Brazil's protest spectacle is seeping into sports coverage

Brazil's 3-1 victory over Croatia won the global viewing figures competition hands down, but the wider contest between the spectacle and the counter-spectacle in Brazil is a much more complex battle. This is an asymmetrical media war were total victory is impossible, and where the dominant power is constantly exposed and undermined by symbolic actions that garner outsize attention.

First blood had already gone to the protestors, whose vociferous booing of both FIFA president Sepp Blatter and Brazil’s President Dilma Roussef at last year’s Confederations Cup ensured that neither spoke at the World Cup’s opening ceremony; a gift to us all. But in a society roiled by social protest, it made sense to go small and eschew the gargantuan pomposity and enormous expense of all recent World Cup and Olympic opening ceremonies. So small, that I found myself wondering where the already meager budget of $9 million had gone.

The spectacle was a rather limp and thinly staffed simulacrum of carnival, replete with the usual entourage of musical instruments, rainforest imagery people on stilts, and acrobats whose head were encased with skeletal footballs.

In the center of the field, a giant ball on a plinth tepidly flashed and finally opened up to reveal the hapless lip-synching of Brazilian pop star Claudina, J-Lo and Pitbull who gurned their way through the official song. Light relief came by way of FIFAs handshake of peace and the release of three doves, two of which didn’t make it out of the stadium.

More illuminating was the crowd. It is hard to tell on television with any accuracy, but I would guess that the audience was at least 95% white, and pretty well upholstered – not exactly a cross-section of Brazilian society. The long periods of silence during the game and the super- intense unaccompanied singing of the second verse of the national anthem were further clues to their social origins. More evidence came in the chants of “Fuck Off Dilma” heard around the stadium, and the massive boos that met the president’s celebrations of Neymar’s penalty on the big screen. This was a party for Brazil’s conservative elites. Of course, much of the rest of the nation joined the euphoria and took to the streets in Sao Paulo, but there were plenty of reports of locals cheering for Croatia too.

Against this the protest movement offered sporadic, small-scale guerrilla media actions. Demonstrations were recorded in many cities, most notably Sao Paulo, Rio, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. In Sao Paulo itself the police, true to form, met small-scale demonstrations at a couple of metro stations with an almost instantaneous use of force, percussion grenades and tear gas, thus disrupting the manicured  coverage of the opening game.

In Britain, at any rate, the presence of this counter-spectacle is seeping out of the news broadcasts and into the sports coverage. The post-match analysis on ITV, filmed  in a glass box on Copacabana beach was conducted against a backdrop of twinkling police lights and stone throwing on the windows. In Germany, pre-match sports reports were taped against a visual backdrop of hovering police helicopters.  As Fiori Gigliotti the great Brazilian commentator of the 1950s and 60s said at the beginning of every World Cup he covered “The curtains are open, it’s the start of the show”.