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.

From about January through April, the 26 Brazilian states, plus the Federal District, run their own tournaments. The formats vary by state, so let’s look at two of the biggest.

In Waltinho’s state, Rio de Janeiro, the top 16 teams — the First Division — play two consecutive tournaments, not totally unlike what happened in the strike-shortened 1981 Major League Baseball season, except they do it on purpose. In the Rio Cup, the teams are divided into two groups, playing the other seven teams in their group once each. The top two teams from each group make the semi-finals, and the ultimate winner qualifies for the eventual state championship. Then they do it all over again for the Guanabara Cup. The winner of each cup meets for a two-game total-goal affair. (This year, Flamengo beat Botafogo on penalty kicks.) If the same team wins both the Rio and Guanabara Cups, there is no championship game. Which is just plain weird. But so is having a guy on your team just for punting.

In Sao Paulo state, the First Division consists of the top 20 teams, except it’s not called the First Division, it’s called Series A1. They play one another once each, and the top four teams at the end make the semi-finals. The playoffs are decided in home-and-home matches. This year, the winner was Corinthians.

But because teams from the city of Sao Paulo and nearby port city Santos are so dominant and often take the top four spots, the top four teams from the “interior” of the state that don’t make the semi-finals have their own playoffs to determine the “Interior Champion.” Those winners often have really cool indigenous team names, like the 2007 champion, Guaratingueta.

In states with several divisions, like Sao Paulo and Rio, the bottom teams of the top division switch places with the top teams of the next division for the following season.

Please note that during the state seasons, there are two other events going on involving many of the same teams: a national tournament called the Brazil Cup and a Latin American championship called the Libertadores Cup. More on those later.

In May, the Brazilian Championship, which has no relationship with the Brazil Cup, begins. There are four levels: Series A, Series B, Series C, and starting this year, Series D. This is sort of, but not quite, like the baseball majors and the minors. A,B and C have 20 teams from across Brazil, and D has 40. Until this year, C had 64. What happened to the four teams that are now in neither C or D is beyond the scope of this article. In Series A, each team plays 38 games — two matches against each of the others.

Meanwhile, in August, the South American Cup begins, involving eight or nine of the Series A teams who qualified the prior year. They somehow find the time to fly around to Bolivia and Venezuela playing these games while they also participate in the Brazilian Championship. Sounds tiring for the players, and lucrative for the teams.

Back to Series A. Whomever ends up in first place in December is the winner, no playoffs necessary. That national champion and the next three teams automatically qualify for the following year’s Libertadores Cup. The teams in fifth through 12th place qualify for the South American Cup. That’s it.

Just kidding! That’s not it. Remember that the Brazil Cup that goes on concurrent with the state season and the Libertadores Cup? It involves 64 Brazilian teams: 10 top-ranked teams, plus two each from the 26 Brazilian states and the Federal District. (Note that if any of those teams are already in the concurrent Libertadores Cup, they are replaced, since you can’t be in both.) The winner of the Brazil Cup, decided in June, claims the first of five Brazilian berths in the following year’s Libertadores Cup (and thus no team can win the Brazil Cup in two consecutive years).

Stick with me: If the Brazil Cup champion in June lands in the top four spots of the Series A national championship in December, they double-qualify for Libertadores. So their second spot goes to the fifth place team. That team, thus, can’t go to the South American Cup, so the 13th place team goes instead. And if the Brazil Cup champ lands in fifth through 12th place, the 13th place team replaces it in the South American Cup, since no team can play in both Libertadores and the South American Cup.

[Advanced lesson: Since both the Libertadores and South American Cup champions automatically qualify for the tournament the next year, it is theoretically possible that if Brazilian teams win one or both, the team placing sixth in the Brazilian Championship could also make Libertadores and the 14th and even 15th place teams could also make the South American Cup. Take two aspirin and read this again in the morning.]

Ah yes, we skipped a very important part: The bottom four teams, 17th place through 20th, in Series A through C, get knocked down to the next-lowest series the following year, replaced by the top four teams in A, B and C.

Finally, there is also a club world championship. The winner of Libertadores gets the South American spot in the FIFA Club World Cup, which this December will take place in the United Arab Emirates. The last Brazilian club to claim the world championship was Inter, from Porto Alegre, which won in 2006 in Tokyo.

And all this has nothing to do with the real World Cup, which is more important than all of the rest put together.

May I suggest a samba lesson?