What happened this week to soccer can be compared to what happened to Formula 1 in ‘94.
If you don’t remember, until ‘94 we were “the country of drivers”… Fittipaldi, Piquet, and Senna were the greatest figures of that era. But there were many others too — actually, lots of them.
TV emphasized every race, the country stopped, we all know the little jingle by heart. Kids idolized the yellow helmet, and Seninha was an immediate hit.
Ads featuring drivers were very common and appreciated too.
In May of ‘94 everything changed, it took us days to ‘wake up’ from the anesthesia and digest it.
Today, 20 years later, we’re not even a shadow of that country. There’s no youth pipeline, there’s no frenzy to watch the races, and Globo strains itself searching for the shadow of a hero.
What happened this week was tragic, but it may have been the death of a soccer that was already in the ICU.
Our teams are awful, our soccer is ugly, defensive-trench, just trying to win 1 to 0. Our Ronaldos, Robinhos, Neymars are getting rarer and rarer (no wonder all the talk in the last two World Cups was about our defense). Our administrators are corrupt, our stadiums unsafe, and our yellow team is led by horrible people and will keep going with Teixeiras, Marins, and Del Neros…
It was good to be born in the country of soccer and drivers. I had a lot of fun, I celebrated 2 world soccer titles, 3 Formula One titles, I remember well Senna’s home victories in ‘91 and ‘93, the ‘94 title, the demolition jobs and dominance between 2002 and 2005 in soccer… Rest in peace, Brazilian soccer.