Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has an Allure All Its Own

RIO DE JANEIRO — In Brazil, the ball is always moving. It moves on grass and on sand, on concrete and on cobblestone. Sometimes, during the rainy season, it even moves on water.

Organized soccer, the kind the Brazilian national team will play next summer in the World Cup, is known as futebol (pronounced FOO-chee-ball) in Portuguese. But pickup games, the ones played in the cities and the countryside, are called pelada, a term Brazilian men also use to refer to a naked woman. One evening last month, a hotel doorman waiting to play at a game in the Flamengo neighborhood here explained the odd symmetry this way: “Football and women,” he said, “are the only two things we really love.”

The doorman was idling beside an asphalt court. The court was lighted by three dim streetlamps and the glint of the moon. It was nearly 11 p.m. and, in the distance, the lights of the Glória and Catete neighborhoods twinkled. Teams were divided into shirts and skins. Games lasted until one team scored a goal or for 10 minutes, with a cellphone alarm beeping to signal full time.

There was no crowd; just the bay on one side, the highway on the other and a concrete underpass, coated in graffiti and stained the color of dried lager, leading away from the court and back to the city. Before midnight, the game included students, day-workers and beach bums; after midnight, busboys and waiters and valets arrived, kicking and running and sweating their way toward morning. Some played in sneakers or trainers. Others played barefoot, the blisters on their heels a nubby reminder of their devotion.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sports/soccer/pickup-soccer-in-brazil-has-an-allure-all-its-own.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all