Opinion – Renata Mendonça: When a knife appears on the field, the game cannot continue

The scenes of the last minutes of the Copinha semifinal between São Paulo and Palmeiras were desperate. A mixture of astonishment and disbelief: was it really happening? Were they fans invading the field to attack base players? Was it a knife on the lawn? Did we really see the referee restart the game after all this?

Brazilian football reinvents surreal scenes like this every year. Fan invades armed training center and everything is fine. Twisted rocks players’ buses before a match and play proceeds normally. Fans invade the field, intimidate players, a knife appears in the meantime and… the game goes on!

Apparently, the knife would have been thrown onto the lawn. Anyway, how did she get there? There was a major security breach that allowed someone to go through the search with her. It reminded me of the episode I experienced almost four years ago, when I was stopped at the entrance to the stadium because I had a notebook in my backpack. “Flammable object, it’s in the fan’s statute”, alleged the police officer in the magazine.

There was no argument — I mean, there was even, on my part, trying to argue that I couldn’t throw away my workbook and that my clothes were also flammable, and yet no one was demanding that I enter the stadium without them. It was a rule that, in my head, made no sense. What harm can a notebook do? And I’m not alone in this. I have heard reports from people who have already been barred with books, newspapers and even oranges. But the citizen with the knife passed.

Those who frequent the stands in the state of São Paulo will agree with me: the experience often leaves something to be desired due to the lack of organization, especially in large games, with a full stadium. Due to the fact that alcoholic beverages are prohibited in the games, people stay outside drinking and leave to enter more at the last minute of the match. This accumulates a lot of people at the same time in lines that are very poorly organized, with people pushing and fighting for a minimum space.

For a woman, then, the experience can be even more traumatic. There is a separation there at the time of the search for women to pass as female police officers. But this line is not organized in advance, so you enter the crowd and, when you are closer to the turnstile, you start asking permission to try to get to the women’s magazine, always with (harassing) hands from strangers trying to touch you along the way.

Inside the stadium, flags with poles, beer and opposing fans in classics have already been banned (which generated one of the most disgusting phenomena in football and which exists and persists exclusively in São Paulo: the single crowd). They even banned fans from going to a football game wearing a football shirt, check it out! –happened in the final of the Ladies Cup between São Paulo and Santos, at Allianz Parque, in December last year.

They just didn’t realize that violence doesn’t need any of these things to happen. None of these measures served to put an end to crowd fights, threats from fans to players or even field invasions. The Military Police, the Public Ministry of São Paulo and the clubs themselves are colluding, because instead of seeking to act in the cause of the problem (arrest and punish those who promote the fights), they prefer to take the sofa out of the living room.

It is essential to take more forceful attitudes so that scenes like those seen in the Copinha semifinals do not happen again and so that a greater tragedy is avoided.