Uruguay v Brazil (1950 FIFA World Cup)

• 1. Introduction

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  Uruguay v Brazil at the 1950 FIFA World Cup is remembered by a single Portuguese word: Maracanazo. Roughly translated as "The Maracanã Smash," the word arrived in the language as a synonym for the impossible. On the 16th of July 1950, Uruguay walked into the world's largest football stadium and defeated the host nation 2-1 in the match that determined the world championship. What makes this so remarkable is not just the scoreline. It is everything that surrounded it. The gold medals had already been engraved with the Brazilian players' names. A victory song, "Brasil Os Vencedores" - "Brazil the Victors" - was composed and rehearsed, ready to play the moment the whistle blew. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro had already delivered a speech to the squad declaring them champions. And the crowd of 173,850 paid spectators - possibly closer to 220,000 when including those who entered without tickets - was almost certainly the largest audience ever to watch a football match. Every one of them expected Brazil to win. How did it all unravel? And what did it mean for a nation when it did?

• 2. A Tournament Unlike Any Other

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  The 1950 FIFA World Cup was the only edition of the tournament ever decided by a round-robin final group rather than a knockout final. Of the 16 nations scheduled to compete, only 13 arrived. The four sides that reached the final group were Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, and Sweden. Brazil came in as joint-top scorers from the preliminary stage, having beaten Mexico and Yugoslavia while drawing with Switzerland. Uruguay's path to the final group was strikingly different. They played just one match in their preliminary group, an 8-0 demolition of Bolivia. By the time the final group stage began, the two sides had taken very different routes to the same destination. Brazil proceeded to overwhelm their first two opponents in the final group, beating Sweden 7-1 and Spain 6-1. Uruguay, by contrast, struggled. They drew 2-2 with Spain after coming back from 2-1 down, and then edged Sweden 3-2, the winning goal arriving with just five minutes to spare. Brazil had scored 21 goals across five matches heading into the decider. Uruguay had scraped through. The arithmetic going into the final match was straightforward: a win or a draw would give Brazil the title. Uruguay had to win outright. Neither Spain nor Sweden could finish first regardless of results. This meant the last match of the final group was, in effect, a World Cup final in everything but name - a fact FIFA itself would later acknowledge.

• 3. The Celebrations Before the Match

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  Newspapers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro did not wait for the result. The Gazeta Esportiva and O Mundo both printed editions the day before the match declaring Brazil the new world champions. The confidence was rooted in more than wishful thinking. In the Copa América held in Brazil the year before, the hosts had scored 46 goals in eight matches. They beat Ecuador 9-1, Bolivia 10-1, and defeated runners-up Paraguay by 7-0. They had also beaten Uruguay 5-1 in that same competition. Twenty-two gold medals were struck, each engraved with a player's name. On the morning of the 16th of July 1950, improvised carnival celebrations filled the streets of Rio de Janeiro, with thousands of signs and chants proclaiming the title. Only one man in the Brazilian camp expressed concern. Paulo Machado de Carvalho, then a leader at São Paulo FC - and later the man who would oversee Brazil's World Cup victories in 1958 and 1962 - visited the team's training session at the Estádio São Januário the evening before the match. He found politicians delivering speeches to the players, and journalists crowding around the squad as though the trophy had already been won. When he warned coach Flávio Costa about the danger of disrupting the players' concentration, he was brushed aside. Carvalho turned to his son Tuta and said, "we are going to lose."

• 4. Varela Tears Up the Script

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  Uruguay's captain, Obdulio Varela, read the premature declarations with fury. The Brazilian newspaper O Mundo printed an early edition on match day featuring a photograph of the Brazilian squad under the caption "These are the world champions." Varela bought as many copies as he could find, laid them across his bathroom floor, and encouraged his teammates to spit and urinate on them. Inside the dressing room before kick-off, coach Juan López told his players their best hope was a defensive approach against Brazil's formidable attack. After López left the room, Varela stood up and disagreed. He told his squad: "Juancito is a good man, but today, he is wrong. If we play defensively against Brazil, our fate will be no different from Spain or Sweden." He then delivered a longer speech urging his teammates to go against all odds and refuse to be intimidated by either the crowd or the opposing team. The words that have endured came at the end: "Muchachos, los de afuera son de palo. Que comience la función." Boys, outsiders are just stickdolls. Let the show begin. It was a defiant, galvanising declaration, and those who were in the room would later confirm it changed the course of what followed.

• 5. Ninety Minutes

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  Brazil attacked throughout the first half, pressing against Uruguay's defensive line with exactly the kind of force that had shredded Spain and Sweden. Unlike those two sides, Uruguay held. The half ended 0-0. Two minutes after the interval, São Paulo forward Friaça shot low past Uruguayan goalkeeper Roque Máspoli and Brazil had what looked like the decisive lead. The stadium erupted. Varela responded not by rallying his team but by taking the ball to the referee and disputing whether Friaça had been offside. He stretched the argument as long as he could, at one point demanding the referee hear him through an interpreter. By the time the exchange ended, the noise inside the Maracanã had begun to settle. Varela carried the ball to the centre circle, looked at his players, and said: "Now, it's time to win." Juan Alberto Schiaffino equalised in the 66th minute. Then, with 11 minutes left, Alcides Ghiggia ran down the right side of the field. Goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa moved to intercept what he anticipated would be a cross. Ghiggia instead drove a low shot directly at the near post. The ball rolled under Barbosa and into the net. The Maracanã went silent. English referee George Reader blew the final whistle. Uruguay had won 2-1.

• 6. What Silence Sounds Like

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  After the final whistle, the stadium fell into what witnesses described as a disturbing and traumatic absolute silence. Radio journalist Ary Barroso, one of Brazil's most famous broadcasters, briefly retired from the sport in the immediate aftermath of the result. In the streets and hotels, grief turned violent in places: a fight broke out between Brazilian fans and Uruguayans in a hotel lobby. Eight people died in Uruguay as a result of celebrations there. The Brazilian players themselves, and most of the fans, behaved with dignity in defeat. Uruguay's newspaper El Dia praised Brazil as "the other winner" and wrote that the team's conduct had earned deeper admiration than before the match. The repercussions extended beyond the scoreline. Brazil's white shirts with blue collars, worn on the day of the defeat, were condemned by the country's sports federation as unpatriotic. A competition was organised in 1953 by the newspaper Correio da Manhã to design a new kit, with the requirement that it incorporate the colours of the national flag. The winner was newspaper illustrator Aldyr Garcia Schlee, who proposed a yellow shirt with green trim, blue shorts with white trim, and white socks. Schlee had initially hesitated to use all four colours, worried that yellow and white was too close to the colours of the Holy See. His design was first worn in March 1954 against Chile. When Brazil won the World Cup in 1958, they wore an improvised blue kit because the new colours clashed with Sweden's.

• 7. The Ghost That Would Not Leave

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  The defeat gave rise to the phrase "Phantom of '50," a term for the anxiety that grips Brazil whenever they face Uruguay at the Maracanã. In 1993, Brazil struggled to qualify for the 1994 FIFA World Cup after draws with Ecuador and Uruguay and a loss to Bolivia. The final qualifying match was again Brazil versus Uruguay, and the fear was palpable. Brazil won 2-0, both goals scored by Romário, who had been largely ignored earlier in the campaign and was urgently recalled to rescue Brazil's qualification. The shadow reappeared during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which Brazil hosted. Uruguay invoked the memory of 1950 as motivation. The irony was that Uruguay lost 2-0 to Colombia at the very same Maracanã stadium, eliminated in the round of 16. Brazil's own tournament ended in a 1-7 defeat to Germany in a semi-final at the Mineirão stadium in Belo Horizonte, a result so catastrophic it acquired its own name: the Mineirazo. Tereza Borba, the adoptive daughter of goalkeeper Moacir Barbosa - who had been scapegoated for the 1950 defeat for decades - said the 2014 semi-final loss was enough to finally redeem her father's reputation. Ghiggia, the man who scored the winning goal in 1950, disagreed that the two defeats were comparable. He said the 1950 match had more at stake. Ghiggia was the last surviving player from the match. He died on the 16th of July 2015, exactly 65 years after scoring the goal that silenced the Maracanã, at the age of 88.