Cruzeiro vs. Atlético: O Clássico

***NOTE: Unfortunately, none of the images that appear on this post are mine. I didn’t have it in me to bring even my little camera into the chaos that is O Clássico. You don’t bring your babies into the middle of a war-zone.

Imagine, Iowans, that Ames and Iowa City were the same city – i.e. that ISU and UI were located in the exact same town, and that their football teams shared a stadium. Everyday you’d walk along the street not knowing if a passerby was a friend or foe. During football season, the Hawks would have their home games, and the Clones theirs, and this hypothetical city would belong to whoever’s team had such a home game on a Saturday. But at some point during the season, the two teams would have to play each other. It would in essence be a home game for both teams, and on this fateful day it would be revealed, either within the gladiator arena or in the parking lots outside, who was friend and who was foe. Imagine such a hellish world, and then multiply all the passion, the pomp and circumstance, and the slightest will to pop that jerk Clone fan in the face times 100, and you have O Clássico – The Classic – which pits Belo Horizonte’s two local soccer teams—and their fans—against each other.

100 years ago this year, the Clube Atlético Mineiro, known simply as Atlético, or by its mascot Galo (Rooster), was formed here in Belo Horizonte (Mineiro is the adjective for this state, Minas Gerais). Originally, as was the case with any soccer—who are we kidding, football—club in Brazil at the time, Galo was a team of the elite, and subsequently only hired players that likewise came from an elite pedigree. I.e., no Afro-Brazilian players need apply. In the middle part of the 20th century, smaller clubs from the interior of Minas Gerais started hiring players from poorer backgrounds, many of whom were Afro-Brazilian, and many of whom were much better than their cake-eating counterparts. These smaller teams began to beat up on prestigious urban teams like Galo, and to save face Galo decided to change tactics. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Since this time, Galo’s identity has shifted at the end of its century of existence to a team of the masses, a team of the poor, the favelados, those that live in favelas.

87 years ago this year, Galo’s rival, Cruzeiro Esporte Clube, known simply as Cruzeiro—or, to keep pace in the rhyming wars of the two teams’ songs, Zeiro—was formed by Italian entrepreneurs in Belo Horizonte. Cruzeiro has followed nearly the same path as Galo in terms of being a team of the elite in the beginning and incorporating poorer, Afro-Brazilian players near the middle of its lifetime—in fact, Brazilian national team hero-turned-has-been Ronaldo, who came from a poor family in Rio, played for Cruzeiro in the early 90s, starting at the tender age of 17. However, though today the team enjoys a following of both rich and poor—really, Galo has rich fans and poor fans alike as well—Cruzeiro has maintained, more or less, its image as a team of the elite, quite possibly in a way to preserve some uncommon ground to separate it from Galo. From an outsider’s perspective, whatever the line is that separates the identity of these two teams and their fans, it’s blurry at best.

Each team has its run-of-the-mill fans, who follow their beloved club and detest their rival, but their fan-ship is all talk. At the extremes of each side lives the vanguard of each team’s fan base. For Atlético, it’s Galoucura, a contraction between Galo and Loucura (madness), thus meaning something like “Rooster Madness,” though our Hawk’s Nest would be something semantically closer, albeit not nearly as crazy. For Cruzeiro, not surprisingly due to the club’s Italian roots, there’s the Mafia Azul, the Blue Mafia (Cruzeiro’s colors are blue and white, Galo’s black and white). These fans on the fringe have their own organizations, their own shirts and pants that have a variety of slogans (one I saw for Mafia Azul said, “You either run with us or run from us – only God can judge us”), and images of their respective mascots in battle gear (I forgot to mention that Cruzeiro’s mascot is a fox—there are a lot of shirts with the image of a fox eating a rooster). Why battle gear? These groups have more hatred for each other than the average fans, and when given the chance their members won’t hesitate to take their natural Brazilian machismo one step further and beat the piss out of their rivals until they're dead or the police come and break up the fight.


All right, that should be sufficient background for the average Gringo to understand the craziness that is football in Brazil. Now let’s get to the game itself.

So Ricardo, the kid I live with from Vitória (I still need to tell his story), is a huge Cruzeiro fan. I came here neutral, but have since been baptized by this Mafia Azul commando-in-training as a Cruzeiro fan, albeit a mild one. Two weeks ago we went to a game between Cruzeiro and one of Minas Gerais’ small interior teams, Vila Nova. It was a brilliant game; Cruzeiro played terrible until the final 15 minutes of the game, coming back from 2-1 down to win the match 3-2 on a PK with 5 minutes to go. The game mattered little, however, and thus only about 10,000 or so fans showed up to the Mineirão stadium, which can comfortably hold 80,000, though has in the past seated—or rather stood—over 100,000. After this game, Ricardo was set on going to O Clássico to make up for such a rather tranquil match. I was leery. Everyone I’d talked to about O Clássico had told me how dangerous it was, how easy it would be to get caught in the crossfire between Galoucura and Mafia Azul. In the end, however, I made up my mind to go. A friend of a friend stood in line to get our tickets, which sold out in less than 8 hours. (As a side note, the tickets are CHEAP here! Student tickets cost 7.50 Reais, about $4.50, while general admission is still a mere 15 Reais, or 9 bucks. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gary Barta!) Ricardo and I, along with the grandson of Dona Dirce, Lucas, decided to take a bus from Coração Eurarístico to Pampulha, a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of the city where the guy who bought our tickets lived, which was conveniently a 10-minute walk from the Mineirão. This was a HUGE mistake. The three of us resolved to wear nothing at all having to do with Cruzeiro, which turned out to be the best decision any of us had ever made in our lives. As soon as the bus stopped at the southern edge of downtown, about 30 Galoucura members hopped on, and almost immediately began singing their war songs—dozens of them. Fans of both teams have pretty ugly chants they shout at one another. The Hawkeye creed that “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother at Iowa State” doesn’t even come close to the dirtiness—and, admittedly, creativity—of the mud these two sides hurl at each other. One of the cleanest and most popular, which both sides use equally (as I said, it’s a war of rhymes), goes “Ei, Galo/Zeiro, vai tomar no cu!” (“Hey, Galo/Zeiro, you’re going to take it in the ass!”) During the 45-minute bus ride to Pampulha, the three of us sat still and never even thought of making eye contact. Luckily, our silence in the midst of this maelstrom didn’t give away our allegiance.

Once we arrived in Pamulha, we chilled for a bit at the ticket-buyer’s house (I missed his name) and waited for some more friends to arrive. We ended up heading off to the Mineirão in a group of 9, which included two other Americans—the first I’d met since arriving here, who ended up being missionaries and friends of a friend of the ticket-buyer. Once again, we were lucky to have worn nothing Cruzeiro, or anything blue for that matter, as the route from the ticket-buyer’s house to the Mineirão took us right through the Galo “tailgate” as it were. Droves of crazy, drunk Atlético fans were getting away with as much mayhem as they could under the constant vigilance of the omnipresent Military Police, ready to break someone’s skull upon with their batons at a moment’s notice. We made our way to the Cruzeiro side of the stadium and, after being patted down by the MP, went in to find some seats. We were in the lower deck of the stadium and amid the throngs of fans we were lucky enough to find seats that gave us a pretty decent view of the field. I wish I could’ve brought my camera in to capture the scene we walked into. The Mineirão is more or less an oval. Behind one goal sits (again, read stands) the Galo fans, behind the other those for Cruzeiro. Along the sides of the oval, taking up about 4 whole sections on either end, is an empty buffer zone, home to only the MP and their German Shepherds. Absolutely no chances are taken that could result in all out war breaking out! For a good hour before the game, each side’s fans hurled slurs at each other as their teams warmed up on the field and innocent—and ignored—pairs of Galo and Cruzeiro fans marched around the field holding banners that read “Atlético and Cruzeiro: United for Peace” and “Cruzeiro and Atlético: United to Fight Tuberculosis.” Just before the opening whistle sounded, the upper deck on each side kept with tradition and unfurled their team’s enormous flags, showing the team logo and colors. To the humiliation of Galo fans and much to the delight of Cruzeirenses, the Galo side unfurled its flag upside-down, a HUGE disgrace to their team. Our group joked about how the people responsible for this atrocity would be killed. Sadly, though I don’t know of their fate, this could very well be more than a mere joke.

The game started with Cruzeiro on the attack early, keeping Atlético on its heals for the better part of the first ten minutes. From then on, the quality of offense on both sides dropped dramatically, making the rest of the game an ugly and anticlimactic defensive struggle. The game ended a 0-0 draw, with fans more hushed and disenchanted than I had first envisioned two weeks before. We scurried out as soon as the final whistle blew to beat the crowds. We chilled at the ticket-buyer’s house for a little bit before getting a ride back home, wanting more than anything not to repeat our bus fiasco from earlier that afternoon. On the way home we passed through Praça 7 de Setembro, a downtown square where Galoucura or Mafia Azul meet up after a victory to unofficially “claim” the city. Despite the marked MP presence, the praça was virtually devoid of hostile life.

This morning at school, fans from both sides wore their team colors with pride, each side believing that their team had played less ugly than the other. As I stood chatting with friends outside in the history and geography department courtyard, I watched as a student in a Galo jersey and another in a Cruzeiro jersey were about to cross paths. In a moment of rare Brazilian sportsmanship, instead of a sneer, instead of a verbal jab, instead of merely ignoring each other, the two fans smiled and cocked their heads back, giving each other a low-five as they each walked by the other. If even for a second, and albeit in the calming shade of palm trees in a well-off university campus, all was right in the football world of BH in that moment.