Barefoot in Brazil: Where soccer legends begin

Yuri Peterson has the speed and elusiveness of a top striker and the vision and touch of a playmaking midfielder.

But what really marks the tiny 11-year-old as a soccer player are his feet. The skin on the side of his big toes have been rubbed away by playing barefoot on the concrete court of the overcrowded housing project where he lives in Sao Paulo’s South Zone, a common malady for young players here.

“It does happen,” he says with a shrug as he looks down at this feet. “I play all the time without shoes.”

So do many boys in Brazil, where soccer games are plentiful but shoes and open fields are not.

Neymar, Fred and Hulk, the top players on Brazil’s World Cup team, all learned the game playing barefoot in the street. So did Romario, Ronaldo and Rivaldo, who won four World Cups among them.

Pele, widely recognized as the greatest player of all time, remembers making a ball out of his father’s and mother’s socks. “Then we’d fill them with paper and play in the streets.”

In few places is a sport more integral to the national identity than soccer is in Brazil.

“It’s everything,” says Sergio Roberto Da Silva, a former minor league soccer player who runs a sports club in San Paulo. “ Brazilians without soccer, they don’t live.”

The World Cup, which will open its monthlong run Thursday in Sao Paulo, hasn’t sparked the same fervor. The government spent more than $11 billion during the seven-year run-up to this tournament, yet many projects remain unfinished and others weren’t started. Many Brazilians refer to it simply as “the robbery,” a misuse of money they say could have been better spent for schools, hospitals or public transportation.

On the narrow street that leads to the soulless concrete tower where Yuri lives, three men were stringing yellow, blue and green paper banners late Sunday, the only indication the country’s national team was about to play. On the same block four years ago, when the World Cup was in South Africa, Brazilian flags hung from houses and flapped from car windows and the logo of the Brazilian soccer federation was painted on walls.

“People are tired of the World Cup,” says Rafael Ambrosio, a resident of South Zone. “Maybe it will change when the games start.”

The games are underway inside the housing project, where Yuri and about a dozen friends chase a pink rubber ball around a fenced-in concrete court marked like a soccer field.

This is what passes for street soccer today in places like Sao Paulo (pop. 11.8 million), the largest city in the Southern hemisphere and one in which cars and buses clog the warren of tangled streets, driving kids to the enclosed soccer courts that dot many neighborhoods.

The court where Yuri plays is 20 yards wide and about 45 yards long with green posts at each end to mark the goals. Graffiti covering the walls around the court claims the territory for the city’s dominant gang, which carefully monitors everything that happens in its neighborhoods but rarely interferes in the soccer games.

That’s not the case 45 minutes away in Itaquera, near the Arena Corinthians stadium where the World Cup will kick off. There, Joel Vitor Oliveira Gonsclaves says, the concrete court in the slum where he lives has become an open-air drug market.

“We wish our neighborhoods could be safer,” says Oliveira.

Da Silva says his sports club has taken 800 children like Oliveira off the streets, giving them food while also feeding their appetite for soccer.

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It’s these poor neighborhoods that are the richest in soccer players.

“Brazil is unequivocally the most successful and celebrated football nation,” says David Goldblatt, author of “Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil Through Soccer.”

“That has got to be your starting point. And as with everything you need to start at the bottom, not the top.”

Los Angeles Galaxy midfielder Marcelo Sarvas, who learned the game in Sao Paulo, said he rarely saw a grass field when he was growing up. Instead he played games of five on five, shirts vs. skins, with a sandal or a rock marking the boundaries of the goal.

Getting good enough to someday play on a grass field was something Sarvas aspired to.

“When you see all the nice stuff, the nice fields, it makes you hungry,” Sarvas says. “All kids dream of becoming a professional soccer player.”

Sarvas is one of four players from Sao Paulo on the Galaxy roster, part of a larger group of players Brazil has shared with top-flight leagues all over the world.

The country’s leading export might be iron ore, but it’s best known as the top producer of exceptional soccer players.

This season there are 18 Brazilians, including national team goalkeeper Julio Cesar of Toronto FC, playing in Major League Soccer, the top U.S. league. Just two of the 23 players on Brazil’s World Cup team play club soccer at home, and six Brazilians play in the English Premier League.

In his book Goldblatt writes that nearly 1,200 Brazilians played professional soccer outside their country during 2008, the high-water mark for exports. Collectively they were worth nearly a quarter-billion dollars.

“Is it because they are Brazilian? Or do they become Brazilian by playing barefoot in the street?” Goldblatt asks.

This story was originally published June 11, 2014 at 9:33 PM.