(…) regional tournaments are not economically efficient, as small football clubs benefit from revenues without generating them, due to their lack of followers.
(…) to solve several problems in Brazilian football (…):
1. Reduce the importance of regional tournaments, which would include from now on only small clubs on a “promotion and relegation” system.
2. Integrate the national and international tournament schedules (…)
3. Solve the economic issues of football clubs, and consequently, the issues of Brazilian football as a whole.
If you thought the excerpts above were written by Juca Kfouri or some other present-day Brazilian sports writer, think again: they were taken from the first issue of the weekly news magazine Veja, published on September 11 (!), 1968:
Veja No 1 - Sep 11, 1968
Forty one years later, the administrative problems of Brazilian football are still pretty much the same. Despite of the perpetual mess that is the CBF (the national football association), or perhaps because of that, Brazil has won 3 more FIFA World Cups after that article was written, and has been a staple at the top of FIFA rankings since its inception.
As anything else in the world, the success of Brazilian football in the international arena can’t be linked to a single factor. The diversity and the size of the population, the tropical climate, and the popularity of the game across all social-economic classes, all played a significant role in the development of that sport in Brazil. That’s all nice and logical, but I would argue that chaos and uncertainty were no smaller contributors there.
Where else in the world you would find:
- Tournaments where a team has to lose a game to qualify for the next phase (Grêmio, 1978; Náutico, 1980)?
- Two champions because the referee can’t do simple math for the penalty shootouts (Santos and Portuguesa, 1973) or because both teams agree to sharing the cup after tying 11-11 in the penalty kicks (Sport and Guarani, 1987)?
- National championship playoffs decided by W.O. (walkover; Flamengo, International, Sport and Guarani, 1987)?
On the other side, football is not a conventional team sport. To win the FIFA World Cup in its current format, a team does not need to score a goal or win a single game in regulation or extra time. Chile qualified to the knock-out phase in 1978 with 3 draws, and theoretically could go all the way to the finals by the means of just winning on penalty shootouts. Furthermore, bad refereeing seems to just increase the interest of fans, to the point that football remains one of the few team sports today where modern technology is off-limits. I suspect this kind of logic is unfathomable to the typical sports fan in North America. If the sport itself is so counter-intuitive, maybe being disorganized, irrational and implausible end up being competitive advantages 🙂 .
Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Product and User Experience at Google once wrote:
Creativity loves constraints but they must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. (…) Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change.
I can’t think of a better description for the jogo bonito. Of course, being creative and fancy is not necessarily the road to success (Netherlands in 1974 and Brazil in 1982 come to mind), but from time to time, that passion for the unconventional gets us gems like these:
Note: This post was updated after its initial publication to add the screenshot of the news magazine and for clarity purposes.
The bamboo raft 
Says it all… While the players and the entertainers are primarily Brazilian… the King is obviously French. 🙂
Great King Eric! One of the best players ever to not play in a World Cup (along with George Weah). I keep forgetting he’s French!