By Fabrício Barcelos
The Rio sun, even though it was filtered by the hills, colored my eyes a smoky, beautiful beige. But nothing shined brighter that evening than your badge, which I saw when entering Maracanã. Breathing was short, short, largely due to the emotion, but also due to the climb to the upper stands, where they accommodated our people. From there, mesmerized by your colors on the electronic scoreboard that a few months before had served in the World Cup final, I thought, with my chest puffed out: “what a cheeky little club, dude!”
I don’t feel bitter when I remember the fight against Flamengo, more than a decade later. I am able to mentally recreate every second of that March 18, 2015. Days like that never stop happening to us, and you gave me weeks of eternity. When you ignore the sentence of failure on the court and offer a hiatus of joy, I feel the density of love that orbits you.
I’m a bit of a nomadic guy; I tied a horse in many corners and left each one tearfully, leaving friends. In these leap-frog sporting adventures, with the 2018 Gauchão final or this magical night for the Copa do Brasil, you give me back the affections spread out on the road. Everyone remembers me – and that, old Indian, makes up for the glasses you are unable to lift. I forgive you, because you are a determining part of who I am. You never let me forget where I came from, nor those who left life after inoculating me with that bar that is liking you, or you, as we say in the country.
It started with a plea for a donation
So there is no room for coldness when, in the winter of 2025, I read on zap a request for a donation, so that you can honor your last commitment for the last division of the national championship, in which you did not have the decency to pass the first phase. I know that for many seasons you have been converting the end of players’ contracts into voluntary work – unilaterally, suggests the mountain of cases in the Labor Court. But I find it hard to believe that I have little money to go to Itajaí, a little mixed trip, so close to the gray and humid Brazil where the poet of our land, Vitor Ramil, formulated the aesthetics of cold. It hurts, because I saw you fight in distant heats.
I witnessed your courage under the July rain in Recife, under the nosebleed dryness of Brasília, under the sea wind of Cabo Frio, under the aroma of the drover in Mineirão. And don’t think I used you as an excuse to go sightseeing in a nice place. I saw you squeezed into the concrete of Serra Dourada, that delusion of grandeur typical of dictators. I also saw you lose the final on penalties in Muriaé and, with my soul in rags, I boarded a van driven by a driver who headed sleepily through the tortuous paths of the forest area of Minas. I saw you in barbaric places.
Some guys cut you into ten
How did we run out of money to get to Santa Catarina, dude?! Now we finally won a cup. A pent-up ancestral joy broke out. It was the last fight we fought in the way my father introduced me to you, the way I learned to love you. Now, some guys have sliced you into ten pieces, and they’re going to keep nine for themselves, in exchange for paying off the debts that are dragging you to the grave and a few more dicks for the next decade.
Okay, we had no choice. But they use Faria Lima verbs to talk about you, and that scares me. Companies die, we know, but you are an unrepeatable singularity. If they kill you, nothing that humanity invents will fill the gaps in our Sundays.
I ask you: continue existing
Bueno, we live in a subtle totalitarianism: churches, schools, hospitals, people, everything is a company, and exists to generate monetary value. Nobody has a choice, we fall into this trap like cattle in a chute. But with you, with your things, not even Marx can make me rational. I accept any arrangement that allows me to entertain daydreams while, on a lawn, there is your red shirt, your black shorts and your prematurely grubby white socks. In exchange for this anguish, I only ask one thing: continue existing.
SIGA THE FOOTBALL
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Who is he
Born in Pelotas (RS), 52 years ago, Fabrício Barcelos is a journalist and Literature teacher. He led newsrooms in São Paulo, Santa Catarina and Goiás and today dedicates himself to public relations narratives. He also teaches at the Demétrio Campos Course, aimed at the trans population. He is a supporter of Brasil de Pelotas, Xavante, which makes it clear that he is less interested in the beauty of what happens on the field and more in what we invent around the game, to scare away the loneliness and emptiness of existence. It is about this collective fiction that he deals with in the chronicles he writes here. Journalist, chronicler and professor of
Literature. Fabrício Barcelos arrives to reinforce The Football team
