Brazilian soccer: a guide

SAO PAULO — There are easy and hard ways to blend in as an American in Brazil. On the hard side: learning to dance samba, becoming fluent in Portuguese, wearing embarrassingly skimpy bathing suits. On the easy side: flashing the thumbs up sign with abandon, increasing your red meat consumption, and adopting a soccer team to follow for the season.

Well, the last one comes with a caveat. It’s easy enough to choose a team — for less stress, pick the one most of your Brazilian friends follow — and if you’ve been exposed to youth soccer leagues, you’ll know when to cheer, at least better than Brazilians do when faced with the flea-flicker, fake punt and tackle-eligible twists of American football.

But if you really want to follow Corinthians or Flamengo or Cruzeiro or Santos though the year, your problems are not on the field: They’re in following the scheduling and standings. Brazil’s all-year-long mess of overlapping seasons and tournaments and championships is a complete departure from the straightforward American team sports system of a regular season followed by playoffs followed by a championship followed by the offseason.

In Brazilian soccer, baffling things can happen. Your team can be eliminated from the state championship one week, but be alive in the Latin American championship the next. Or drop from the first state division to the second the same year it rises from the second national division to the first. And could it possibly be true that whether the 14th place national team qualifies for the South American Cup next year may depend on whether a different Brazilian team won the Libertadores Cup months before?

Oh, yes, it could. Last week I was lamenting my confusion to my friend Zack, one of the few Americans I see in these parts and quite a befuddled Brazilian soccer fan himself. He suggested a solution: His Brazilian father-in-law Waltinho — an expert in explaining complex Brazilian logistics of all kinds — was coming in from Rio to visit, and he would make everything clear.

That turned out to be only sort of true. On Saturday, after we all watched Brazil trounce Uruguay 4-0 in a World Cup eliminatory match (which has nothing to do with the club competition), he laid out the system as he understood it. I took notes, Zack drew a diagram. Waltinho had about 90 percent of it down — the rational parts — but when things got loopy, he got on the cell phone and patched in Rapha, a family friend and specialist in irrational soccer fanaticism, to help with the loony details. (Total number of calls: five.)

So here’s how it works. I think.

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