A Chorus of ‘Goooooool,’ the Siren Song of Soccer
RIO DE JANEIRO — Having caught his first big break on radio 50 years ago, José Carlos Araújo, who had honed his sportscasting skills by calling button soccer games in a neighbor’s backyard, figured he would have to tame his changing voice to avoid losing his pitch halfway through the effusively long cries of “goooooool” that are the hallmark and necessity of a Brazilian play-by-play announcer’s routine.
“Goooooool”
Among play-by-play announcers in Brazil, the cry of “goooooool” is the exclamation point that punctuates a story’s heart-thumping passage. Here are six of the best.
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José Carlos Araújo
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Gabriel Andrezo
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Galvão Bueno
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Alex Escobar
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Edson Mauro
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Luis Roberto
One colleague, a veteran of the airwaves, suggested he take up smoking. But Araújo, 17 at the time, had another idea: He hired a woman who taught German through music on national public radio to teach him how to sing.
“When it comes to narrating a goal in soccer,” said Araújo, of Rádio Transamérica, one of the grandfathers of sports radio broadcasting here, “there’s a big dose of artistry involved.”
Among play-by-play announcers in Brazil, the cry of “goooooool” is the exclamation point that punctuates a story’s heart-thumping passage, the announcer’s voice rising and falling harmoniously and continuously whenever any team scores. If turned into a drawing, it would look like an arch. If it were a person, it would be the biggest guy in the room.
Fans scream goal; announcers swear that they sing it. Galvão Bueno, one of the best-known working sportscasters in Brazil, compared it to “a tenor’s high C,” one of the most challenging notes the tenor’s voice can carry.
“It’s your crowning achievement,” said Bueno, who is working his 10th World Cup narrating the games, mostly for Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest television network. “Or your moment of defeat.”
It is also a marker in the history of sports broadcasting in Brazil — and its most enduring and endearing feature. In 1946, 14 years after the first soccer game was broadcast live on Brazilian radio, Rebello Júnior, an announcer at São Paulo’s old Rádio Difusora, stretched his call of “gol” on the air until he was almost out of breath, legitimizing the celebratory scream bellowed by fans in the stands and amplifying it to the world. It was all in an effort at differentiation: If everyone else was talking, why not shout?
In a trilogy chronicling the history of World Cups past, Max Gehringer, a businessman turned business columnist, wrote that in 1958 in Sweden, people in the stands turned to the booth occupied by the Brazilian sportscaster Edson Leite, of Rádio Bandeirantes, every time the ball hit the net, just to watch his performance.
Interactive Feature
Battle Cries
The world’s best soccer players bring their own unique style to the game. So it is only fitting that the commentators react in kind — calling a goal with passion and personality.
The elongated “goooooool” call has since been adopted in Spain, Germany (where “goal” is replaced by “tor,” or rather, “Tooooooor!”) and all over Latin America, as well as among Spanish-language broadcasters in the United States. In 2008, as an experiment, Luis Roberto, a sportscaster for Globo, cried “gol” only for the local team, Botafogo, when it played in the quarterfinals of the Libertadores Cup against Club Estudiantes de La Plata of Argentina.
“It was a disaster,” said Roberto, who has been narrating soccer games on television and radio since 1977. “Even people who rooted for Botafogo were screaming at me, accusing me of being disrespectful because I only acknowledged the goals scored by one team.”
Soccer broadcasting has evolved over time; sideline reporters give narrators in the booth fast information about elemental aspects of the game, like who scored or who is stepping in to replace the player who was hurt. Regional differences in pace and style have also taken hold. In São Paulo, narrators sound more like horse racing announcers, employing a pattern known as metralhadora, or machine gun. In Rio, the rhythm is decidedly less frantic. Still, the “gol” cry has persisted, though Brazilian announcers have adorned it, hoping that theirs is the one that stands out.
Araújo’s is preceded by “entrou” — Portuguese for “it’s in” — and a pause, which, he conceded, is really an opportunity to fill his lungs with air. Edson Mauro (formerly Edson Pereira de Melo), a renowned radio announcer for Rádio Globo, says “bingo” before he cries out “gol,” a word he chose after spending a night hearing it at a bingo hall in Madrid on a day off from covering the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
At Escola de Rádio, a broadcasting school here, Mauro — who used half of a coconut shell to amplify his first narrations, of his friends’ beach soccer games in Alagoas, his home state — prods his students to call the same game over and over again and to record themselves doing it. The reason, he explained, is that the students can track their improvement or “understand once and for all that the job is not for them and give up.”
Once an anomaly, the skill has since become a requirement. Among sportscasters, the verdict is unanimous: There is no future in sports radio for announcers who do not know how to bellow an impressive, long and loud cry of “gol.” So they work at it daily, in much the same way that classical singers do before a big performance.
Mauro is one of those who hum, buzz and make raspberry sounds, quivering his lips to loosen them up. Bueno eats apples to moisten his throat hours before he narrates a game. Araújo, a septuagenarian who goes by Garotinho, or little boy, does not drink whiskey to avoid “changing the chemical balance of my vocal cords,” he said.
Roberto relies on a phonoaudiologist to help him pull his voice out of his diaphragm so his goal cries will not fail. His colleague Alex Escobar, who is narrating his first World Cup, thinks phonoaudiology sessions are “kind of silly” and resorts, instead, to simple tricks he learned fronting a band that played the wedding circuit in the 1990s.
“On days I’m narrating, I don’t drink coffee,” Escobar said. “And the day before, I don’t drink alcohol.”
They all agree that sleeping is key, although that is sometimes hard to do. Bueno has been following the Brazilian national team from Goiânia, the site of its first friendly game, to the site of each of its matches during the tournament, by car and by plane. Gabriel Andrezo, a rookie announcer for the website FutRio, whose focus is on narrating games played by Rio’s teams, sometimes has to ride the train back from a stadium deep in the city’s outskirts, getting home long past midnight and getting up early in the morning to write and post an article, before lunchtime, about the game he called.
Failure happens, and physiological reactions get in the way. Andrezo was once overcome by a coughing fit. Araújo could not get rid of hiccups. Roberto, after finishing a grueling work schedule at the 1998 World Cup in France, heard his voice falter as he cried “goal” when Vasco da Gama, a team from Rio, scored against River Plate of Argentina in the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores.
“I sounded like Tarzan,” he said.
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