Soccer as a game and soccer as a metaphor: that is what Bye Bye Soccer, a collection of short stories by Brazilian writer Edilberto Coutinho, is all about.  Through his terse, sometimes brutal stories, we come to know the history of soccer in Brazil and see it for the double-edged sword that it is: both as a way out of poverty (and a way to forget poverty) and as a crowd-control measure, whereby giving the people a focus and allowing them to forget about the misery in their own lives makes it possible for the government to forget about eradicating the people’s misery.  Coutinho shows us soccer as it is perceived — a game of goals and action, national pride and international prominence — and as it is experienced –an industry of oppressed workers, powerful bosses, and isolated moments of vicious happiness.  These stories give us soccer as a game and soccer as life.

The best of the stories, “Black Ship”, moves between past and present, tracing the history of a black family through its generations of soccer players.  Instead of offering freedom (spiritual, social, or economic), soccer for this family is form of slavery.  Rich owners purchase, trade, and discard of their players as if they were workers on plantations, good only for the hard work they can provide and chucked when too hurt to keep playing (working).  In “Black Ship” we learn how soccer was brought to Brazil from Britain and was first a game of the wealthy whites, both in terms of players and audiences.  Blacks were allowed to play only if they had superstar ability, and even then only under protest from white clubs and players.  Slowly black players became accepted but in this and other stories of Coutinho, it is only an acceptance of  convenience and greed, with profit  and success the goal of the still predominantly white and racist owners of the teams and clubs.

Even as soccer in Brazil and throughout the world evolved into a game of possibilities for all classes and races, in Brazil it was never a game of equal opportunities and it was always a game of manipulation. Similar to professional sports in the United States, soccer has been the way up and out for the under-privileged for Brazil (actually, “under-privileged” is a completely inadequate adjective for the level of misery and want in slums of Brazil) but the opportunities were not tempered with any lasting imprint of further education or long-time security, in other words, a permanent path out of poverty.  Soccer was a temporary escape for most players, much as watching a game of soccer was only a temporary escape for the fans.

Coutinho’s stories are ugly and hopeless in many ways, but never extravagant or false.  There is truth in these stories, truth succinctly and harshly presented, and I recommend this book as both a history of the game played in Brazil and as a very sharp slice of life.