For as long as anyone can remember, Brazil has been the landof the Beautiful Game, run by less than beautiful administrations.
The players have always been there. Pele emerged as a tenderyet resplendent youth at the 1958 World Cup. Neymar and Oscar are the hopes ofthe next World Cup, on Brazilian soil, in 2014.
But who will guide them? Last Friday, a week before the drawfor the World Cup rehearsal event, the Confederations Cup, Brazil summarilyfired its national team coach, Mano Menezes.
The elders of the Brazilian soccer federation, the CBF, gaveno explanation. Its president, Jose Maria Marin, brushed aside the question atan international soccer conference in Rio de Janeiro on Monday, saying: “Thepast is the past. We won’t talk about this again. We must think in the presentand the future.”
Marin is 80. He is the new boy in the top seat after hispredecessor, Ricardo Teixeira, dodged corruption investigations by quittinglast March from his 20-year tenure on the grounds of ill health.
The removal of Menezes might be as simple as that. Hired bythe old regime, he was unlikely to survive in post under the new one.
Menezes was far from universally accepted. No man could bein a nation of nearly 200 million people “ about 199 million of whom aresoccer-crazy.
Menezes knew he was on the “coaching carousel,” as it isknown in Brazil, the spinning wheel that sooner or later shakes off the teambuilder and replaces him.
Marin says nobody need know before January who will be thenext coach, but the grapevine suggests that the future lies in the past.
The name on insiders’ lips is Luiz Felipe Scolari, the sameBig Phil who took over coaching the Selecao, the national squad, one yearbefore the 2002 World Cup, and won it.
Fine. He knows the drill, and he is enough of a drillsergeant to toughen up the boys that Menezes has identified and experimentedwith ever since Brazil decided that it simply was not acceptable for thenational team to play at home in the dour, defensive, counterattacking way thatfailed under Dunga at the 2010 World Cup.
“I find it hard that Brazil’s next coach will be aforeigner,” Marin said in Rio. “I have the greatest respect for Guardiola, butBrazil has won five World Cups with Brazilian coaches.”
Indeed, it has. This would not be the first time that theCBF has abruptly changed its coach on the run in to the big event.
The military dictatorship ensured in 1969 that JoaoSaldanha, a romantic who put his soul into the Pele, Gerson, Tostao line up,was not the man it wanted among heroes.
Saldanha was removed, and Mario Zagallo, a World Cup winneras a winger, was given the role. And Zagallo, wily and industrious, madesignificant changes that contributed to that great triumph.
At the heart the firing of Menezes, however, is soccerpolitics.
A friend in Sao Paulo mailed me over the weekend.
“These ‘cartolas’ who run Brazilian football,” he said,referring to the Portugese term for top hats, “have no real love of the gameand climb into these positions of influence out of self-aggrandizement.”
He added: “I can’t think of one who played an active role onthe pitch or in a coaching capacity. They are politicians who, unlike the guysin politics itself, are accountable to nobody and probably no less corrupt.This has been eating away at my insides since I heard Mano Menezes had beenfired. The infighting of cartolas has left the Selecao in a very precarioussituation.”
That view permeates Brazil.
There are detractors of Menezes. We heard them loud andclear when fans in Sao Paulo jeered and booed the coach and Neymar during adepressingly casual 1-0 victory over South Africa in September.
