South American football trading style for substance

Socio-economic factors & practical demands among reasons leading to South Americans discarding unique style

Brazil coach Tite believes in learning from different styles of football

SARANSK: Soon after Argentina crashed to a soul-crushing defeat to Croatia at the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium, Jorge Valdano — the man who scored one of the Albiceleste’s three goals in the 1986 final — wrote an article for The Guardian. In that, he mourned aloud at the funeral of Argentinean football. “There is no identifiable moment when it all started, nor one place where it began, and there is no dominant theory,” he wrote.

“What is true is that bit by bit we got further away from the ball, the one thing we loved more than the game itself. We got further from a style that used to draw us to the stadium, where we longed to shout ‘ole’ every time we saw someone dribble, trick an opponent, tease them; every time we saw a lightning one-two or some expression of cunning, that astuteness — that was our life.”

This is not a lament limited to Argentina for the Brazilians have mourned the death of their unique style multiple times over the last couple of decades. Of course, many contemporary articles concerning Brazilian football throw about the word ‘ginga’ often. But they’re as wide off the mark as an Englishman at a penalty shootout, for ginga in its purest form has been extinct for decades. As Valdano writes, there is no point in time that one can point to and say ‘this is when it was murdered’. But we know it’s dead. It is generally accepted that the brilliant Brazilians of the 1982 Cup were the last known exponents of it. “The dream had ended,” wrote the New York Times, somewhat prophetically, following their exit.

“And it is a shame, for it was a beautiful dream.” By the time, they won the World Cup for a fourth time 12 years later, there was little difference between them and Europeans. Centuries after it had colonised the New World, Europeans had colonised their football as well. So what happened to those vaunted South American styles, the Brazilian ginga, the Argentinean La Nuestra, even the Uruguayans with their distinct style that married the beautiful game to its ugly side? Generally, that discussion ends with fingers being pointed in the direction of European club football.

Today, teenagers from South America are gleaned away by European clubs before they can finish their evolution. One of the loudest advocates of this theory is the great Pele himself. “The style of football — all over the world, not just Brazil, also Europe — has changed, has become more similar,” he said in a 2016 interview. “Almost all the best players, as soon as they come up, are taken elsewhere. We don’t have the same Brazilian style — the ball control, the same way of playing — like we did in my time.” But perhaps that is too simplistic a view.

Both the origin of these traditional South American styles and their gradual declines were products of social, economic and political factors. In the case of Brazil, their departure from their style can be traced back — ironically — to the 1970 team when Claudio Coutinho and Carlos Alberto Parreira were part of the backroom staff. Both were technocrats, non-footballers, who were given charge of the national teams by the ruling military regime following disillusioning losses — Coutinho after the failure in 1974 and Parreira after Tele Santana’s team returned emptyhanded from the 1982 Cup. Both were advocates of the view that the traditional Brazilian style was outdated.

Parreira can even claim vindication for his 1994 team lifted the Cup playing the sort of dour football that was the antithesis of the Brazilian game. The same goes for Argentina when their idealist manager Cesar Luis Menotti was succeeded by the anti-Menotti in Carlos Bilardo, whose foremost disciple today is the pragmatic Diego Simeone. Others point to the fact the socio- economic conditions that gave birth to a Pele or a Maradona no longer exists in many parts of these countries.

As Valdano lamented: “The street was always our school, which had the great virtue of teaching us the trade, giving football a cultural weight and developing and celebrating players who were different. But the street as a formative stage has gone and no one has known how to replace it with an educational model like those in countries such as Germany or Spain.” Or maybe football has just moved on, absorbing from the past whatever works best and discarding the rest. For Brazil’s second goal against Serbia, Coutinho floated in a beautiful ball that bypassed six Serbians and found Paulinho who had been making a long run from deep inside midfield. It wasn’t exactly ginga. Neither was Tele Santana turning in his grave.