Sport Club Rio Grande

Guy Burton investigates the history of Brazil's oldest football club

German hearts were broken by Brazil in the 2002 World Cup final. But historians of the game in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg must have felt a certain amount of pride in the result. After all, it was the Germans who were partly responsible for the organisation of the Brazilian game and helped found the longest running football club in existence in the country.

Though the German contribution is not well-known, the origin of the game in Brazil is. In the last years of the nineteenth century a young Englishman, Charles Miller, returning to his engineer father from school in Southampton, stepped ashore in Sao Paolo with some footballs. It wasn't long before the game was being played not just by the English community in Sao Paulo, but by other communities too.

But whereas Miller's game was picked up by the sports clubs in Sao Paulo, several of them did not see football as their main concern. Football became one activity among many, including socialising and cricket. Later on many of the football sections of these clubs – or indeed the clubs themselves – were dissolved.

As a result it was not the British or Sao Paulo which would provide the new game with its longest serving legacy. Instead it would fall to Germans in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul to found Brazil's longest-running football club: Sport Club Rio Grande.

The Germans were no strangers to the country. Like the British, they had been migrating to Brazil for work since the 1820s. Under the country's first independent ruler, the emperor Dom Pedro I, efforts had been made to attract settlers to the south. The attraction of European immigrants to the authorities was obvious: greater numbers in the south would not only settle the land but make the region more secure.

At first the great majority headed for Rio Grande do Sul and the neighbouring state of Santa Catarina. According to the historian, Boris Fausto, figures for Rio Grande do Sul show that German migrants made up 93 per cent of all migrants to the state between 1824 and 1870. In all it is estimated that a quarter of a million Germans migrated to Brazil in the century after independence.

As the German immigrants spread out, some found their way further south. A bus ride along the BR-116 highway from Porto Alegre is the city of Rio Grande. Situated at the mouth of the natural lagoon, Lagoa dos Patos (Lake of Ducks), the city has had a long history. Originally a cattle station, it marked the southern extent of Portuguese influence in Latin America. As the state's economy developed and Rio Grande do Sul became less dependent on its gauchos (cowboys) and cattle ranching, Rio Grande found favour as an obvious location for a port. Without its own immediate access to the sea, exports from Porto Alegre and the interior would need to travel through Rio Grande to the Atlantic, bound for America and Europe. And with its own local economy undergoing a process of industrialisation, Rio Grande also had its own products for sale.

Of the immigrant communities in Rio Grande, the British had long maintained a presence there. But in the period after independence increasing numbers of Germans and Portuguese also made their way there too. English and German was commonly spoken on the streets of the city, alongside the national language of Portuguese.

But even if the different communities spoke their own languages and maintained their own cultures and traditions, there was one thing they had in common. By the end the 1890s football had arrived in Rio Grande.

In July 1900 a group of young British, Germans and Portuguese conceived of the idea of a club entirely devoted to football. After several false starts, the group eventually met at the Germania Club on 19 July, which had catered for the Teutonic community and their families since the 1860s. It was on the occasion of a young German's twenty-fifth birthday that Brazil's longest-running football club came into being.

Originally from Hamburg, Johannes Minneman had migrated to Rio Grande to work in the commercial opportunities presented there. But he had not been living and working in Brazil for long and still lacked fluency in the Portuguese language. It is not surprising then, with the large number of Germans in the group, that the founding documents for Sport Club Rio Grande were written in German, using gothic characters.

The aims were modest enough. With 22 founders, the club had enough players to make up two teams. With little imagination they were called A and B respectively. For the first few months they played amongst themselves, before meeting external opposition for the first time in May the following year. On that occasion the combined forces of Sport Club would be ranged against a team of English sailors from the battleship Nymph, beating them 2-1. Two years later the club finally settled on red, green and yellow as its team colours – the same as the state flag – which it has kept to this day.

Minneman would marry and have children in Rio Grande before returning to Germany in 1906. Over time the German and English influences at the club would wane, as Rio Grande's influence as a major port declined. In 1922 Sport Club won the Independence Cup, a competition held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Brazil. Fourteen years later the club won the state championship – its last major success.

With the professionalisation of the sport, the period since the Second World War has been less than kind to the club. In recent years Sport Club has turned out in the state's Second Division, usually ending the season in the bottom half. In 2004 they finished last out of nine teams in their first-round group, winning one and drawing three. Their position forced them into a wooden spoon play off against the two clubs immediately above them, Uruguaiana and Rio Grandense. Honour was partly restored with a victory and a loss against both, placing them second in their group.

Given that low level of achievement, the only note of pride for the club in recent years has been its centenary, dragging them out of national obscurity and back into the public eye. In July 2000, a full page advert appeared in some of Brazil's biggest newspapers, including the Rio-based Jornal do Brasil. Its publicity was designed to highlight that it was the oldest football club in Brazil, challenging the claims of several other more famous clubs, including those of Ponte Preta, São Paulo Athletic Club, Flamengo, Vasco da Gama and the Bahian club Vitória. For good measure and to ensure it had the official seal of approval, it played its trump card by informing readers that the president would be coming to their celebrations. With that invitation confirmed and eventual agreement by the football media, Sport Club Rio Grande could at last claim the title of Vovô de futbol brasileiro – the grandfather of Brazilian football.

Guy Burton

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