A Venezuelan Football Odyssey

Jordan Florit is the author of a new book on Venezuelan football – Red Wine and Arepas: How Football is Becoming Venezuela’s Religion. As part of a special double-header with Jordan, which includes this podcast on football in Venezuela, he describes his introduction to Venezuelan football in this guest post…

When I stepped out of Maiquetía Airport into the uninterrupted Venezuelan night – stars perfectly visible and street lights absent –  the only characteristic the experience shared with the country’s Latin American and Caribbean neighbours was the stifling wall of heat that greets you in the most offensive way. 

This wasn’t intended to be a holiday and nor would it be. Before I made the decision to travel to Venezuela, I did not know a single person who had visited the country, and since 2013, the year Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died, the number of international tourists had tumbled from a 21^st century high of just over one million to 429,000 in 2017.^[1]Although stats in the past three years are impossible to find, I am sure the tumbling has continued.

“It would be good if you wrote about your arrival at the airport,” one Venezuelan, who had left after almost year-long protests in 2017 told me. “Have someone you trust meet you in the arrivals lounge,” said another, “and don’t accept help with your luggage or a taxi.” Then a Venezuelan still living in the country advised me to separate my shoes across the bags I was arriving with, otherwise they might go missing. The amount of people shrink-wrapping their suitcases at Madrid Airport was testament to the concerns, as were the number of non-Venezuelans on the plane: one – me.

So why on earth was I in the land of Angel Falls and the Caribbean Andes, the third highest murder rate in the world with a capital (Caracas) that ranks in the same position for cities, and where economic and political crises are the defining features? Despite baseball being Venezuela’s sporting tradition, I was there to take in and document its fledgling football culture, the role the Beautiful Game plays in its society, and the insight it may – or may not – provide into the collective Venezuelan psyche.

Why Venezuela?

Since 2012, I had been taking a passionate interest in Venezuela, and during the 2017 U-20 World Cup, their national football team, known as La Vinotinto (The Red Wine), finished runners-up to England, causing my curiosity to spill over into South America’s least impressive international side. Their senior team is the only CONMEBOL country yet to qualify for a World Cup, and they join Ecuador as the only ones not to have won the Copa América. The record of their club sides at the Copa Libertadores, the continent’s premier competition, paints an equally insignificant picture: only Bolivia joins them in never having a representative reach the semi-final.

Despite this, I was confident football could prove an effective lens to examine and explore the country through. As the stability and safety of Venezuela had decreased, the popularity and prominence of its football had increased. The two seemed inextricably linked. My aim was to use the outwardly inexplicable rise of the latter to provide an insight into the sad decline of the former. Additionally, by focusing on football and the stories of those who make up its ecosystem, I hoped to add to the global conversation on Venezuela; one that was frustratingly unidimensional – crisis.

I did not want to change the topic, I wanted to expand on it. Venezuela had been distilled into a carousel of repeating headlines of inflation, oil, and politics. Behind it, the complexity and character of the country had been lost, as too had the people’s passions and personality.

I made it to my first night’s accommodation – courtesy of capital club side Atlético Venezuela – unscathed, but I had lost the majority of my luggage to the customs officials. The next twelve hours were defined by me making incredibly uncomfortable eye contact with a man who had a pistol tucked into his trousers and the water cutting out on me sixty seconds into a shower and head to toe in lathered soap. The adventure was already turning me into an upstream swimming salmon, perpetually struggling but determined to succeed.

Twelve hours later, I was in the back of a boxy car with a leader of the Caracas FC barra (a fan group with elements of the casuals of England and the ultras of Europe, while being unlike either), in a convoy of other leaders to a suburb of the capital my guide and translator was not comfortable accompanying me to. Although my Spanish listening skills are adequate, I was still grateful that one of the barra members spoke near-perfect English and was able to act as my temporary interpreter.

Time with the barra

The purpose of our drive out of town was to visit a community football school that runs sessions seven days a week and late into the night on a multipurpose court hidden among a concrete jungle of high-rise apartment blocks in Artigas. The journey itself, however, allowed me to get the lowdown on the most peculiar of stand offs: the Venezuelan league’s most successful side with 11 titles, Caracas FC, and their unsatisfied barra, Los Demonios Rojos (The Red Devils).

“We have never been in such a drought without a title,” Víctor, a barra leader, explained to me. “We suffered years of false promises, always missing out in terrible ways, and that was the trigger. To see the team lose in the [2019] Sudamericana without showing any effort or intention to advance… well, all these things just piled up.”

When I had told people of my plans to spend time with Los Demonios Rojos, I was met with disgust, dismay, and at best a precautionary word of advice. It was less inspired by their shared characteristics with ultras or casuals, but more the perception that they had aspects of hooliganism. Three months earlier, Caracas FC were due to play their first game of the Clausura – the second half of the season – apart from it never happened. It was suspended.

Los Demonios Rojos had nonviolent protests planned for the game; “peaceful,” was the word they used. Instead, according to Víctor, they faced unjust repression so that the club could avoid the barra’s criticisms and their protests from being seen or heard. “It is inconceivable that some banners showing a collective stance are the trigger for not starting a football game,” Víctor’s girlfriend Giorgina said.

The banners carried messages calling for the president to resign, that the fans deserved more, and that new signings were needed. ‘We come for the colours,’ one read, ‘failure since 2010,’ said another, but neither got their moment in the sun that day. The police were called in to quash the protests before they had even begun, violent clashes occurred, and the game was postponed and later cancelled. For those suggesting my choice to spend time with them was ill-thought-through, it was vindication; for me, it was reinforcement.

A week after my evening with the barra, I was looking forward to seeing their banners and witnessing their support at Caracas FC’s final home game of the season. After the opening day’s fracas, fixtures had had to be played behind closed doors, certain fans, Víctor included, were banned from the training ground, and the players and manager were affected. For the past few weeks, however, they had been allowed back into the ground. Yet they were a no show. The protests had become competition-long and on that day the barra were showing their dissatisfaction with a boycott.

Although it was a shame for me, it soon became an incredibly powerful moment. Whilst I could not see them, I could hear them. With a strange quietness about the stadium, my ears slowly tuned into a familiar sound. It was the rhythm of La Vida Es Un Carnaval (Life is a Carnival) by Cuban singer Celia Cruz. It was straight out of the Los Demonios Rojos songbook and the anthem their band had played for me on the multisport court in Artigas. They were there. They wanted you to know. They had just chosen not to enter. Instead, they sang, chanted, and beat their drums from outside the stadium. 

“They have their reasons; as a fan, I would want to see my team win,” Caracas FC manager Noel Sanvicente told me as we sat in his office discussing the barra the day after their absence. “We are competitive, and the players need to be applauded and supported in all of our matches, yet we have had a harder time winning at home. I didn’t feel support, only pressure, and insults.” Six weeks later, Caracas won their twelfth league title.

For all the passion and pride I witnessed and was told about by both sides of this fallout, for Caracas’ record twelve league titles, and for the three other topflight clubs that occupy the capital, the city is perversely not considered a football hotbed – not by the cities and states that are and not by many Caraqueños themselves. Stalin Rivas may not be from the capital, but he is one of the greatest Venezuelan players of all time and won four league titles with Caracas, as well as the 1995 Player of the Year Award whilst at the club. “I could walk down the high street today and I would not be recognised,” he told me. 

As I would discover as I snaked west through the country towards the border state of Táchira, the embers fuelling the increasing religiosity in Venezuela’s game are the ones that have been burning the longest, the ones in the Andean cities of Mérida and San Cristóbal, in the homes of Estudiantes de Mérida and Deportivo Táchira fans, fierce rivals with each other and with “the elitists in the capital” as one Táchira fan called the Caracas fans.

While Stalin Rivas believes his face would be anonymous among the other two million in Caracas, it is not indicative of football’s growing popularity. Shortly before I headed out to Venezuela, the same journalist who told me not to pack my trainers together told me how she had interviewed two boys under the age of ten about their love of football. “Who’s your favourite player?” she asked. “Lionel Messi,” they replied. “And who is your favourite Venezuelan player?” Their faces went blank and they lost their voices to the shy embarrassment kids are prone to. They could not think of one. Here were two kids head to toe in replica kits of big European clubs but couldn’t name a single countryman they should be looking up to. After some gentle prodding, one blurted out “Yeferson Soteldo”, a magnificent dribbler in the same mould as Ronaldinho.

Football’s sudden rise to importance in Venezuelan society over the past twenty years means its growth has been disjointed, with some parts pulling away quicker – and some aspects developing faster – than others. Through the tears in the fabric of the game, a glimpse into the very essence of Venezuela and Venezuelanness can be seen. Those first few days were to be just the start of a dizzyingly complex and emotionally raw ride into the heart of the country and its football.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our fascinating podcast with Jordan for more on his Venezuelan football odyssey – subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. We’re on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Player.FM and Anchor. Look for us in Google Podcasts too. We’d really appreciate a rating or view if you like what we’re doing as it helps others discover our podcast.

^[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/816645/venezuela-number-of-tourist-arrivals/