The true birth of Brazilian football
Most books on Brazilian football will suggest that Charles Miller, ‘the father of Brazilian football’, introduced the game to Brazil. Miller, the son of a Scottish engineer, was educated in Southampton and arrived in Sao Paulo in October 1894 with two footballs. Whilst Miller would play an important role in developing football in Brazil, it was a Scottish textile engineer from the village of Busby in East Renfrewshire, who first introduced the game.
Tom Donohoe arrived in Brazil in January 1893 to work at a new textile factory in a village called Bangu which is now a district of Rio de Janeiro. Having discovered that football was yet to reach the vast country Donohoe had to wait until later in the year to arrange for a football to be brought back from the UK. He convinced Henry Bennet, a factory colleague who was ordering supplies for the factory, to purchase the ball. Donohoe waited weeks for Bennet to make the round trip and was dismayed when it transpired that the prized football had been left in a hotel room back in England.
In 1894 Donohoe was able to make the trip himself and he purchased a football, a football pump and some football boots. Returning to Brazil in April 1894, Tom beat Charles Miller by six months.
Donohoe was not from an established family in Brazil and was unable to organise the game on a similar scale to that of Miller. Indeed when he approached the factory manager in Bangu to ask for support in setting up a football club his request was declined. As organised football began to take off in Sao Paulo in the late 1890s Donohoe could only arrange semi organised games amongst the factory workers in Bangu.
Even within such a restricted format Donohoe was a pioneer. During an era when society in Brazil was segregated along racial lines, he involved black Brazilian workers from his factory in the games. Finally in 1904, ten years after introducing football to the country, Donohoe was a member of the committee which instituted the Bangu Atlético Clube. This football and sports club was the first in Brazil to play black footballers.
