WIN OR LOSE, BUT ALWAYS WITH DEMOCRACY

LONG READ · POLITICS

Win or Lose, But Always With Democracy

In 1982, under Brazil’s military dictatorship, one football club ran itself as a full democracy. Players voted on transfers, wages and training schedules. The janitor had the same vote as the star midfielder. It lasted three years — and changed the country.

In 1982, Brazil was nineteen years into a military dictatorship.

The coup had come in 1964. The generals had promised stability and delivered repression. Trade unions were banned. Opposition leaders were jailed, tortured and disappeared. The press operated under censorship. There were no direct elections for president — the military chose its own successors through a parliament it effectively controlled.

In this country, in this year, a football club decided to run itself as a democracy.

Not symbolically. Not as a slogan on a banner. Full, operational, one-person-one-vote democracy — where players voted on their own wages, their own training schedules, their own transfer decisions. Where the kit man and the cook had the same vote as the star midfielder. Where the club’s director of football answered to a committee, not the other way around.

The club was Corinthians. The man who led it was a 6’3” bearded midfielder with a medical degree who smoked cigarettes and quoted philosophy and had been named after an ancient Greek thinker by his father, a self-taught civil servant who named three of his sons after Greek philosophers.

His name was Sócrates. And what he built at Corinthians between 1982 and 1984 remains the most radical experiment in the history of football.

BACKGROUND

What the Dictatorship Was

Brazil’s military dictatorship began with a coup on April 1, 1964. A coalition of military officers, conservative politicians and business interests overthrew the elected government of President João Goulart, who had been pursuing land reform and the nationalisation of foreign companies. The United States government, fearing another Cuba in Latin America, recognised the new military government within hours.

What followed was not a temporary interruption of democracy but a systematic dismantling of it. Political parties were dissolved and replaced with a two-party system the generals controlled. Congress was purged. Habeas corpus was suspended. The secret police operated an apparatus of surveillance, detention and torture. Over 400 individuals were killed by the Brazilian military during the dictatorship, and many more were disappeared, tortured or imprisoned.

By the late 1970s, the regime was under pressure — from a global recession that had exposed the limits of the “Brazilian economic miracle,” from a growing opposition movement, and from international human rights scrutiny. A controlled process of political opening — abertura — began. But the pace was set entirely by the military. Direct elections for president remained prohibited.

It was in this context that Sócrates, Adílson Monteiro Alves, and their colleagues at Corinthians chose to demonstrate, in the most public arena available to them, that another way of running things was possible.

CONTEXT

The Man and the Club

Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was born in Belém, in the north of Brazil, in February 1954. His father was a civil servant and self-taught intellectual who named three of his sons after Greek philosophers. The name Sócrates was not coincidence. It was an argument about what a life should be.

He grew up in Ribeirão Preto in São Paulo state, reading philosophy and politics alongside playing football. He enrolled in medicine at the University of São Paulo while already playing professionally. By the time the Democracia Corinthiana began, he held a full medical degree — making him one of the most educated professional footballers on earth, in any era.

On the pitch, he was extraordinary. Standing 6’3”, easily recognisable for his beard and headband, Sócrates captained Brazil at the 1982 World Cup — a team widely regarded as one of the finest never to win the tournament. He was named South American Footballer of the Year in 1983. He scored 22 goals in 60 international appearances. In 2004, Pelé named him in the FIFA 100 list of the world’s greatest living players.

He was also, by his own admission, a heavy drinker who smoked and had no interest in the disciplined life that football clubs traditionally demanded. He believed the sport should be played with joy, not fear. He believed the same of life.

Corinthians was, at the start of the 1980s, a club run as most Brazilian clubs were run — autocratically. Players were told what to do, when to eat, where to sleep. The concentração — a practice of locking players in a hotel for one or two days before matches — was standard. Nobody voted on anything. Power flowed from the directors downward, unquestioned.

Sócrates thought this was wrong. Not merely inefficient — morally wrong. A microcosm, in miniature, of the dictatorship that ruled his country.

1964

Year the military coup took power

1982–84

Years of the Democracia Corinthiana

2

Campeonato Paulista titles during the democracy

THE DEMOCRACY

How It Worked

The man who made the experiment possible was not a player.

Adílson Monteiro Alves was a journalist and intellectual appointed as Corinthians’ director of football in 1981. He had read widely about workers’ self-management, collective governance and democratic theory. He introduced Sócrates to politicians, scientists and artists. He brought him books. He understood that Sócrates was not simply a footballer who had opinions — he was an intellectual who happened to be one of Brazil’s greatest players, and who therefore had a platform that almost no intellectual in a censored country could access.

Together, they proposed something that had never been tried at a football club anywhere in the world: that every person employed by the club — from the most famous player to the most junior employee — would have an equal vote on every decision that affected them.

The mechanics were simple and serious. Every person employed by the club had one vote. Players voted on transfer policy — who the club bought and sold, and for how much. They voted on their own wage structures. They voted on training schedules. They voted on the concentração — and abolished it, deciding that adult professional athletes did not need to be confined in a hotel before a match. They voted on travel arrangements. They voted on what time lunch would be served.

Some players were initially suspicious. They knew little about democracy and feared the club would go bankrupt or attract the attention of the military authorities. They voted anyway.

Each decision was put to the group. Each person cast their vote. The majority ruled. If the director of football disagreed, he implemented the majority decision regardless — or left. The club’s finances were made fully transparent. Every contract, every fee, every expenditure was available to every employee. There were no hidden salaries. There was no back-room dealing.

The results confounded the sceptics. Far from descending into chaos, Corinthians won the Campeonato Paulista — the São Paulo state championship, the most prestigious regional competition in Brazil — in both 1982 and 1983, a tournament they had not won for thirty years. They cleared their debts and made a net profit of three million dollars across the period.

Democracy, it turned out, was also good management.

“Ganhar ou perder, mas sempre com democracia.”

— Corinthians players’ banner, carried onto the pitch after winning the 1983 Campeonato Paulista final. Translation: “Win or lose, but always with democracy.”

THE SHIRTS

Football as Political Platform

Football gave the Democracia Corinthiana its most powerful platform — and Corinthians used it with deliberate intent.

On November 15, 1982, Brazil held its first multiparty elections since the 1964 coup. Voters would choose state governors directly for the first time in almost two decades. It was not a presidential election — the military was not prepared to permit that — but it was a crack in the wall.

Corinthians walked onto the pitch in shirts that read “Dia 15 Vote” — Vote on the 15th. The message was seen by millions of television viewers across Brazil. It was the first time a Brazilian football club had used its shirts for explicit political messaging.

Further slogans followed. “Diretas Já” — Direct Elections Now. “Eu quero votar para presidente” — I want to vote for the president. Each match became a public platform in a country where public platforms were controlled and constrained.

After winning the 1983 Campeonato Paulista final against rivals São Paulo, the players carried a banner onto the pitch: “Ganhar ou perder, mas sempre com democracia.” The slogan became the movement’s motto. It was directed not simply at football but at the country — at a military government that had spent nearly twenty years arguing that Brazilians were not ready to govern themselves.

Here were people governing themselves. And winning.

THE END

The Vote That Closed It

In 1984, the Brazilian Congress voted on the Dante de Oliveira constitutional amendment — a proposal that would have restored direct presidential elections. The amendment required a two-thirds majority: 320 deputies. When the vote came on April 25, 1984, 298 deputies voted in favour. The amendment fell short by 22 votes.

Sócrates had made a public promise. If the amendment passed, he would stay at Corinthians. If it did not pass, he would accept Fiorentina’s offer and leave for Italy.

He signed for Fiorentina.

His single season in Italy was, by most accounts, a disaster. Injuries, the defensive style of football, cultural isolation, and a freezing Tuscan winter combined to make him appear overrated and overpaid. He chain-smoked. He cut teammates’ designer ties off with scissors if they wore them to his house. He returned to Brazil in 1985, played for Flamengo, Santos and Botafogo, and retired in 1989.

Without Sócrates, the Democracia Corinthiana could not sustain itself. Adílson Alves was forced out by the club’s traditional power structure, which had been waiting for its moment to reassert control. The concentração was reinstated. The experiment was dismantled quietly, as if it had never happened.

Sócrates spent his later years drinking heavily, practising medicine, and writing widely-read columns on sport, politics and philosophy. On December 4, 2011, he died in a hospital in São Paulo from septic shock caused by an intestinal infection, compounded by chronic liver damage from years of heavy drinking. He was 57 years old. He was survived by his wife and six children.

WHAT IT MEANT

What the Democracy Proved

The Democracia Corinthiana lasted less than three years. It did not change Brazil’s political system. The concentração returned to Corinthians. The radical experiment was dismantled and largely forgotten.

And yet something remained.

What Sócrates and Adílson Alves proved — practically, financially, in competitive results — was that a football club did not have to be run like a dictatorship in order to succeed. That the people who work inside an institution can govern it collectively without it falling apart. That democracy, even in the unlikely setting of a Brazilian football club under a military government, produces better outcomes than autocracy.

The Corinthians Democracy was later recognised in Brazil as one of the most important political actions of the struggle against the dictatorship. Not the most dramatic. Not the most dangerous. But among the most effective — because it demonstrated, in public, in front of millions of television viewers, every time Corinthians walked onto a pitch, that the thing the military said was impossible was in fact happening.

In a country where the generals argued that Brazilians were not capable of governing themselves, Corinthians governed themselves.

They won the championship.

Win or lose, but always with democracy. In the end, they managed both.

FURTHER READING

Corinthians Democracy · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthians_Democracy

Sócrates obituary (December 2011) · Al Jazeera · aljazeera.com

Win or lose, but always with democracy · Common Goal · common-goal.org

Dante de Oliveira Amendment · Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_de_Oliveira_Constitutional_Amendment_Bill

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