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Brazil’s bright yellow jersey is a symbol that unites the country through a love of football and national pride, but over the past two years the shirt’s adoption by right wing supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, who wear it at protests and rallies to show their political allegiance to the Brazilian president, is causing controversy.
That famous yellow jersey was burnt into the imagination of a global audience in the 1970 World Cup. Inspired by the spelbinding performances of Pelé – he wore the number 10 jersey – the yellow shirt has represented Brazil’s success on the pitch and created a positive image worldwide for the past five decades.
That 1970 national team also became embroiled in politics, notably ahead of the World Cup in Mexico when General Medici, the president of a nation under military dictatorship, played a key role in the removal of the coach – Joao Saldanha – who had overseen a perfect qualification campaign.
Fast forward to 2020 and critics of Bolsonaro say the iconic yellow jersey has now become tainted by its close association to the Brazilian president.
Walter Casagrande, a former footballer for the Brazilian national team and the São Paulo club Corinthians, remembers the feeling of scoring a goal while wearing the yellow jersey in his first match with the “selecao” in 1985.
“It was a magical thing,” Casagrande told CNN Sport, “like an enchanted object that gave me huge emotion.”
Casagrande’s sentiments lie on the left side of the political chasm separating Bolsonaro’s supporters and opponents, and he feels an item he cherishes is being misrepresented.
“Now I consider the Brazilian yellow jersey to have been kidnapped and appropriated by the right wing, so we cannot use it.”
Casagrande said that for him the power of the yellow shirt used to be that it represented democracy and freedom.
“Brazil is appearing horribly to the world right now,” he said. “It’s the first time in my life I’m seeing the yellow jersey being used against democracy and freedom.”
READ: 50 years on, 1970 World Cup-winning team remains Brazil’s greatest ever
As quick as the left is to criticize Bolsonaro, his supporters aren’t slow to counter punch.
Cosmo Alexandre, a Brazilian fighter who holds multiple world titles for Muay Thai and Kickboxing believes the left is conflating their many issues with Bolsonaro, and using the jersey as just another way to air grievances.
As a Bolsonaro supporter, Alexandre brushes off accusations that the jersey’s symbolism is being manipulated, and says the reason for supporters to wear a yellow t-shirt is simple: everyone in Brazil has a yellow t-shirt.
He points out that supporters don’t always wear the Brazilian team jersey specifically, and rallies are full of people wearing yellow t-shirts of all kinds.
Alexandre says there is a separation between the jersey’s sporting reputation and associations from what it politically represents.
“Around the world everybody knows about the Brazilian soccer team, so even if I go to a fight and I use the yellow soccer team shirt, everyone knows it’s Brazil,” he said. “So it’s not about politics – it’s just that the world knows about soccer in Brazil.”
It may be easier for some than others to isolate football and politics in a country where football is God.
Josemar de Rezende Jr. is a football fan who co-founded a Bolsonaro volunteer group in his city before the election. He said he’s proud of the Brazilian team’s global reputation for winning, and to him the yellow jersey “means love for the country, leadership, achievement and pride.”
READ: The mystery of the 1998 World Cup final
White and blue kit campaign
Nonetheless, the subject of the yellow jersey has become so divisive that a campaign is underway for Brazil to play in a white shirt.
João Carlos Assumpção, a Brazilian journalist, filmmaker and author of “Gods of Soccer,” a book about the political, sociological and economic history of Brazil, is leading a campaign for the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) to abandon the yellow jersey altogether and go back to the classic white and blue kit from when the program started in 1914.
CNN reached out to the CBF who responded that they choose not to comment on this matter, “as it is a very unique issue.”
“People used to love Brazilian soccer because we used to play very well,” Assumpção said, “and if we play well with the white shirt in 2022 I think everybody’s going to buy a white shirt. It’s going to be very difficult to change, but I think it’s not impossible.”
The white and blue jersey was deemed unlucky when Brazil lost the World Cup at home to Uruguay in 1950 so they switched to the yellow jersey, and won five World Cups wearing it – a finals record that still stands today.
Assumpção’s vision for changing the color of the kit is to say to the world that Brazilians want change in the country. “Not the changes that this government is doing,” Assumpção clarified.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the color yellow, including the yellow jersey, represents a positive change in the country. Bolsonaro supporter Rezende Jr. believes the attempt by the left to reclaim the yellow jersey is an effort to “mischaracterize the government,” which he describes as a “patriotic government that represents and has support from all social classes throughout the nation.”
READ: A pig’s head and riot police: Football’s most controversial transfer
Political turmoil in the country mirrors the fierceness between inter-city football rivalries all across Brazil. Except it is not contained by city boundaries and in recent months has brought fans together.
São Paulo is home to four main clubs: Corinthians, Palmeiras, São Paolo, and Santos. The rivalry between Corinthians and Palmeiras is especially intense, and in June groups from each club joined together in the streets to counter-protest Bolsonaro’s supporters.
Sociologist Rafael Castilho, a Member of the Collective Corinthian Democracy and Coordinator of the Corinthians Study Center said that for Brazil to overcome the current political situation, it will have to “unite different ways of thinking and accept the contradictory.”
Castilho explains the civic responsibility rival clubs feel to support each other and join with civil society movements, “as the country experiences a crisis of party representation and social movements have been intimidated by police action,” he said, adding that “the attitude of fans has gained sympathy because part of society feels represented by the courage of the fans.”
The Corinthians have a history of mixing football and politics. In the 1980s during the pro-democracy movement called Diretas Já, the club team was led by national team leaders Socrates and Casagrande.
The two intertwined football with politics when the team wore jerseys during a game in 1982 displaying the words “VOTE on 15th,” in an effort to motivate their fans to vote in the São Paulo state government election.
Two years later the Corinthians were the center of a movement called Democracia Corintiana, which Casagrande said put more than one million people in the streets dressed in yellow.
“It was a very important moment for Brazilian democracy, and this yellow jersey was central to that movement,” Casagrande said.
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The yellow jersey was back on the streets in the 2013 protests against ex-President Dilma Roussef and against corruption. A year before the World Cup was to take place in the South American country, conservative protesters wore shirts that represented the colors of Brazil, while leftist protesters used other colors.
Alexandre and Rezende Jr. both say that yellow is an improvement from the red t-shirts government supporters used to wear when the left was in power, alluding to an underlying support of communism.
“When Bolsonaro started running, his supporters used the yellow color to show I’m Brazilian and I don’t want communism in my country,” Alexandre said.
The fight for the yellow jersey leaves some longing to reclaim a victorious past, while others push forward to create new meaning for the iconic symbol. In a country so deeply rooted in football, it’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away.
Assumpção thinks it’s only possible for the football community and Brazilians not associated with the far right to recover the jersey “maybe in five years or 10, but not now. Not now.”
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CNN
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When dreams clash with reality; when life reaches a daunting crossroads; when we must decide whether to be or make history.
Right now Neymar is at the crossroads.
A 21st century football brand fueled by endless promise; a nouveau-riche social, commercial and cultural phenomena; a superstar who’s no stranger to the scrutiny of the public eye.
Yet when it comes to the bright lights of European football’s biggest stage – the Champions League – he’s trapped in a perpetual cycle of repetition.
A one-time winner, yes – but for some ably assisted by his supremely skilled South American counterparts – Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez – in the once famed ‘MSN’ triumvirate at Barcelona.
On two occasions misfortune has conspired to subvert the Brazilian prodigy’s chances of grabbing the competition by the scruff of the neck in the red and blue colors of Paris Saint-Germain.
So here we are in 2020. Is it third time lucky? Is this Neymar’s moment of truth?
Three games now stand between the ‘Red Pill’ of European enlightenment or the ‘Blue Pill’ of another footnote in the 28-year-old’s lengthening Wikipedia page.
“This is the year that he can really redeem himself […] These three games can change everything […] I don’t believe he’s going to have another opportunity like this one,” Brazilian football journalist Fernando Kallás tells CNN Sport.
Since planting their flag in the cobbled Parisians streets in June 2011, PSG’s Qatari investors have made no secret of their ultimate goal – continental supremacy.
Domestically it’s been an era defined by unrelenting dominance. Seven top-flight league titles and five French cups, including four trebles in six seasons.
But if Europe is a combination lock, they’ve been interminably searching for the locksmith with the elusive key. Seven times they’ve tried and failed to crack the complex code – each failure more painful and bitter than the last.
“A specific timeline was set and once you get past that timeline each season it goes on it seems like PSG are getting further and further away so there’s a weight of history that’s bearing down,” explains French football expert Jonathan Johnson.
The world record signing of Neymar from Barcelona in August 2017 – for a still mind-bending $263 million – was intended to deliver that knight in shining armor.
No longer the back-up singer to Messi and Suarez but now the leading performer with a license to thrill and become the best in the world.
For some it was a game-changer; for Kallás it remains “the biggest mistake in the history of sports.”
READ: How billionaire owners changed European football
Reflecting this past week on the three-year anniversary of his move, the striker wrote that “(these) came with a lot of knowledge. I’ve lived times of joy and some complicated ones.”
His bond with supporters in the city of love has undulated its way through the full gamut of Facebook relationship statuses: From ‘Married’ to ‘Separated’ to ‘It’s complicated.’
All with the allure of a former lover in Catalonia lingering in the background.
A long drawn-out, but ultimately unsuccessful, serenade last summer to woo the Brazilian back to the Camp Nou brought simmering tensions in Paris to the boil.
The love-hate dynamic around the polarizing figure was perhaps best encapsulated in the superstar’s first league appearance of the 2019-20 season.
Relentlessly booed for 90 minutes before delivering a sublime match-winning bicycle kick at the very death – half the naysayers enraptured; the other half enraged.
Kallás paints a picture of jury similarly split down the middle along generational lines in Brazil – the young pretenders who adore “the image, the smile, the tattoos” contrasted with the old guard who are “really concerned about him.”
The Cold War in Paris has since thawed, along with the realization that going back to the future is – for now – not an imminent prospect.
“He has shown on the pitch and off it that he’s committed to the project […] He really has to embrace the challenge of being a PSG player and achieving something, notably in the Champions League, in Paris,” says Johnson.
Whilst a new leaf may have been turned on the pitch, questions remain off it.
Neymar’s personal life has – at times – borne the hallmarks of a gripping telenovela – filled with intrigue, and all supported by an ensembled entourage.
Last year he was cleared of wrongdoing after a Brazilian model accused the former Brazil captain of rape and assault.
This year he was forced to miss a league match through injury – two days after hosting a lavish birthday party in a Paris nightclub.
Those willing him on to succeed despair: Will the boy ever become a man?
“In Brazil we have an expression that says that he (Neymar) is an endless promise […] That he is “Menino Neymar” (“Baby Neymar”) – He’s not a boy […] He needs to be in reality […] He has to grow up,” says Kallás, who has followed the Brazilian’s trials and tribulations on and off the pitch.
“When he’s on the pitch he delivers […] I have never, never heard one complaint from a coach or another player about his attitude in training, in the locker-room.”
COPA90: Retro games with Neymar
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COPA90
And for all the goals, assists and silverware to date, history and biology have dealt the twinkle-toed star a cruel hand – starving him of the opportunity to have his say at the business end of European football’s elite club competition.
Curtailed seasons in 2018 and 2019 due to injuries coincided with dramatic exists for PSG from the round of 16 stage at the hands of Real Madrid and Manchester United, respectively.
“That’s what makes the remainder of this campaign so important and why he’ll be under such close scrutiny,” says Johnson.
The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly – and perhaps favorably for PSG – changed the dynamic for the finale of this year’s tournament.
Gone are the two-legged knockout affairs from the quarterfinal stages onwards, replaced instead by single-leg shoot outs – all within the bubble of Lisbon.
Without the departed sharpshooter Edinson Cavani and the recently sidelined Kylian Mbappé, the floor is Neymar’s.
First the surprise package of Atalanta awaits in the quarterfinals; Then a potential clash with the battle hardened Atlético Madrid in the semifinals and, after that, who knows in a winner-takes-all final.
Whilst progress in the competition would – according to Johnson – “really give the (Qatari) project the shot in the arm that it’s needed after a few years of massive disappointment,” for Kallás, this month could be the beginning of a career defining two years for the individual at the heart of the narrative.
With the Brazilian’s contract set to expire in 2022 and a World Cup in Qatar that same year, which is likely to be his last in a Brazil jersey, it’s quite simply “make or break.”
“We always say ‘This is going to be the year. No – This is going to be the year. No – This is going to be the year’ […] He’s 28-years-old, he should be in the peak of his career but he’s not […] It’s his last chance.”
The telenovela has had its unforeseen plot twists, its moments of madness and its bursts of brilliance. Now it’s in the hands of its lead protagonist to script its showpiece ending.
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By Norma V Hansen.
On Saturday, Lyon delivered a stunning performance against Manchester City, winning 3-1 to secure their spot in the Champions League semifinals.
The French team got off to an excellent start, neutralizing Manchester City’s forward momentum and ultimately taking the lead in the 24th minute with an inventive finish from Maxwel Cornet just outside the box.
In the second half, the English team escalated their efforts, and the intensity paid off when Kevin de Bruyne calmly netted the equalizer. However, substitute Moussa Dembélé then netted twice, propelling Lyon forward.
Lyon is set to clash with Bayern Munich in the semifinal on Wednesday, after the German squad moved on by defeating Barcelona 8-2 on Friday.
For the first time since the 1990/91 season, and in the Champions League era, there will be no English, Spanish, or Italian teams featured in the semifinal round. Additionally, this marks the first occasion in Champions League history where two French teams will compete at this stage.
Belgian midfielder de Bruyne reflected on yet another painful exit from the tournament, stating it’s “not acceptable.”
“It’s definitely the same issues. I think the first half was inadequate,” he told BT Sport post-match. “We’re aware of that.
“We started sluggishly, lacking options. I think we performed quite well in the second half. We equalized at 1-1, created a couple of opportunities, but then naturally the 2-1 goal, followed by the 3-1, sealed our fate. It’s unfortunate to finish this way.
“The match was competitive, but they didn’t really generate chances outside of the two goal opportunities. Yes, we need to learn. It’s not satisfactory.”
READ: ‘The club requires changes’ Shifts on the horizon for Barcelona following Champions League disgrace.
With its star performers and a colossal head coach, Manchester City was heavily favored to triumph over Lyon.
Nevertheless, the French squad had demonstrated its fortitude in the second leg against Juventus in the prior round, managing to scrape past Cristiano Ronaldo and his team despite being nearly five months without competitive action.
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL !!!!!!@MDembele_10 scores the third goal! LET’S GO! #ManCityOL pic.twitter.com/D2ZN5t2PdM
— Olympique Lyonnais (@OL) August 15, 2020
And their tenacity was tested right from the start. Manchester City held a strong grip on possession from the very first whistle but failed to generate any significant opportunities.
Ultimately, Lyon’s capacity to counter-attack yielded the game’s opening goal. A pass played behind the City defense for Karl Toko Ekambi to pursue eventually reached Maxwel Cornet, who, with Met City’s goalkeeper Ederson away from his net, executed a remarkable curling shot into the near post from about 20 yards.
The remainder of the first half unfolded precisely as Lyon and manager Rudi Garcia had envisioned. Manchester City maintained possession largely yet struggled to carve out many clear chances, while Pep Guardiola’s side appeared vulnerable on the counter.
After the interval, the match began to open up, and following an attacking substitution by Guardiola, City started creating opportunities at will.
As pressure mounted, some deft footwork by England international Raheem Sterling freed him to set up de Bruyne for a finish.
It seemed there would only be one victor. However, Lyon’s own super-sub Dembélé had other ideas, capitalizing on a through ball near halfway and slotting it under Ederson. Following a tense video assistant referee check, after a few anxious moments, the goal was awarded.
Although Metropolis was at a disadvantage, it generated greater chances, and one of the finest fell to Sterling. With some clever footwork and a cross from Gabriel Jesus, Sterling found himself with a clear shot just 5 yards from the goal, yet he sent the ball soaring over the bar.
This miss proved costly. Just 59 seconds later, Lyon found the net again, with Dembélé capitalizing on a weak save from Ederson, sending the French side into the semifinals for the first time in nearly a decade.
This outcome means that during Guardiola’s tenure at the club, Manchester Metropolis has yet to progress past the quarterfinals of the Champions League.
Despite believing his team performed well for most of the match, Guardiola expressed disappointment over Manchester Metropolis’s inability to play error-free in the Champions League.
“One day we will overcome this quarterfinal barrier,” he told BT Sport post-match. “Except for the first 25 minutes when we struggled to effectively exploit space, the players exhibited freedom in their play.”
“Moreover, the last quarter-hour of the first half was encouraging. The second half was acceptable; I felt we were superior, but in this competition, perfection is essential in a single match, and we fell short.”
The 2019-20 Champions League semifinals will feature two teams from France and two from Germany vying for a place in the final; a first since 2012-13 where only two different nations are represented at this level.
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CNN
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For Alexis Ohanian last summer, it started with a simple phone call. The entrepreneur and co-founder of Reddit was in London and his friend wanted him to come to Paris, “He’s like, you’re an idiot if you don’t come down to watch the USA play France.”
Shortly afterwards, Ohanian was alongside 45,000 other fans, watching Megan Rapinoe score twice for the US women’s national team in the quarterfinal of the Women’s World Cup, leading her country towards what would be a fourth world title.
“It was admittedly the first time I’d ever been to a women’s football match,” he told CNN Sport, “and the crowd was electric. I walked away from it thinking, how did I not pay this enough attention? How did I not even know there was a pro league back in the States?”
A few days later, he and his wife, the tennis legend Serena Williams, were watching the tournament final on television. Their young daughter Olympia was running around wearing the jersey of one of the team’s star players, Alex Morgan.
Out loud, Ohanian wondered about the possibility of Olympia one day playing the game professionally, but Serena cut him off.
“Without missing a beat, my wife was like, not until they pay her what she’s worth. And she was half joking, but not really.”
In that moment, Ohanian says he felt compelled to try and make a positive contribution to the world of women’s sports, “Alright babe,” he declared, “challenge accepted!”
READ: Megan Rapinoe says ‘we all have a responsibility to make the world a better place’
Twelve months later, ‘Angel City’ has become a reality. Ohanian is a lead investor on a new Los Angeles soccer project led by the Hollywood actress and activist Natalie Portman.
The National Women’s Soccer League was formed in 2013 with just five teams, four have been added since and the league will hit double figures in 2021 when Racing Louisville FC join in. The following season, Angel City will make it 11 teams in the league.
According to Angel City’s President Julie Uhrman, the idea for this new team came during Portman’s involvement with Time’s Up, a movement established in 2018 to combat sexual harassment.
“You can see that she really gets behind causes that are important to her and she does meaningful work for those causes,” Uhrman told CNN Sport, adding: “she wanted to take her commitment to elevate women’s athletics, to address pay equity and to make it public and meaningful.”
Promoting Angel City’s launch in July, Portman spoke about the challenges which have traditionally held back women’s sports. She was talking on Instagram with somebody who’s experienced it first hand for the last 20 years – Williams.
“Our team told me that only 4% of sports coverage is of women’s sport,” Portman said, “it’s insane that we’re here in 2020 and it’s so disproportionate.”
READ: Alexis Ohanian on being married to Serena Williams
The team, which doesn’t have an official name yet – Angel City is only a nickname – and they won’t play until 2022. But already it’s clear that those behind the club are doing things differently.
For one, the founding investors are almost exclusively women, “I think you can count the number of clubs that are mainly owned by women on one hand and probably with only a couple of fingers,” Uhrman told CNN, “I mean, it’s very unusual.”
Listed on the club’s website are the 31 founding investors and only four are men; Alexis Ohanian is one of those odd-men out.
He described an early meeting with Uhrman, Portman and venture capitalist Kara Nortman, “the three of them sat down and said, ‘this is what we want to build, this is how we want to build it,’ and it was really important to them from day one to have a majority women-owned team.
“I think we can talk about so many of the disparities in professional sports. And I think one of the ways we get real change is not just proving that this is an amazing business that will generate lots of money and lots of attention and lots of success, but it’s also showing that every bit of how this organization is run can be different and be as, if not more successful as a result.
“And not because it feels good, although it does feel good, but because it’s preposterous that it is not more normal.”
The club knows that they are trying to swim against the tide, and not just because they’re hoping to change the perception of professional women’s sport; they’re also launching a club in a Los Angeles sports market that is already saturated.
READ: Natalie Portman and Serena Williams are among investors behind Angel City
Uhrman rattles off the clubs that they’ll soon be rubbing shoulders with in a city famed for congestion, “Los Angeles is a market where there is already nine professional sports teams and [collegiate] powerhouses like University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles.
So even the idea of bringing another professional sports team here, the third soccer club here, is an ambitious, big idea.”
But Angel City believes that their novel approach will cut through the noise, establishing a local, community, club with global appeal. “We know women’s soccer has been incredibly successful during the Olympics and World Cup,” Uhrman says,
“The question is, why is it every four years that they garner such attention? And I think the answer is because of exposure and awareness.”
Behind the key investors is a supporting cast of Hollywood stars, including Jennifer Garner, Eva Longoria and Jessica Chastain, plus Serena Williams and 14 former players on the US women’s national team; it’s a group of women with tens of millions of followers on social media; they’re going to use their collective platforms to shout it from the rooftops.
“There’s this general issue that if you can’t see it,” Uhrman says, “You can’t be it. If you can’t see it, you can’t follow it. [If] you can’t cheer for it, you can’t get your friend to become a part of it, and so there’s a systemic problem that we have to fix and change.”
Uhrman continues, “We have a group of people that come from the entertainment space, the media space, sports and the technology space. We’re thinking about soccer as bigger than sports, in fact we’re thinking about it as entertainment.”
Ohanian says the focus will be on social media storytelling to build the brand and it already seems to be working, “tens of thousands of folks are very excited, [we’ve] sold out merchandise for a team that doesn’t exist yet.”
He compares women’s soccer to e-sports, which drew a rush of investment five years ago, and has concluded that the market has massively undervalued female soccer.
“These are clubs of gamers, young men who draw hundreds of millions of fans all over the world. [But] the average American does not know who the best League of Legends player is, whereas Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan are already cultural icons.
“From a marketing standpoint, no offense to e-sports, they’re far more marketable for brands who want to be aligned with consumer spending in this country.”
In her conversation with Williams on Instagram, Portman remarked that already, Angel City has changed the conversation, “people are starting to think about how to do this in other sports too.”
Women are standing up for and elevating other women; the sisters are doing it for themselves. It’s an LA Story that could have a Hollywood ending and it’s a potential game-changer for women’s sports everywhere.
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