Click on the banner to read the full series
“Who is Neymar?”, asks Jefferson Blanco, 15, resident of the 23 de Enero neighborhood, in Caracas, one of the poorest in the country. Is he a player of the Brazilian national football team? I don’t really know the team, but I know everyone that’s playing in Vinotinto (The Burgundy)”, answers the smiling boy who kind of looks like the thin player from Santos.
Read more:
Master, the rapper that sings the Bolivarian Revolution
Venezuelan Cinecittà wants to break free from “the dictatorship of Hollywood”
Passions have changed in Venezuela, as we can tell by Jefferson. Baseball used to be everyone’s favorite sport and the few football enthusiasts had to choose a team to root for from other countries during the World Cups, such as Brazil, Spain or Italy. But now Vinotinto – the affectionate name of the Venezuelan team — is a synonym of pride and trust. “We will beat Brazil in the next World Cup”, says Jefferson, and he is not smiling this time.
Traditionally a punch bag, Vinotinto became a national passion because of the impressive results the team achieved in a very short period of time. Its best moment, so far, was when it finished fourth at the 2011 America’s Cup, in Argentina. The team made it to the quarter finals beating out Chile, while Brazil lost to Paraguay, who would later knock Vinotinto out of the semifinals.
Tough defeated and unable to dispute the final match, the Venezuelan players were received as champions in Caracas. For Nicolás “Miku” Fedor, 26, who plays in the national team and in Getafe, in Spain, a key moment in Venezuela’s football history was the 3 x 0 match against Uruguay in 2004 in the qualifying game of the 2006 World Cup – the match is known in Venezuela as the Centenarizo. “In that day the mentalities changed, we saw that it was possible to beat those teams”, says the player.
Also part of this successful team, the Venezuelan player Rafael Acosta, 23, points out the investment in the sport as another central element to the evolution in the field. “The idea that Venezuela is not strong enough in football has changed. In the last 8 years, the quality improved a lot, especially with the football schools for children. Now it’s understood that football comes from the junior categories, comes from the children”, he explains.
Miku punctuates that the sport’s professionalization walked hand in hand with the economic development of Venezuela in the past few years. “Football grew side by side with the society as a whole. The sport didn’t only grow in an international level; it also grew on the national level. That is due to the increase in income. If a player, or if any kind of worker is well-paid, his level of work and commitment are much higher”, he says.
Baseball x football
The excitement about the national team made it as far as President Hugo Chávez, a baseball enthusiast that now frequently talks about the football matches in his Twitter account. The president is not alone. Research made by GIS (Grupo de Pesquisa Social Siglo XXI – Group of Social Research XXI Century), in October 2011, showed that the growth of the Venezuelans enthusiasm for football is obvious, especially amongst the teenagers. 29% of the teenagers said that they practiced the sport in the last year, while that was the answer of only 17% of the national population. Baseball was second on the list, being the choice of 15% youngsters and also of 15% of the people on the national level.
In the same research, when asked If they “agree very much” or if they only “agree” with the sentence “with the success of the national football team, Venezuela is now Vinotinto”, 95% of the youngsters chose the first answer, while the national sum was 89%. Nevertheless, when the sentence was “other sports are a hit, but baseball is Venezuela’s national sport”, 93% of the youngsters answered “agree very much”. That was also the answer of 95% of the people on a national level.
In Miku’s opinion, it is only a matter of time before football becomes the number one national passion in Venezuela. “There are more children associated with football than with baseball nowadays in Venezuela. The Venezuelan Football Federation, the clubs, and society itself have crucial roles in that scenario”, points out the player.
Taking advantage of the football trend, Adidas, the sportswear company responsible for the national team’s uniform, launched a media campaign that played on Bolivarian Revolution emotions. In the commercial, the first made for Vinotinto, a kid travels to Brazil on a bus and while he travels, he talks about his passion for the Brazilian team, especially for Kaká.
“I would like to be a midfielder like you, score the goals that you score”, says the boy. Amazed by the beaches in Rio de Janeiro, he says to Kaká that he practices every day to be like him: “you will always be my number one”. That fanaticism becomes a thank you and a goodbye speech. In front of his house, the boy takes off his Brazilian jersey and underneath it, he’s wearing Venezuela’s jersey. The Brazilian jersey is packet and put in a mail box. “You’re the best, but I’ll stick to the colors of my true passion”, justifies the boy.
The media campaign was applauded in Venezuela and was watched over a million times on the brand’s channel on YouTube. In a politically polarized country it’s unquestionable that Vinotinto could easily become an easy target for political disputes, but the effect has been the opposite of that, as Acosta confirms: “Football unites Venezuela. People can come from different political parties, be black or white, but when the game starts, there will surely be harmony”.
Investments
The enthusiasm for football reflects the new energy injected in sports in Venezuela after Chávez was elected and decided to use gym classes as an instrument of social integration. The institutional outcome of that decision is the Organic Law for Sports, created in 2011. The objective of the law is to expand the physical activities on a national level and create a national fund for its financial support, controlled by the state.
Public investment in sports, from 1992 to 1998, was the equivalent of 3.75 million dollars, according to government figures. In the first eleven years of Chávez’ government, between 1999 and 2010, these figures went up to 131.7 million dollars –25 times the old government budget.
As a part of this political strategy, in 2002, they created the Mission Barrio Adentro Deportivo (Mission Sports Inside the Neighborhoods), a program that universalizes the right to physical activity in the poorest communities, including the provision of equipment and recruitment of teachers. In 2006, they also founded the Universidade Esportiva do Sul (Southern Sports University), in the state of Cojedes, which is training coaches and managers for the whole country.
Little by little, inspired by the Cuban experience and supported by several deals with the Caribbean island, Venezuela is creating a system that resembles a sports pyramid, which combines sports democratization within society (mainly in schools) with a chain of increasingly advanced steps that select and prepare athletes to be professional and play the major championships and Olympic games.
Translation: Kelly Cristina Spinelli
NULL
NULL