If you love history, you'll root for Brazil and Uruguay today. Here's why.
On July 16th, 1950, Uruguay beat Brazil 2-1 in the World Cup final at the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro. It wasn't even a real final, but only the last game of the "final round-robin" that would determine the winner. Brazil needed a win or draw to triumph. Instead, they lost. Urban legend says that some fans killed themselves; surely enough, some wanted to.
This was the first World Cup after World War II and Brazil's first at home. Heavily and uneasily multicultural, Brazilians had only been introduced to football by German and Italian immigrants some 40 years prior. Their oft-white national team was mixed-race in 1950, a crucial (if poorly received) step. Initially only a local affair, futbol had only recently been understood as a national and "Brazilian" phenomenon, spurred in no small part by its exploitation by then-president Getúlio Vargas. What begun as the Sunday entertainment of the white elites of Rio and São Paulo had quickly made its way out to the working-class neighborhoods and the poorer countryside, thanks to the typical (and generally effective in the short term) culture-making fixation of populist half-dictators like Vargas.
That day at the Maracanã everything was set for Brazilian victory. The stadium was built to host 150,000 (an unthinkable size at that time), but the official attendance was around 173,000 and maybe closer to 200,000. Work was called off almost everywhere. Rural towns gathered around the government-installed radio speakers in the center square to listen to the play-by-play, delivered by the famed composer-turned-sportscaster Ary Barros (the inventor of "goooooool!"). Vargas even spent the entirety of the first half rehearsing his victory speech -- or so it is said.
The game was a soundly deserved 2-1 loss to a legendary Uruguay who fielded Varela, Schiaffino, and Ghiggia, all three easily among the top 50 players of all time. The winning goal, scored by the latter, was blamed on Brazilian goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa. He wasn't perfect, on that one save or during the rest of the game, but no doubt he would have been blamed less if he were white. Instead, he bore the scorn of football fans for a half-century until his death in 2000.
While the memory of that game has faded, some (many? all? it is hard to say for sure) fans yet retain its cultural burdens. The disappointment of a World Cup final loss, the acknowledgment of a great team's vulnerability, the national shame of losing at home (comparable to the Argentine shame of *winning* at home in 1978, that too because of a ruthless dictator)...
...and maybe -- just maybe -- that slithering feeling, like an itch on your back that's just out of reach, that Brazil's greatness cannot be cemented without a home win; that their five World Cup wins since 1950 cannot wash completely the shame of the Maracanazo.
If Brazil and Uruguay win today, they play each other on July 4th. It won't be a final, but a quarterfinal. And it won't be the Estádio do Maracanã in Rio, but the Castelão in Fortaleza. Whatever happens here, the ghosts of the Maracanazo cannot truly be banished. Such is the character of sports history, after all, where so many attempts at undoing or avenging the past conjure new ghosts and new shames to wash, only with different victims.
But if Brazil and Uruguay win today, I for one wouldn't mind another shot, or even just a brief commemorative window on one of the most fascinating and controversial eras of global football.
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(Some material from this story borrowed from the work of David Goldblatt, Loch Phillipps, Wright Thompson, and Federico Buffa).
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