The Maracanã after its first twenty years: a stadium named after a journalist, nearly renamed after a king, host to a German triumph, an Olympic penalty and a final watched by 5,000, and now run by two of the clubs that call it home.
The first part of this pair, Maracanã: echoes of triumphs and tears, ends with a crowd of 80,000 standing in the rain in 1969, cheering a penalty that may or may not have been Pelé’s thousandth goal. This one picks the story up from there, more or less. It is about what happens to a famous stadium once the founding legends are in place, which is that people keep arguing about it: what it should be called, who should run it, who is allowed to play there, and what it is for.
The old version of this post was very fond of phrases like “a colossus of concrete and emotion” and “a living entity, pulsating with the fervor of those who have passed through its gates”. I’ve cut those, partly because the voice guide forbids them and partly because I tried to picture a pulsating stadium and it put me off my lunch. What’s left is a series of nights and arguments, all of which you can look up.
A name that wouldn’t shift
Officially, nobody plays at the Maracanã. They play at the Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho. According to Agência Brasil, the journalist whose newspaper campaign got the stadium built died in 1966, and the municipal stadium was given his name in his honour. The same report then adds, with some pleasure, that the official name “did not change the name the Brazilian people and football fans all over the world call the stadium: Maracanã”.
That’s the first lesson of this half of the story. You can rename a stadium on paper, but the people who go there will carry on calling it whatever they called it before. Every English fan who has ever been told to say the name of a sponsor before a ground’s real name will understand. The Brazilians got there first, and with a much nicer name to fall back on.
In 2021 someone tried again, and with a far bigger name than Mário Filho’s. In March that year, as Agência Brasil reported, Rio de Janeiro’s state assembly passed a bill, under an urgent procedure on 9 March, to rename the Maracanã complex after Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Rei Pelé. It went down badly. The state prosecutors’ office advised the governor to veto it, citing a 2012 municipal decree that made the Maracanã part of Rio’s cultural identity. On 6 April the assembly itself backed down, and its president, André Ceciliano, the bill’s author, met party leaders, who agreed to recommend a veto. On 8 April the acting governor, Cláudio Castro, vetoed it. The official name stays Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho.
There’s something almost perfect in the outcome. Pelé, the greatest player Brazil ever produced, lost a naming contest to a sportswriter. I suspect most journalists would be insufferable about this for at least a decade. I’m trying not to be.
And yet it makes sense. Mário Filho isn’t just a name on a sign. Agência Brasil’s 2021 report recalls that he “coordinated the campaign” for the stadium in the late 1940s, fought Carlos Lacerda in print over its location, and convinced Rio that it should be the biggest in the world, for more than 150,000 people. Born in Recife on 3 June 1908, he died in Rio, aged 56, after a heart attack. The Maracanã is, in a fairly literal sense, his. The people of Rio may not use his name, but it seems they didn’t want anyone else’s on it either.
The rebuild
A stadium built for nearly 200,000 people doesn’t stay that size. The same 2013 Agência Brasil piece, written as the stadium was being rebuilt for the 2013 Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup, notes that the 1950 crowd of 199,854 made the Maracanã for many years the biggest stadium in the world, and that after successive refits and that modernisation its capacity was limited to 76,000. It also observed, with a historian’s dry eye, that the arguments over the refit “revive, in a certain way, the discussions that marked its construction”.
That’s a nice line, and an accurate one. The Maracanã began as a row about a racecourse and has been a row about money, location or ownership roughly once a generation ever since. The only thing that has changed is the size of the crowd that can watch the row play out. A stadium that once held 200,000 now holds well under half that, which feels like a loss until you remember what standing in a crowd of 200,000 must have felt like, especially at half-time, especially in July.
Götze, 2014
The rebuilt stadium got the match it had been built for on 13 July 2014: the World Cup final, Germany against Argentina. Brazil weren’t in it, which in a sense was a mercy. Days earlier, as the BBC put it later, the hosts had suffered “their heaviest ever World Cup defeat”, 7-1 to Germany in the semi-final in Belo Horizonte, a long way from Rio.
Daniel Taylor’s Guardian report from the Maracanã is a good read even now. The goal “finally arrived, 112 minutes into a long, wearing night”. André Schürrle crossed, Mario Götze took the ball down on his chest with his first touch and, with his second, arrowed a left-foot volley into the net. Germany’s whole entourage ran from the dugout to the far side of the pitch. It was their fourth World Cup, and Taylor wrote that it would make them remember Rio “with the same fondness as Bern in 1954, Munich in 1974 and Rome in 1990”.
The details are wonderful. Bastian Schweinsteiger’s face was split open by Sergio Agüero’s arm in extra time; he was stitched up beside the pitch “his legs flicking with pain as the needle went in” and was soon back demanding the ball. Lionel Messi, two minutes into the second half, had only Manuel Neuer to beat and put his shot a yard wide. Argentina’s supporters, who had crossed the border in huge numbers, spent the tournament singing songs about Maradona being better than Pelé. That they did it at the Maracanã, on the pitch where Pelé was carried off after his thousandth goal, shows a certain nerve. Germany then won it in front of them.
Germany were hardly at full strength, either. Sami Khedira was lost to a calf injury in the warm-up, Taylor reported, and his replacement, Christoph Kramer, had to go off after a clattering from Ezequiel Garay in the first half. Gonzalo Higuaín missed a clear chance in the 20th minute, after Toni Kroos, “of all people”, headed the ball straight to him, and later had a goal disallowed. Before the match Franz Beckenbauer had said it “can be only Germany”, which Taylor thought a mistake: Argentina, “and the little fella in the No10 shirt, were far too talented to be underestimated in that way”. In the end Beckenbauer was right, but only just, and only 112 minutes in.
What strikes me now is that the man who set up the winner and the man who scored it were both substitutes. Schürrle had come on for Kramer; Götze, Taylor wrote, had arrived in a way that probably marked the end of Miroslav Klose’s international career. The Maracanã’s two World Cup deciders were therefore settled by a winger nobody in Rio had worried about and by a substitute whose arrival, by Taylor’s reading, had pushed one of Germany’s great strikers towards the exit. It’s not a stadium that rewards the obvious.
I’ve always thought there’s a strange symmetry here. The Maracanã’s first World Cup decider in 1950 was famous because the hosts lost it. Its second, 64 years later, was one the hosts didn’t even reach. Brazil has played the starring role in its stadium’s World Cup history both times, once by losing and once by being absent.
Neymar, 2016
Two years later, the stadium got its revenge, or the nearest thing to it. In August 2016, in the men’s Olympic football final, Brazil played Germany at the Maracanã in front of 78,000. According to the BBC’s report, Neymar scored a 25-yard free-kick in the first half, Germany hit the woodwork three times, Max Meyer equalised after the break and it finished 1-1 after extra time. In the shootout Weverton saved from Nils Petersen and Neymar scored the winning penalty. Brazil had lost Olympic finals in 1984, 1988 and 2012. This time they won gold for the first time.
Rogério Micale, the Brazil coach, had done his best before the game to play down talk of revenge for the 7-1. “That was the World Cup, this is the Olympic team,” he said. “Neymar never played in that match so there is nothing that could generate any type of feeling that we have to take revenge.” Nobody in the stadium appears to have listened to him. The BBC describes a capacity crowd and “a fantastic atmosphere”. Weverton said afterwards: “The gold is ours, but it belongs to God. God loves Neymar like he loves all this team.” Neymar was briefer: “This is one of the best things that has happened in my life. That’s it.”
It’s worth noticing that the Maracanã’s great moments of joy for Brazil keep arriving from the penalty spot: Pelé in 1969, Neymar in 2016. It is the most romantic stadium in football, and its home crowd’s happiest memories are of two men placing the ball and walking back.
Five thousand guests
Then came the strangest final the stadium has ever staged. On 30 January 2021, during the pandemic, Palmeiras and Santos, two São Paulo clubs, met at the Maracanã in the final of the Copa Libertadores. The final had been due in November but, as the Guardian’s Reuters report explained, the competition had been halted for six months by coronavirus. It was a roasting afternoon, with the temperature in Rio above 100F. Chances were rare. Eight minutes into stoppage time, moments after the Santos coach Cuca was sent off following a fracas on the touchline, the substitute Breno Lopes looped a header in at the back post. Palmeiras won 1-0.
The report says the game was shown in 191 countries and watched in the stadium by “5,000 specially invited guests”. Set that number beside the one from 1950. A ground that once held 199,854 for one match staged the biggest club final on the continent in front of five thousand people, most of whom had to be invited. The fans who mattered most, Palmeiras supporters, were watching in São Paulo, celebrating, the report notes, “ignoring socially distancing rules”. It’s the only time I can think of when the Maracanã was nearly silent for reasons that had nothing to do with Uruguay.
Fluminense’s night
The Maracanã’s own clubs have had their nights there too. On 4 November 2023 Fluminense, one of the clubs that play there, met Boca Juniors in the Libertadores final at the stadium. According to the Guardian, Germán Cano scored in the 36th minute, Luis Advíncula equalised with a shot from outside the box in the second half, and in extra time the substitute John Kennedy scored in the 99th minute. He celebrated with the fans and was promptly shown a second yellow card. Boca’s Frank Fabra was also sent off, for slapping the Fluminense captain, Nino, during a brawl. Fluminense won 2-1, their first Libertadores, having lost the final in 2008.
Cano said afterwards: “I recovered the ball for my son Lorenzo. I can tell him now that I am champion of the Libertadores.” The Guardian adds that his 13 goals in that season’s competition were as many as all of Boca’s players had scored between them. Fluminense’s coach, Fernando Diniz, was at the time also Brazil’s interim manager, so for one night the man in charge of the national team was celebrating in the national stadium with a club side. The report also noted that it might be the last appearance for the midfielder André, who was being linked with Liverpool and Arsenal, which is the other great tradition of the modern Maracanã: whoever shines there in November may well be wanted in Europe by the following summer, whether he goes or not. Ghiggia, who left Peñarol for Roma two years after 1950, would have recognised the pattern.
John Kennedy is the detail I keep coming back to. He scored the most important goal in his club’s history, ran to the crowd and got sent off for it. Barbosa spent 44 years being blamed for a goal he let in at the Maracanã. Kennedy got an early bath for one he scored, and I imagine he’d do it again.
Who runs it now
And so to the latest argument, which is about who controls the place. Since 27 September 2024 the stadium and the Maracanãzinho arena next door have been run by a consortium of Flamengo and Fluminense under a 20-year concession from the state government, which Diário do Rio notes will run until September 2044. The clubs don’t own it. The complex remains state property; their company, Fla-Flu Serviços S.A., has the right to manage, operate, maintain and exploit it commercially for the length of the contract.
The problem is Vasco da Gama. Diário do Rio explains that Vasco want to play some matches at the Maracanã but have to apply to the concessionaire and get permission. Flamengo and Fluminense agreed to let them use it for up to four matches a year in 2025 and 2026, subject to dates and conditions. In August 2026 the consortium turned down Vasco’s request to host a Copa do Brasil quarter-final there against Vitória, saying the request had come too late and the pitch had maintenance planned. In September Vasco were waiting for an answer to a request to play their Copa Sudamericana semi-final against Boca Juniors there, because São Januário, their own ground, does not meet Conmebol’s 30,000-seat minimum for the semi-finals.
If you want to know why the Maracanã still matters, this is it. Seventy-six years after Mário Filho argued it into existence, Rio’s clubs are still arguing over the keys. It’s a public building in the hands of two private clubs, and a third club has to ask permission to use it. Vasco, remember, were Barbosa’s club. They have been unlucky at this stadium before.
The heartbeat, measured
The old version of this post called the Maracanã “the heartbeat of Brazilian football”, and I’ve kept the title because it isn’t wrong. But a heartbeat isn’t a steady thing. It speeds up and slows down, and occasionally it does something alarming that sends you to the doctor. The Maracanã’s story since the 1960s has been like that: a renaming that didn’t take, a rebuild that halved it, a German triumph, a Brazilian penalty, a final played to empty seats, a Fluminense night and a row about the rota.
Through all of it, the one constant is the name. The state calls it after a journalist, the assembly once tried to call it after a king, and everybody else still calls it after a river named for a noisy bird. For more grounds whose people have never quite agreed on what to call them or who owns them, see our piece on the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille, and for one of the men who made the Maracanã’s early legend, our profile of Zizinho.
