Why Flamengo? (Doctoral Thesis)

Department of Physical Education. Federal University of Viçosa. (Brazil)\ Dr. Marizabel Kowalski belkowalski@ufv.br\

Abstract: "Why Flamengo?" is a study built around a simple question: how Flamengo became popular. The club's history, like that of so many other sports institutions in Brazil, its achievements and idols (statistically and quantitatively) were not enough to explain the large statewide and national fan base for the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo soccer team. However, soccer, as a constituent of properties and facts, can come to justify the relationship between the Brazilian way of life and the mass popular force in specific ways: by recording and understanding the way in which society constructs the instances that shape habits, beliefs, passions, behaviors, and, above all, its self-image. In understanding the sporting phenomenon recreated by the press and literature, highlighted in songs and poems, elaborated in paintings, cartoons, and caricatures; inserted and integrated into the social structure of the Rio de Janeiro community and the popular soccer culture in the country, Clube de Regatas do Flamengo is the atmosphere of the forms of a society linked to an invented tradition—Flamengo. We explored literary references as sources of research: their expressions of adherence, attachment, dedication, cohesion, and belonging to the club; civic components, important social identities, deep cultural values, and unique individual tastes—all relevant aspects of the interrelationships of the country's cultural circularity around soccer; "links" that support the understanding of Flamengo's popularity as a tradition invented by journalists, columnists, musicians, carnival-goers, poets, and writers, forming part of the tradition of the city of Rio de Janeiro and a national preference. Keywords: Flamengo. Soccer. Popularity.

Abstract \ "Why Flamengo?" is a paper built around a simple matter: how Flamengo was made so popular. The club history, its victories and idols (statistically and quantitatively) were not enough to explain the great size of its crowd, in the national as well as in the regional realm. Soccer, however, as part of the aspects and facts, may justify the relationship of the Brazilian way of life and the popular power of the masses. This is a done in the records, as well as, in the understanding of how society builds treaties of habit making, beliefs, passions, and beyond everything, its self-image. Considering the understanding of the sports phenomenon, it is reconstructed by the media, the literature, and put in emphasis in songs, poems, paintings, and comic strips. Clube de Regatas do Flamengo is integrated and created in the social community of Rio de Janeiro's folks and to the soccer culture of the Brazilian nation. This soccer club represents the atmosphere of how a society is linked to a created tradition: Flamengo itself. We made some literary references from the research sources to be explored. These are found in the acts of joining, in the obvious attachment and in the close bonded feeling of belonging, related to this team. Some important civic components, social identities, deep cultural values ​​and individual preferences are all relevant parts of the inter-relationship of the cultural circle of this country that surrounds soccer itself. Some links that provide support for the understanding of Flamengo's great popularity, as a made up tradition, created by journalists, sports writers, and poets. They all take part in the tradition of city of Rio de Janeiro and of a national preference. Keywords: Flamengo. Soccer. Popular.\

http://www.efdeportes.com/ Revista Digital - Buenos Aires - Año 12 - N° 107 - Abril de 2007\ 1 / 1 Download Livro em .PDF (5 Mb)\

Introduction: "Why Flamengo?" is a study built around a simple question: how Flamengo became popular. The club's history, like that of so many other sports institutions in Brazil, its achievements, and its idols (statistically and quantitatively) were not enough to explain the large statewide and national fan base for the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo soccer team. Our central hypothesis is that the elements discussed by writers alluding to Flamengo are imbued, in all their diversity, with popular unity; they demystify the foundations of worldviews that they themselves relegate to the past and, while regurgitating allusions and echoes of current political, ideological, and nationalist trends, traditional and deeply popular, they create around the club an important environment of stylistic factors—a joyful, bold, licentious, and frank image. These literary genres prepare the atmosphere of the forms and images of a society that is linked to football, but specifically makes the football team Clube de Regatas do Flamengo an event of the invented tradition - Flamengo.\

Part I. What doesn't explain Flamengo

Chapter I. The Club's Performance\ This chapter focuses on a statistical survey of Clube de Regatas do Flamengo's representation in state, national, and international events. The following events were considered relevant to this analysis: World Cups (1930-1994), the Club World Championship, Mercosur, CONMEBOL, the Brazilian Championship, the Rio de Janeiro State Championship, and other significant competitions. The main objective is to confirm that Flamengo's titles, while significant, do not justify the club's popularity. According to data from Folha de S. Paulo, Revista Placar, and Rede Globo, Flamengo has the largest fan base in the state of Rio de Janeiro and also the most significant nationwide. These publications highlight Flamengo as the preferred club for 46% of Rio fans, followed by Vasco da Gama with 23%, Botafogo with 17%, and Fluminense with 13%. For Brazil, the percentages are 37% for Flamengo, Corinthians with 21%, and São Paulo with 14%. The hypothesis of this chapter is whether the club's significant popularity could be related to its better performance, measured by the number of titles won by Flamengo throughout its history. Thus, the first step was a comparative analysis between performance and popularity. Palmeiras and São Paulo are currently the clubs with the same number or more titles, but they are not more popular than Corinthians, which has gone more than twenty years without a Brazilian Championship title and boasts the second-largest fan base in the country. The issue of São Paulo, whose consistency reflects the history of a traditional club with a strong following, is also unclear. Finally, Flamengo's popularity is also not explained by its titles and achievements. We reiterate that Flamengo has the largest fan base in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil and is also responsible for the highest attendance at stadiums. It leads in Brazilian titles but trails Fluminense in state titles. However, two of these figures differ significantly from the others: the attendance percentage at Flamengo's games. Every time Flamengo takes the field, this is responsible for an increase in the average attendance, whether in preliminaries, rounds, qualifying, and, of course, in the finals.

Chapter II. The Rivalry Between Clubs and Flamengo\ The hypothesis presented here is that the rivalries between Rio de Janeiro clubs, constructed by these narratives, along with the extolling of sporting prowess, do not seem to explain Flamengo's popularity over Fluminense, Vasco, and Botafogo. These clubs would be equally deserving of the popularity attributed to Flamengo due to the historical context and the mediation of results. Thus, we cite three points of focus: Flamengo and Fluminense, Flamengo and Vasco, and Flamengo and Botafogo.\

Flamengo and Fluminense together built one of the richest periods in Rio de Janeiro football and marked the history of Brazilian football. However, Flamengo became more popular than Fluminense, both following the same path. Why Flamengo and not Fluminense or Vasco?

Flamengo and Vasco

STATISTICS BETWEEN FLAMENGO AND VASCO-\ Period: 1923 to 1999\ STATE TITLES: FLAMENGO - 26, VASCO - 21\ GAMES: 300 FLAMENGO WINS: 114 VASCO WINS: 104 DRAWS: 82 FLAMENGO GOALS: 419 VASCO GOALS: 406\

Flamengo and Botafogo\ Botafogo is third in title wins and, when comparing their head-to-head record with Flamengo, has a 28% win rate, compared to Flamengo's 42% and a 25% draw rate. However, the situation differs when it comes to idols and the number of players and goals scored in World Cups. It is the club with the most idols and stars throughout the history of Brazilian football. Botafogo, in addition to providing players to the Brazilian national team for the World Cups between 1930 and 1994, a total of forty-four throughout history, also provided seven hundred and twenty-eight people to the Brazilian national team, including assistants and technical directors in a variety of roles, in Brazil's most distinguished participation in various international football events. It boasts a roster of stars and idols, none other than Garrincha, Amarildo, Zagalo, Jairzinho, Perácio, Nilton Santos, Rildo, and Josimar, all among the top scorers in the World Cups. Botafogo is followed by Vasco, a club that brings Leônidas, Ademir, Alfredo, Maneca, Pinga, Roberto Dinamite, Dirceu, Edmundo, and Romário, coming from Flamengo. We also mention Fluminense with Preguinho, Romeu, Didi, and Branco. Flamengo presents Moderato, Júnior, and Zico, later Sócrates (coming from Corinthians/SP), bringing Baltazar and Rivelino, and Romário who returns to his original club, Vasco. Another group of idols is divided between São Paulo (SP) with Gerson, Oscar, Serginho, and Careca, and Santos with Pelé, Zito, Clodoaldo, and Carlos Alberto. As for Palmeiras, with Chico, Jair, Vavá, Mazola, and others at Portuguesa de São Paulo, such as Julinho and Djalma Santos; Bangú and São Cristóvão, between the 30s and 50s, stood out with some stars. And yet, Botafogo is the third favorite among Rio fans. The clubs characterize their rivalry with Flamengo in a unique way: competitive, in a simultaneous pursuit of an advantage, a victory, an emulative prize. However, Flamengo's popularity belongs by right of contiguity to the fans, and in our understanding, the "rivalry" between the Rio clubs contributed and contributes to this.

Chapter III. Patrimonial concession in the Vargas era\ We recall that donations and favors to sports clubs became common in many governments. Donations and favors granted to clubs, at local and national levels, have become common in Brazil under some governments. In the 1930s, the land in Gávea was donated to Clube de Regatas do Flamengo for the construction of its headquarters. President Dutra donated land in downtown Rio de Janeiro, where years later, in the early 1950s, President Vargas granted a loan to the club so that it could build a twenty-four-story building overlooking the bay. Fluminense, in its encouragement of politics and sport, in its various celebrations and inaugurations within the club (renovations, gyms and swimming pools), alluded to the presence of politicians, if not in fervent speeches, instigated by the political situations of different eras of the effusion of sport; since Coelho Neto, described and criticized by Lima Barreto, in the pejorative words of a "regression to barbarism", and especially in the years in which the Fla-Flus dominated the football scene in Rio de Janeiro and the country. (History of the Fluminense Regatta Club, 1997). The luxurious headquarters of Botafogo de Regatas - a project by Bahiana & Fortes, known as the "Moorish Palace" - had its cornerstone laid on July 1, 1919, and was inaugurated on August 15, 1920, in the presence of Prince Aimone of Savoy, of Croatia. The presence of politicians such as: Paulo Azeredo, Anselmo Mascarenhas, Emannuel Sodré, Oscar Niemeyer, Flávio Ramos, Raimundo Ferreira Silva, Arthur César de Andrade, Augusto Paranhos Fontennele, Miguel Rafael de Pino, Jucelino Kubitchek, Guilherme Arinos and César Maia (Botafogo: The Glorious, 1996) stood out. Arthur Bernardes, president of the Republic between 1922 and 1926, sanctions decrees on August 16, 1926, donating the lands of General Severiano to the Botafogo Club, located in several headquarters, in areas that would pass through the growth of the city, was led to give up its spaces to metropolitan constructions in 1938 and 1954. In 1954, with the project designed by Oscar Niemeyer and donated to the club, it was remodeled and the "Pasteur Palace" gave up some more areas to encompass the entire sports structural plan. Later, in 1970, he lost the land, but not the built-up areas in General Severiano, which were abandoned. In 1993, it returned to this old headquarters, again with an area donated by the state government, where one of the most modern sports complexes was built, with the need for more areas to cover the entire project, which were donated during the first administration of the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, César Maia. Its inauguration, on February 08, 1993, was attended by João Havelange. Vasco da Gama inaugurated its Stadium in São Januário in 1927, bringing to the celebration no less than the President of the Republic, Washington Luís, Ministers of State and the President of the CBD, Oscar Costa. The purpose was to honor these individuals for their contributions to the club and to Brazilian sport, which were beginning in other ways: swimming with heated and covered pools, gymnasiums, tracks, land for sports fields, open courts, structure for the social area, etc., carried out over the years. (Statistical Yearbook of the Vasco da Gama Rowing Club, 1998 and ASSAF & MARTINS, 1999). The relationship between national identity and culture shows that the nation is the socio-historical context within which football fits, highlighting that the emotional investment of individuals in the elements of the sporting context has as a fundamental factor the maintenance of symbols.

Part II. Flamengo: A Sociological and Historical Question\ The objective here is to map the polarization that emerged in the world of sports, in the amateur development of Brazilian football, at the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century. The hypothesis is that the emergence of a mass culture in the early 20th century redefined the meaning and logic of contemporary sport, emphasizing the commodification of sport-spectacle, to the detriment of a romantic version. However, both conceptions seem congruent: sport unleashes a collective passion in the Brazilian people, and football, competing for modernization through professionalization, has not distorted the popular romantic tenor of the sport—thinking, acting, and cheering based on belonging to a group.\

Chapter I. The Historical Construction of Flamengo\ A romantic saga in the founding of the Flamengo Regatta Group - bohemianism, adventure, and tragic overtones mark the club's origins. The Flamengo of heroes and scoundrels is also imbued with the tradition of a Rio de Janeiro neighborhood, amidst stories and legends of the Carioca people, amidst the "white man's house" and the "clamor," the "scream," which would come to mark the club's history in the most expressive allusions.\ The nationalist ideals of its founding date, November 15th, the indigenous names of the boats, no longer foreign, no longer mythological; truly Brazilian, taken from the literary works of Tomás Antonio Gonzaga, from Carlos Gomes' opera "O Guarani," through Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar to the expedition reports of Cândido Rondon, becoming inspiring boats along with their rowers, personalized in the poems of Olavo Bilac, the ode to "Salamina." This era is marked by the club's adoption of football in 1903, but its participation in championships only began in 1912. It is in this romantic context that Flamengo's history is built, intertwined with rowing and football. From the 1920s onward, with its professional sport, it continued to be the "most beloved club" in Rio de Janeiro, where the Flamengo boys still made a point of maintaining the playful, cheerful atmosphere of the Republic of "Peace and Love" festivities. Carnival celebrations with reco-recos, whose favorite target for their riots and "garajada" games was the Vasco da Gama Club, adjectively "Portuguese." From the improvised field at Praia do Russel, the Paissandu land, the Fluminense lease.

Chapter II. Flamengo and the New Dream: Living from Soccer\ With the political, social, economic, and labor system restructuring of the Vargas era, widespread changes occurred in Brazilian society, and a new administration emerged for the sport.\ Flamengo: Amateur + Professional + Popular + ISM\ In the case of Flamengo, the reluctance stemmed from the club's president. Players received "bonuses" and gifts from members to play, but the members were also willing to pay salaries. The president of Flamengo and AMEA, Rivadávia Meyer, positioned himself as a strong defender of amateurism, rejecting the right and desire of players to become professional. On one occasion, Meyer reacted violently when interviewed by the newspaper Diário Carioca on January 26, 1932, a year before professionalism was officially declared in soccer, expressing his anger:\ I consider the player who wants to become professional to be a gigolo who exploits prostitutes. The club gives him all the equipment necessary to play and have fun with the ball, and still wants money? I will not allow this at Flamengo; professionalism debases man. (Diário Carioca, January 26.01.1932, 1950). Football that transcends the symbiosis of ISMS The culmination of football's popularity is seen as the joy and sadness of the 16 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, in the discord between the commotion of early credit for the defeat of July XNUMX. Where, in the construction of the largest stadium in the world for Brazil to shine, Flamengo was the primary focus. Politics, religiosity, and football Football once again became the joy of Brazilians a week after the defeat, highlighting the emphasis placed on football and the conception of an era marked by the "Symbiosis of ISMS," romanticism, populism, professionalism, civic-mindedness, patriotism, and Flamengo's spirit.

Part III. The popular invention of Flamengo\ The football of the Clube de Regatas do Flamengo, of the writers (journalists, columnists, musicians, poets, designers, painters and photographers) and of the public expression, became a reference of a city already characterized by the joy of its carnival being invented as a tradition - Flamengo.\

Chapter I. Flamengo's Artistic Expression: Flamengo in Caricatures, Flamengo in Photographs, and Flamengo in Paintings\ Visual artists, photographers, and illustrators inspired by the club's football impact painted Flamengo. Henfil and "Urubu"'s caricatures extol the daily life of the club, the city, and the country. The cartoons offer a glimpse into a time frame shaped by the harshest of criticisms, that is, when it was "comic." The photographs, in surrealist flashes, capture memorable moments inside and outside the stadium. Flamengo's popularity is also fueled by paintings, canvases that capture the artist's subjective emotions, feelings, and attachment to the club.\

Flamengo of Caricatures\ Before the books, films, and the national success of Graúna and its politically charged gang, Henfil was already famous among readers of Jornal dos Sports with a group of amusing characters, led by a crazed Flamengo fan - Urubu. Among the characters are Bacalhau (naturally, a Vasco da Gama fan), Pó-de-Arroz (Fluminense), Cri-Cri (Botafogo), and Pó-de-Souza (a parrot whose main pastime was throwing full chamber pots at the heads of his enemies). Through them, Henfil portrayed and criticized Brazilian soccer, with its main targets being its officials, sports directors, and referees. Expressions like "sacrifice," "baralho," "top-top," "putzgrila," "cacilda," "qiuspa," "cambuda de feladapata," and other well-known ones were common in the vocabulary not only of the club's fans, but also in everyday Rio residents. Others, like "Don't Wake Me Up!!!," where the vulture appears with its eyes closed and a wide smile on its face, from the late 1970s and early 1980s, were more than just a cartoon. They faithfully represented the author's state of mind regarding Flamengo at that time. Henfil translated the fans' feelings into cartoons and used them not only for mockery or criticism, but also for campaigns like "No to Violence," "Women in the Fan Club," and "Take Your Flag," portraying a specific era in the football club's history, while also composing the artist's unique vision of the country of football.

Flamengo in photographs\ The photographic images of Flamengo are eminently surreal; they resonate with the emotional involvement and commotion of the photographed scene, transforming it into an internal question that will depend on the cultural, social, and psychological experiences of each observer, without remaining tied to an external and absolute concept. According to Nietzsche, "what matters is the momentum that awakens passion, ardor, flame, the will to live," which, through Zarathustra, aims to do nothing more than evoke our creativity through spontaneous manifestations (1998, p. 34).\

Flamengo's paintings\ The "canvas" as a work of culture exposes feelings through the hands of the artist who believes he expresses, through form, what thought has extracted from the moment of emotion. His subjectivity lies in painting the thought, in acting, in doing, in expressing the sound of the thing's tone. Color is not the same; it unites, it does not separate; it is there and collaborates, it is not opaque; it is sensitivity. It feels and consents. The importance of Flamengo's art is a construction based on emotional values: joy, sadness, chaos, passion, alienation, compulsion), expressed through memories—places, things, people, and emotions—feelings of identification with good and bad times, fantasies, dreams, and reality make up the memory of a club, becoming tradition.\

Chapter II. Flamengo as a musical reference\ From this chapter, we map the discursive references that actively participated in the construction of Flamengo's popularity. We hypothesize that the literary reference (journalistic, artistic, poetic, musical, etc.) contributed to the construction of Flamengo's identity with popular values. In the analysis of the speeches, we note that there are writers who are part of a club, as well as other social categories. We accept that we are facing a circular process: sport, and especially football, has become a source of inspiration and its materializations, in turn, contribute to the creation of a phenomenon, from sympathies to the force of magnetism.\ Literary material creates links with football, often attributing itself to the expression of the feelings of a society. Adjectives such as "nation" and "state of mind", the ups and downs of glories and defeats express popular feelings and converge to create a "national passion". The Brazilian becomes a football being. Even more so when seen in illness, criticism, envy, idolatry, and suffering. From Olavo Bilac to Vinícius de Morais, football, as a language, is a source of passion and art.\ Flamengo and popular songs\ In comparing Flamengo's songs, symbolism covers language practices. The chant's intonation is legitimized by gestures, shouts, invocations, forms of greeting, tones of voice and the use of accessories (flags, pennants, colored shirts), obviously highlighting the club's name.\ The pole of Flamengo's discourse is also a subjective axis, which cannot fail to be "desire": "It is my greatest pleasure...", a formidable egotistical sense followed by an indefinite multiplicity of phatic terms, where the repeated numbers of grammatical occurrences operate a simulacrum, sharing with the binary polarization in which opposites are punctuated: pleasure and displeasure (Freud), pleasure and pain (Epicurus and Lucretius), joy and sadness (Spinoza), happiness and unhappiness (Diderot) (BODEI, 1995, p.198-202) and BAUDRILLARD's "seduction" when he states\ (...) that the vertigo of seduction, as well as any passion, resides first of all in predestination. Only it confers that fatal quality that lies at the heart of pleasure - that kind of witty quip that links in advance any movement of the soul to its destiny and its death (2000, p.127).\ In the use of images that the songs presented, we are not dealing here only with the focus of a sports game, but with a demonstration that places football as one of the most important manifestations of the Brazilian way of being, as it is shown in the whole of our culture: in romance and in music, more precisely in the poetics of songs. From mass culture to academic erudition, in the articulation of this sport on three levels: the erudite, the popular, and the mass, we move on to the carnival figures and poets who contributed to the popular invention of Flamengo.

Chapter III. From Carnival Artists to Poets.\ Sambas and songs that enlivened the parties inside the club and took part in the traditional carnival of the city of Rio de Janeiro. In this topic we move on to My Verses...They Are Your Verses...Flamengo, where men and women poeticized the club and its heroes with their dreamlike plots and rhymes, contributing to its popularity.\

Flamengo's Carnival: Passion and Fun\ We hypothesize that Flamengo began to be recognized as part of local and national tradition when it became a benchmark for a similarly caliber event in Carnival music. While the songs were solely intended to praise the club, they remained a restricted domain of supporters, activists, and fans. As the theme of Carnival changes, perspectives change, and the club becomes public and part of the Carioca tradition and Carnival as a national tradition. From the serenades and all-nighters of the early 66th century, from the thunderous reco-recos of the garage, from the tumultuous "Peace and Love" republican festivities, to the turbulence of Café Rio Branco, from the howling crowds on the edge of the Lagoa to the immense crowd at Maracanã, Flamengo is a theme for Carnival fans who, through their songs, also express in the melodies their misfortunes and mockery about the club's defeats, whose exalted verses and the caption "Your Glory is to Fight" or "Once Flamengo, Always Flamengo" reaffirm the passion for the club with commitment and loyalty: until death, in victory and defeat, always... For ALENCAR, "the club's anthem has become one of the fans' favorite Carnival marches," adding that (...) in any case, Flamengo's Carnival has its traditions. One of them was the lively costumed sea bathing events held in front of the 68/22 headquarters, formerly the 1970nd, with extraordinary attendance. People came from the neighborhoods and suburbs. They had groups like "Eu Sozinho," "Tenentes do Diabo," "Uma Vez Flamengo, Sempre Flamengo," "Piranhas e Flamengos de Verdade," "Guarda Rubro-Negra," and many others, livening up and spreading the club's anthem, the most played and heard at all Rio's carnivals, at the Municipal and Brás de Pina. (207, p. 8-XNUMX). Emotion, passion, and drama are commonly used terms in the minds of writers, conceived and correctly used socially, through which the history of an era can be reconstructed. This can be illustrated by the evolution of verse and prose about Flamengo. Novelists even describe figures that increasingly become types: the Rogue, the Poor, the Bourgeois, the Top Hat, the Black, the Strong, the Weak, and the Oppressed, a statue—the Naked Boy, God the Saint, and the Gambler the Hero—are illustrated and constituted according to a formal law that is not limited to a single case. Words reveal the evolution of the iconographic corollary that extends from culture to journalistic tradition (as we will see later), passing through elective affinities, where supra-singular figures are progressively liberated that are no longer limited to a particular history or a precise era, but can serve as models and become ideal, transcendent types in which each person can recognize themselves.

Chapter IV. Flamengo of chronicles and literature. The public expression and the invention of Flamengo's tradition\ As a public expression, we find a Flamengo revered by religious figures, writers, chroniclers, journalists and politicians, whose consecrations are reported in various ways; from devoted and fervent evocations, simple romantic expressions to unbridled passions. The history of Flamengo, like that of most Brazilian sports clubs, is centuries old and is accompanied by words meaning race, cup, achievements, idols and heroes who marked their presence in the time and space of everyday life in Rio de Janeiro, recognized for their lifestyle and revived by chroniclers, with sensibilities necessary for the romantic construction of Flamengo, such as, for example, HOMERO HOMEM (Mov. 21, from the poem "King Without Sleep"):\ King at Maracanã Soul Grit Flame Wins Red is my evil Black is its sign Soul Grit Flame Wins In the stands and in the general Red-black is my evil Soul Grit Flame Wins I am a hundred thousand in the stands Another hundred thousand in the social Soul, Grit, Gama, Flama Alga- Zarra Car- Naval On the pitch and on the scoreboard I am a triumphant zero.\ To say that the artist, the poet, the columnist, the journalist, the musician inscribe themselves in a theatrical function does not mean invalidating them a priori; on the contrary, it means recognizing them an important social role, but perhaps not the one that their various readers attribute. Its seriousness comes from its function as a simulacrum, despite what the actors and their detractors think, because here, what we call real is quite insignificant, although it is precisely this insignificance of the "real" that constitutes Flamengo's greatness. In other words, the chance encounter made Flamengo an event at the heart of the "real"; however, there is an irreducible "unreal", whose action is far from being negligible - an invented tradition.\ HOBSBAWM (1997, p. 22-23) ensures that:\ Incidentally, it is worth highlighting a specific interest that "invented traditions" may have for modern and contemporary history. They are highly applicable in the case of a comparatively recent historical innovation to the "nation" and its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation state, symbols, interpretations. All these elements are based on exercises in social engineering that are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical originality implies innovation. (...) Concepts must include a constructed or "invented" component. And it is certainly because a large part of the subjective constituents of the modern "nation" consists of such constructions, being associated with appropriate and, in general, quite recent symbols or with a discourse elaborated for this purpose (such as that of national history), that the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without giving due attention to the "invention of traditions." Finally, the study of the "invention of traditions" is interdisciplinary. It is a field common to historians, social anthropologists and various other scholars of the human sciences and which cannot be adequately investigated without such collaboration.\ The allusions to Flamengo do not stray from the allegories of tragedy and comedy, between the drama of the theater and the setbacks of life in the euphoric joy of the late 19th century to the present day, reflecting on the mystique of the magnetism of the red-black, exalting it with nationalist, civic versions, in the relationship between the people-nation and the club. From glories to defeats, from short stories, poems and chronicles, from mass culture to erudition, we find in these literatures the most distinct exacerbations, taken to the most varied cultural manifestations in caricatured descriptions, which resort to the creation of diverse types, such as symbols and mascots of the club: boa constrictor, frog, vulture, dead chicken, Peladinho, Popeye, Zé Carioca, etc. The writers, in their descriptions, recount the romantic themes, the fervor for the most beloved, the most popular club in the country, and invent a tradition – Flamengo.

Bibliographic reference

KOWALSKI, Marizabel. Why Flamengo? Doctoral Thesis. Rio de Janeiro: UGF, 2002. Digital book. 388 pages, and over 50 figures, .pdf file 5 MB.

http://www.efdeportes.com/efd107/por-que-flamengo.htm