By Samindra Kunti, Rio de Janeiro
August 3 – The Rio games kick off today with the women’s football tournament but Brazilian football focus and Olympic hopes will be on the men’s tournament that starts tomorrow and whether mercurial superstar Neymar can deliver them a much-coveted gold.
Iraq and Denmark will kick off the Rio2016’s men’s football tournament. Brazil will also be in action against South Africa in the Mane Garrincha stadium in Brasilia, but are scarcely tournament favorites. The tournament culminates with the final on August 20 in Rio and the hosts would dearly love to be playing.
In one of the great anomalies of world football, Brazil has never won Olympic gold. They came closest at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games when the USSR proved too strong in the gold medal match.
At the last World Cup, Brazil’s unforgiving 7-1 semi-final defeat against Germany on home soil should have sprung a Copernican Revolution, an admission of Brazilian football’s fallibilities – an outdated ideology based on a non-existent passing game, but Carlos Dunga’s post-World Cup appointment was proof of a football culture in denial. New coach Tite will not be in charge of the Olympic team, leaving Rogerio Micale at the helm, whose expertise at youth level may be an advantage.
Yet again, all eyes will be on Neymar, almost a hunchback carrying the whole of Brazil on his shoulders. Marquinhos and Felipe Anderson are also included – out of 18 squad members, 12 ply their trade in Brazil. The hosts face South Africa, Iraq and Denmark in Group A. They won’t meet Germany, Mexico, Portugal, other title candidates, or Argentina, until the semi-finals stage.
South American rival Argentina is in disarray, still reeling from its Copa America final defeat earlier this summer.
That game set off a chain of events that also highlighted the institutional crisis at the Argentine FA (AFA). Lionel Messi, and others may follow, announced his retirement from international football. The Olympic tournament has then become important to test out replacements, but Argentine clubs have been reluctant to release players.
Germany led by Horst Hrubesch, who has a good track record at youth level, will be boosted by the presence of the Bender twins. The defending champions Mexico arguably don’t have as strong as a squad as at the 2012 London Olympic Games, but remain among the contenders.
In Rio, the 16-team Olympic football tournament will come to the fore, but the inclusion of the global game in the Olympic Games has always been contentious, highlighted by the whirlwind journey from amateurism to professionalism and the ‘law of 23.’ Football is welcome at ‘the greatest show on earth,’ because of economic imperatives.
At the last Olympic Games in London in 2012, 1.5 million tickets were sold for the football event out of 1.7 million available tickets and an overall total of 6.6 million tickets. Yet, Olympic football is often bedraggled by the Under-23 rule and considered an anomaly in an overcrowded football calendar. It serves as an Olympic parenthesis – the International Olympic Committee needs its revenue – but, at the same time, it is detached from the Olympic universe, an unnatural symbiosis between the global game and the world’s largest sports event, at least by participation.
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