Cordel Sobre O Futebol

Writing a cordel about football isn't as simple as rhyming players with winners

I've been writing cordéis for about twelve years now. Started because a friend challenged me to make one about a local team's promotion run, and once you get into the rhythm, it sticks. The format is straightforward but has real constraints that trip up beginners constantly. Here's what I've learned doing it for real, not from a textbook.

cordel sobre o futebol

The core structure is septilha, meaning each line has seven syllables. Not seven words, seven phonetic syllables, which is a different thing entirely. Portuguese elides vowels between words constantly, so you have to count carefully. "O gol foi marcado no segundo tempo" — let me count that out: o (1) gol (2) fo (3) mar (4) ca (5) do (6) no (7) segun (8) do (9) tem (10) po (11). That's eleven. Way too long. You'd rewrite it as "O gol saiu no segundo tempo" and check again: o (1) gol (2) sa (3) iu (4) no (5) segun (6) do (7) tem (8). Still eight. Try "Golaço no segundo tempo": go (1) la (2) ção (3) no (4) segun (5) do (6) tem (7). There we go. Eight? No, go-la-ção = three syllables here. go(1) la(2) ção(3) no(4) segun(5) do(6) tem(7). Seven. Got it. The rhyme scheme is almost always AABB CCDD throughout. Pair rhyme, couplets, every two lines. It sounds repetitive if you read it thinking about standard poetry, but that's the point. Cordel is meant to be spoken aloud at feiras and eventos, and the repetition locks the narrative into the listener's head. You're not writing for analysis. You're writing for recitation.

Here's a complete cordel about football I wrote last year for a cup final between two neighborhood teams in São Paulo. I used the real team colors and a fictionalized version of what happened: O sol caía na várzea,
O chão estava escorregadio,
Dois times na mesma arena
Pronto pro embate decidido.

Verde e amarelo à esquerda,
Branco e vermelho à direita,
Ninguém sabia a resposta
Daquela noite agitada.

A torcida já cantava,
Os camisas já vestiam,
Na cabeça só pensavam
Em levantar a taça.

Apito inicial soou,
A bola rolou pra frente,
O time verde dominou
Jogando com muita gente.

Meio-campo bem conectado,
Volante de muita raça,
Atacante veloz e esperto
Deu trabalho pros zagueiros.

Aos vinte, um chute de fora,
A bola ferveu no rede,
O gol do verde abriu
E a torcida que não crede.

Mas o time branco não desiste,
Segue em frente sem parar,
Na segunda etapa entra
Com força pra se equiparar.

Contra-ataque velozoso,
Passe rasteiro e certeiro,
O camisa onze empurrou
Pra empate não demorar.

Trinta minutos se passaram
Sem nenhum outro gol,
Os dois times cansados
Mas ainda assim resolutos.

Na prorrogação decidem,
O jogo vai pro pênalti,
Cinco contra cinco agora
Pra decidir o troféu.

Um por um vão cobrando,
Um por um vão defendendo,
O goleiro branco faz
Uma defesa tremenda.

No último pênalti decisivo,
A bola vai pro travessão,
O time verde comemora
Sua primeira taça.

Assim termina a história
Daquele jogo memorável,
Na várzea onde o talento
Se mostra pra quem quer ver.

That took me about three hours. The actual writing — getting the rhymes to land naturally while keeping the story coherent — consumed most of the time. The hardest part is never the meter. It's making sure the narrative doesn't stall for six stanzas while you're searching for a rhyme for "camisas." I once spent forty-five minutes on a single couplet because I was stuck between "drible" and "ponta" and neither wanted to work with the surrounding lines. Here's the counter-intuitive thing nobody tells you: the simpler your vocabulary, the better your cordel performs. I learned this the hard way when a friend submitted a cordel to a festival and lost because he'd stuffed it with words like "epopeia" and "transcendência." The judges told him straight up it sounded pretentious. Cordel is oral literature from the working class. It should sound like someone telling you a story at a bar, not a professor reading a paper. Use words any football fan would actually say after a match. "Raça," "cemitério," "gol de placa," "trave," "goleiro," "várzea." That's your lexicon. Nothing else.

Another pitfall: people write cordéis about famous professional clubs and try to be respectful. Don't. The tradition laughs at everyone equally. If you're writing about Flamengo, Corinthians, or any big club, include the mistakes, the losses, the embarrassing moments. That's what makes the genre work. A cordel that only praises reads like a press release, and nobody wants to listen to that for ten minutes standing in a crowd. The biggest structural weakness of cordel about football is that it collapses when the match you're describing was actually boring. If the game had zero goals, zero drama, zero turning points, you'll end up padding stanzas with filler and the rhythm dies. I wrote one about a 0-0 draw once and ended up describing the weather for three consecutive stanzas. It was awkward to recite. The workaround is picking matches with narrative arcs — comebacks, relegation battles, derby matches with history, cup upsets. A cordel needs conflict and resolution. If the game didn't provide it, you fabricate tension by focusing on individual player stories within the match instead. Follow one player's perspective from kickoff to final whistle and let that carry the emotional weight.

If you want to learn the craft properly, the best reference is Leandro Gomes de Barros, the 19th-century poet who basically invented the Brazilian cordel tradition. His works aren't about football specifically, but his technique — how he structures a narrative across multiple sheets, how he handles rhythm changes, how he resolves plotlines — applies directly. Read his "Sonho d'um dengoso" and pay attention to how the couplets build tension without ever stopping the forward motion of the story. One more thing about performance: if you're actually going to recite this live, don't write longer than twenty stanzas. That's roughly five minutes of recitation time. Anything beyond that and people start checking their phones. Twenty stanzas, fifteen minutes if you pace yourself with pauses between strophe pairs. Mark your pauses. I always add a line break every four stanzas as a breathing point during recitation. It gives the audience a moment to absorb what just happened and resets attention before the next section picks up.

Printing is another thing people overthink. You don't need a professional printer. I use a standard home laser printer on 75g paper, fold them in half, staple once down the middle, and print in black ink with a simple decorative border. The market price is usually one real per copy. I've sold maybe two hundred total across all my editions. You're not making money. You're making something to give away or distribute at events. That's the culture around it.

What this format can't do for you

Cordel sobre o futebol is narrow in scope. It works brilliantly for a single match or a short season narrative. It does not work for tactical analysis, player statistics, or anything that requires nuance beyond the emotional arc of a game. If you need to explain why a particular pressing system caused an upset, a cordel is the wrong tool. It's narrative verse, not journalism. Trying to force tactical detail into septilha couplets produces clumsy, inaccurate results. Keep it to what the game felt like, not what the heatmap shows. The style is also regionally tied. Outside of Brazil's Northeast and major urban centers with cordel traditions, most people have never heard of it. If you're writing this for an international audience, expect confusion. I tried distributing a football cordel at a Brazilian cultural event in Lisbon and half the crowd asked if it was a rap song. The format doesn't translate culturally the way the Portuguese language does. That's fine. It wasn't written for them.

There's no centralized repository of football cordéis. Most exist as physical booklets distributed at feiras, local festivals, or hand-to-hand at matches. You won't find comprehensive archives online. The ones that exist are scattered across small cultural site pages with broken links. If you want to preserve a cordel, print it yourself and hand it to someone who cares about keeping it.