🔴⚫ How did Flamengo get so big?

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Hello! Welcome back to the Brazil Sports newsletter, brought to you by The Brazilian Report. This week, we look at Brazil’s biggest football clubs, and one in particular, to ask: How did Flamengo grow to become so popular?

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]

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The Brazilian football club with almost 40 million fans

At the start of this month, Rio de Janeiro football clubs Botafogo and Flamengo met in the Mangueirão stadium, in the northern city of Belém, for the final of the Supercopa — the now-traditional curtain-raiser to the football season, pitting the winners of the league and domestic cup head to head.

Fans from both teams packed the 54,000-seater stadium, but these were not supporters that made the 2,500 kilometer trip (about 1,500 miles) from Rio de Janeiro — these were local fans, bearing banners from Flamengo and Botafogo supporters groups from around the Amazonian state of Pará.

Distance-wise, it is as if Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur played a North London Derby to a packed stadium in Moscow — filled with Muscovite Gunners and Spurs supporters.

Belém already has two traditional and well-supported football clubs in Remo and Paysandu, but on the city’s streets — and throughout Brazil’s North region — the jersey you’ll see more than any other is the red-and-black hooped shirt of Flamengo.

And this is true almost anywhere in Brazil. With the exception of the South (where local clubs Grêmio and Internacional dominate the football scene), Flamengo and Corinthians, a giant from São Paulo state, are the two best-supported clubs in all other Brazilian regions.

While the debate of “who’s bigger” might sound like a desperate battle of egos, these matters in Brazil actually have statistical backing.

As well as providing some of the most influential opinion surveys ahead of presidential elections, pollster Datafolha also asks Brazilians about their football preferences on a reasonably regular basis.

Its latest football support survey, held in November last year and published this January, Datafolha showed Flamengo having Brazil’s biggest fanbase, reaching a stonking 19% of the country.

With 2022 census data calculating the Brazilian population at 203.1 million, Datafolha’s results suggest that 38.5 million of them identify as being Flamengo supporters — not far off the entire population of Canada.

Three clubs from Brazil’s biggest city come next, with Corinthians claiming 14% (28.4 million), Palmeiras 7% (14.2 million), and São Paulo with 6% (12.2 million).

Spanish giants Real Madrid are widely considered to be the best-supported football club in the world, but even they would struggle to come up with such impressive numbers from a reputable statistics agency. 

Radio sets the standard

But why is it that Flamengo, Corinthians and other São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro clubs are so popular across Brazil? To answer that, we need to go back to the 1930s.

Radio arrived in Brazil in 1922, at the same time as the country celebrated the centenary of its independence from Portugal. News on sports at the time was sparse, and it would not be until the 1930s that the first football matches were broadcast live on the wireless.

Unsurprisingly, when they were broadcast, the matches were invariably from the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, or São Paulo — Brazil’s second-biggest city at the time.

That in itself goes some way toward explaining the national popularity of teams from the country’s two largest cities, with those initial affiliations being passed on through generations, from parent to child.

A great Flamengo, a greater Brazil

But what the radio argument does not explain is how Flamengo became, by a country mile, Brazil’s most popular team.

One might suggest that, during these periods of radio broadcasting, Flamengo was the best team, and avid listeners in growing cities around Brazil were latching on to glory —  but that would not be true either. In fact, at the time it became Brazil’s most popular club, Flamengo was in the middle of what is still its longest trophy drought in history: 12 years without a single title.

Indeed, Brazil in that regard is an outlier in world football: its two most popular clubs are not its most successful.

During the Zico era, at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s, Flamengo were indeed Brazil’s dominant club. In recent years, they have established themselves as perennial trophy-winners and could well be about to enjoy a long period of dominance. Corinthians is a similar story, having flashes of greatness over Brazilian football’s history but no sustained period of undisputed dominance.

Flamengo and Corinthians have won plenty of titles over the years, but their popularity preceded those triumphs. Compare that to the domestic dominance of Bayern Munich in Germany, of Real Madrid in Spain, or Juventus in Italy. By rights, Brazil’s winningest clubs are Palmeiras and Santos.

The rise of Flamengo coincides with the first long rule of President Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945), and particularly the Estado Novo period beginning in 1937, when Vargas launched a self-coup to rule as a dictator.

Throughout those years, the Vargas government sought to cement its legitimacy by appropriating and supporting Brazil’s “national symbols” of Carnival, theater and football, backed up by a broad framework of propaganda.

As an indication of how important sport was to the government, Lourival Fontes, Vargas’s propaganda minister, led Brazil’s delegation to the 1934 World Cup in Italy.

Nation-building was the name of the game, and Flamengo saw an opportunity. The club’s own publicity campaigns tapped into the Vargas Era jingoism, affirming that it was the most loved team in Brazil — an idea that began to stick.

In 1937, Flamengo president José Bastos Padilha launched a children’s competition in partnership with two major newspapers to see who could come up with the best slogan that linked Flamengo and Brazil. The winners? “Flamengo teaches you to love Brazil above all else,” and “A strong Flamengo, a stronger Brazil.”

Brazil’s national team went on to enchant the world at the 1938 World Cup, and Flamengo broke its trophy hoodoo in 1939, leading to celebrations in the streets of the capital. The rest, as they say, is history.

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