Chaotic state of football in Brazil epitomises a nation where greed has conquered glory

The national game merely reflects the mood in a divided nation which is going to the polls with very little faith in the power of democracy

Look, cards on the table: I don’t know for certain, and nor do you, whether Flávio Bolsonaro – the man widely tipped to become the next president of Brazil after Sunday night’s election – really did steal an island from Richarlison. There are lawyers involved, claims and counter-claims, and in any case, adjudicating land ownership disputes between right-wing strongmen and Tottenham reserve-team strikers lies very much beyond this column’s spectrum of expertise. It’s why, for example, this newspaper took no official position on the well-publicised battle between Rodrigo Duterte and Vincent Janssen over that Polynesian isthmus.

According to Richarlison, a few years ago he purchased an island off the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro, and has the documentation to prove it. Richarlison says Bolsonaro tried to buy it from him, and when he refused a lawyer named Willer Tomaz simply turned up and annexed it. “These guys took the island without spending a penny, as far as I know,” Richarlison claimed in an Instagram video that has been viewed more than 31 million times. Tomaz has accused Richarlison of lying, arguing that he has a public deed registered at the notary’s office. Bolsonaro, for his part, has denied any connection with the island in question and described Richarlison’s intervention as “politically motivated”.

All of which offers just the tiniest sliver of insight into an election that – in common with most modern Brazilian elections – has by turns been rancorous, divisive, wildly surreal and littered with contested facts, where the fake news sounds real and the real news often sounds fake. “Brazil is now a dystopian place,” said Renan Santos, one of the presidential candidates defeated in the first round of voting. “People do not talk about public policy. They just create entertainment content about politics.”

And this being Brazil, of course, it has been an election indelibly inflected by the ultimate entertainment content: football, its symbols and tropes, its ability both to explain and reflect a country torn along multiple planes. As president, Flávio’s father Jair – a deeply weird ex-military man who refers to his four sons by number – made a concerted effort to politicise the yellow national team shirt, appropriating it as an emblem of his campaign and wearing it at rallies. Numerous footballers – Neymar, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Dani Alves, Thiago Silva, Lucas Moura – allied themselves explicitly or tacitly to his cause.

In part this can be explained by the wider appeal of the Bolsonaros within Brazil’s evangelical Christian community, from which 20 of the 26 players in Brazil’s World Cup squad this summer came. Many are followers of neo-Pentecostalism, a highly commercialised brand of evangelism fuelled by 24-hour TV preachers, megachurches and vast ostentatious displays of material wealth, in which the individual is cast as the architect of their own fate.

The disaffected young urban men from which both Bolsonaros draw their base have little use for the minimum wage increases or welfare programmes established by current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They dream not of union membership but entrepreneurialism and influencer clout, conceive of society not as a collective struggle but as a game with winners and losers, where the aim is not to build order but to conquer the chaos.

In this world Neymar – currently whiling away the last of his fading light at Santos – is not a cautionary tale, a potential all-time great footballing career that essentially disintegrated into frivolity and waste. In this world Neymar is an aspirational hero, a man who accumulated wealth and celebrity status beyond his wildest dreams, and did it all with a defiant wink, by apologising to nobody. Neymar has, of course, publicly backed the younger Bolsonaro before this election.

But the real footballing battleground of this election has been not the players, but the clubs. Last month Lula incited fury within Brazilian football by imposing a ban on sports betting in a country where an estimated 7% of the population are problem gamblers. Online gambling is also one of the sport’s major sources of revenue: 14 of Brazil’s 20 top-division clubs advertise online betting sites on their shirts. Star players such as Neymar and Vinícius Júnior make a handsome living endorsing gambling companies. “How am I going to pay for [Lucas] Paquetá?” the Flamengo president, Luiz Eduardo Baptista, complained on a podcast. Bolsonaro has criticised the ban and suggested he may be open to reversing it if elected.

And in a sense the dividing lines in this election are also the very same questions with which football has been grappling for decades. Is this a team game or a vehicle for individual volition? Is it all about the scent of triumph, the cold hard certainties of winning and losing, the reaping of accolades and capital, the haptic thrill of crushing enemies underfoot? Or can it also be an expression of collective will, civic and regional pride, representation and inclusivity, the pursuit of a goal larger than the self?

Perhaps the modern Brazil is particularly sensitive to these questions: dysfunctional and chaotic, captured above all by a sense of endemic decline. By 2030 it will be 28 years since the men’s team won a World Cup. It still has no nationwide academy system or standardised youth development programme. The national federation has had eight leaders since 2012. This is a game that has essentially been broken down into its constituent parts, its players strewn across the globe, an entire country of entrepreneurs and sole traders.

We hear a lot about football’s power to unite a nation. Perhaps we underestimate the extent to which it can also divide; the way it can reflect the very worst of ourselves, our greed and vindictiveness, our lust for feuds and petty entertainment. There is a Women’s World Cup being hosted in Brazil next summer and while Lula has sought to fast-track the professionalisation of women’s football, Bolsonaro’s only public utterances in the field of women’s sport have been to assert his opposition to trans athletes playing it.

Occasionally voices of dissent whisper into the gale. Raphinha has shared posts on workers’ rights and social justice. Richarlison has pledged that if he ever recovers the money he spent on the island, he will donate a portion to the hospital in his home town of Nova Venécia. Former players such as Juninho Pernambucano and Rai have spoken out against the Bolsonaro family. Female footballers such as Carlinha and Tayla Carolina have used their platform to oppose the far-right. Perhaps they, unlike so many of their compatriots, realise that ultimately democracy is like an island retreat: one day it’s gone, and it’s not entirely clear whether you ever had it in the first place.