to involve themselves with anything, even when they want to. In Brazil, it’s very difficult. It’s very unlikely for there to be five or six players who are politically engaged.”
Neymar, for one, would doubtless argue that Casagrande’s problem stems from footballers not being engaged in a way of which he approves. Either way, it is hard to imagine the World Cup not being hijacked by Brazil’s politicians, given the febrile state of a country plagued by political murders and the ongoing crisis of Amazon deforestation.
Victory in Qatar in December could remedy a growing disconnect between the national team and the country’s citizens — a problem Neymar himself admitted earlier this year — or it could simply empower Bolsonarismo, assuming the reigning president is triumphant on Sunday.
Seasoned observers are not hopeful. “If Bolsonaro is elected, we are heading for an authoritarian pathway,” says Chaloub. “So, in this scenario, the World Cup would have one meaning. If Lula is elected, there will be another meaning. People from the left might wear the Brazil shirt to reclaim it. But it seems likely that the far right will continue to do what they are doing.”
(Top photo: Instagram/@ronaldinho)