⚽ Football or Carnival? 🎉 Or both?

Hello! Welcome back to the Brazil Sports newsletter, brought to you by The Brazilian Report. This week, it’s Carnival! And we’re exploring the curious intersection between Brazil’s famous samba parades and football ultras groups.

If you have any questions about this newsletter, or topics you’d like to see covered in future issues, send me an email at [email protected]

São Paulo: where football ultras and Carnival meet

It is often said that Brazil’s national sport is not football, it’s winning. While little more than a light-hearted jibe, it goes some way toward explaining the tangible competitive spirit in a country where even samba and Carnival can become a competition of winners and losers.

While much of the true soul of Carnival lies in its cities’ street parties, the main events of the four-day festival are the gigantic televised parades of the samba schools of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Though they are certainly joyful and celebratory in tone, make no mistake: these parades are hard-fought tournaments, and there can only be one winner each year.

Parades are marked on aspects such as their costumes and floats, but also attributes like “harmony” and “evolution,” with the school earning the highest score becoming Carnival champion. 

Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools have famously been linked to racketeering, with bosses of the notorious and illegal jogo do bicho animal lottery sponsoring and running traditional schools in an attempt to gain public favor.

In São Paulo, however, the dynamic is completely different. And while the Carnival competition is mostly made up of traditional samba schools, the “intruders” in this case are football ultras. In the top division of São Paulo’s samba competition (the so-called Grupo Especial), three entrants bear the names of major ultras groups of the city’s three biggest football teams.

In Brazil, these ultras groups are known as torcidas organizadas, literally “organized supporters.” And public opinion regarding them is divided. Their entry into Carnival was, in some cases, an attempt to smooth out that divide.

“Organized” fans

There are football ultras groups all over Brazil, of different shapes and sizes, and with different raisons d'être. On the one hand, the gloriously fervent atmosphere at Brazilian football matches — including the songs, drums and displays — simply would not exist without these torcidas organizadas, or organizadas for short. Many of these groups are also engaged in charitable pursuits, collecting and distributing food donations for needy communities and organizing fundraising events.

However, the organizadas also embody the violence that exists in Brazilian football. Be that running battles on matchdays, pelting opposition team buses (and supporters’ buses) with bricks or threatening members of their own club.

Brazil’s first organizadas date back to the 1930s and 1940s. As the name suggests, these were organized groups of fans who would chant and play music in unison in the stands.

However, the country’s first organizada in the style we know of today was Corinthians’s Gaviões da Fiel (“Hawks of the Faithful”), established in 1969. As Brazil’s military dictatorship had reached its most repressive and brutal phase, authoritarian politics were equally common in the running of football clubs, and the Gaviões sought to serve as an independent force questioning the decisions made within Corinthians.

In the years that followed, São Paulo’s four biggest clubs (Corinthians, Palmeiras, São Paulo FC, Santos) all had their own organizadas — often more than one, with dissident groups being a feature of the movement from the outset.  

Why Carnival?

Regarding the branching out into Carnival parades, once again the Gaviões da Fiel were the pioneers. Even though the group was swelling in numbers and importance, the leaders of the Gaviões noted that it was getting exceedingly hard to keep their members together and engaged when there was no football.

Traditionally, the Brazilian football off-season extended from December to February or March — or, in other words, the perfect time to rehearse and parade on Carnival. The Gaviões joined traditional samba school Vai-Vai and had their own wing in their parade, before branching off on their own.

“It got to the point where the Gaviões wing alone had more than 200 people, and it was no longer a wing,” said anthropologist Roberto Souza Junior, who researches the crossover between São Paulo’s torcidas organizadas and samba schools.

Since becoming a fully fledged school, the Gaviões da Fiel have won São Paulo’s Carnival competition four times and have been a consistent force in the top samba school division since 2008.

The story of how the other two top-tier samba schools linked to football ultras groups (Mancha Verde, of Palmeiras, and the Dragões da Real, of São Paulo FC) branched out into Carnival is a tad more controversial.

On an August morning in 1995, Palmeiras and São Paulo FC faced off in the final of a youth tournament in the city’s Pacaembu stadium. With the game finishing 0-0 after 90 minutes, the decision went to a Golden Goal, which Palmeiras scored, granting them the title. A pitch invasion ensued, which rapidly turned into a running battle between organizadas from both teams, with many members armed with sticks, metal poles and bricks.

A total of 102 people were injured and one person (a 16-year-old São Paulo fan) died. The whole thing was broadcast live on free-to-air television.

The public outrage in the aftermath of what became known as “The Battle of the Pacaembu” led to the court-ordered extinction of the main organizadas of both teams (including the Mancha Verde, Torcida Independente and Dragões da Real), as well as a São Paulo stadium ban on the entry of any flags, uniforms or banners bearing the name of organizadas.

This was just the highest-profile of several such incidents around that time that saw organizadas being banned from São Paulo’s stadiums.

In these cases, following in the footsteps of the Gaviões da Fiel to become samba schools gave these other organizadas a better legal standing. Not only could they continue to gather their members while technically serving stadium bans, it would be a lot harder to legally extinguish these groups if they also operated as samba schools.

“There was a survival strategy involved there, of moving to a different classification and diverting the headlines away from the violence, and evading legal punishments,” Souza Junior told The Brazilian Report.

Perfect match?

At a basic level, there is a clear link between Carnival parades and the “performances” of Brazil’s organizadas inside the stadiums. Choreography, uniforms, banners, rhythm and even singing skills are essential on match day, in much the same way as they are on parade day.

Ahead of big games, it is not unheard of for organizadas to pass out “hymn sheets” to supporters in other stadium sectors so that they know what chants to sing and when.

During his field work, Souza Junior tells the story of being present at a curious rehearsal meeting of one of São Paulo’s biggest ultras groups. “They had noticed that during the matches, one side of the organizada was singing a certain song louder than the other side. So they got everyone together at the headquarters, arranged the members in the positions they usually stand in the stadium, and rehearsed the chant. The leaders would then move certain members from one side to the other in order to create the ideal sound.”

Indeed, anyone sitting in the ultras end that does not sing along, do the right choreography, or wear the right uniform is likely to be (un)politely asked to leave.

And their results in São Paulo’s Carnival speak for themselves. The Gaviões da Fiel are four-time champions, while since 2019 the Mancha Verde have only been outside the top two positions once, winning two titles in that period.

Other stories we’re following

🏟️ If you happen to be in São Paulo over this long holiday weekend, the Museu do Futebol museum housed inside the Pacaembu stadium will be holding a Carnival Super Tuesday event, with free-to-attend workshops and live shows. 

⭐ Last year’s national and continental champions Botafogo are finding themselves in all sorts of trouble early this season, facing early elimination from the Rio state championship and suffering a heavy 4-0 aggregate defeat to Argentine side Racing in South America’s Recopa supercup final.

🧮 In less than four weeks, Neymar has already made more appearances and scored more goals for Santos than he did in 532 days at Saudi club Al-Hilal. He scored directly from a corner kick last weekend, gaining headlines worldwide.

🏎️ Rookie Brazilian Formula 1 driver Gabriel Bortoleto took part in pre-season testing this week, representing the Kick Sauber team. The season officially starts with the Australian Grand Prix in two weeks’ time.