Update 11:50am EST: The team Chapecoense was to play in the final, Medellin's Atletico Nacional, just requested that the South American Football Confederation grant the Copa title to Chapecoense.
(Story developing)
This morning Brazil woke up to devastating news. A plane carrying the country's Chapecoense soccer team crashed just south of Medellin, Colombia. According to Colombian authorities, 71 were killed, and there are 6 survivors, among them 3 players. 21 journalists were also aboard the flight and killed. It is still unclear why the plane crashed.
As the morning wore on, Brazil was engaged in a heartbreakingly gruesome task: tracking which players' bodies had been found, and which were dead. And as daylight broke across Colombia, the first images of the wreckage – a mangled pile of white metal – made clear that the five survivors had managed a miracle.
The President of Brazil, Michel Temer, declared 3 days of mourning, as the country grapples with what will go down in the country's history as one of the most awful sports tragedies of all time, following in the sad steps of the death of racecar drive Airton Senna, which Brazilians still mourn.
A Comparison From the United States
For American readers, though, what happened today is positioned to be hauntingly similar in scale and cultural impact to the plane crash of the Marshall University football team in 1970. That accident is considered the deadliest tragedy affecting a sports team in American history.
In that accident, the team plane of a small West Virginia university crashed upon approach to the runway, killing 75 people – a number that is strikingly similar to the number reported dead in today's crash. The Marshall University plane was full of players and coaches, but it was also full of team boosters; the flight was the first flight the team had taken that season, since they normally traveled by bus. As a result, many fans joined the journey that day.
For the city of Huntington, West Virginia, where Marshall is located – an often overlooked spot in coal mining country, and my family's hometown – the accident was an unthinkable tragedy that would haunt the city, which now counts 360,000 people in its metropolitan area. The Marshall football team was nearly disbanded after the accident, and – as you may have seen in the Matthew McConaughey movie We Are Marshall – the team's ultimate return to play would prove to be both as unlikely as it was emotional.
A Tucked-Away City with a Love for Soccer
We can expect that the Brazilian city of Chapecó, like Huntington, will be similarly haunted by this tragedy.
The team Chapecoense – a relatively young team, having formed only in 1973 – were on their way to compete in their very first international competition in the Copa South America club league final. The upcoming game would be a high point in the team's arc, a seemingly impossible conquest. Last night, Brazilian social media were alive with chatter about the team's upcoming big moment, an arrival of sorts for an overlooked team from a small Brazilian city nestled in the countryside near Iguaçu Falls.
Chapecó is the kind of place that most Brazilians have heard of, but few have visited. At the airport, you see planes destined for Chapecó and wonder where exactly they are headed. It's a city deep in the heart of Brazil's southern state of Santa Catarina, a state better known for the stylish beaches of Florianopolis and the tasty German beers of the surrounding towns. But Chapecó lives in a different universe from the nightclub beats that blast out of Florianopolis' clubs.
In Chapecó, the business and culture revolve around food. Chapecó is the headquarters of two of the biggest food manufacturers in Brazil – Seara and Sadia. Every morning, Brazilians around the country wake up to breakfasts of grilled cheeses layered with Sadia ham, and every lunch they sit down to plates of Seara-brand grilled chicken breasts. The growth of the town's agrobusinesses over the past decade has left the town relatively wealthy. And many of the town's people are descendants of the unique blend of immigrants that mark the southern end of Brazil: German, Polish, and Italian.
Chapecoense's Remarkable Management and Meteoric Rise
And although those heritages led many of the city's residents to cheer for the big-time southern Brazilian soccer teams, like Gremio and Atletico, the sudden rise of the Chapecoense team had in recent years won over the city's hearts. According to Gabrielle Vasconcellos, a young woman from Chapecó, love for the Chapecoense team had reached other parts of the country as well. "Chapecoense charmed and conquered the whole country," she says, "for being a team that was skilled, charismatic, and humble, which is difficult to find here [in Brazil]." They were the Brazilian underdogs.
Raphael Pedrotti, is also a resident of Santa Catarina, but a fan of Chapecoense's rival team. Even so, Pedrotti recognizes the respect that Chapecoense garnered in recent years. He calls Chapecoense "a model of management," noting that the team stood out for paying its employees, a remarkable achievement in Brazil where, he says, "most teams stay afloat by paying fines to players and coaches for breaking their contracts and firing the team's employees." Instead, he says, against all odds Chapecoense grew in stature while still staying in the clear financially, and as a result had the support of the whole city and the business community. Plus, Pedrotti adds, the team's fast ascent has only happened with one other team in Brazilian history. "They are an example of a meteoric rise."
In 2009, the team wallowed in Series D ranking – a league ranking that kept them out of the news and out of sight for most of the Brazilian population. But thanks to solid players and solid management, the team surged from Series D in a quest for Series A that was remarkably quick and successful. Between 2012 and 2014 the team steadily graduated from Series to Series until they reached Series A, in an ascendance that was as unexpected as it was historical.
Suddenly, to the surprise of Brazilian soccer fans around the country, this far-away city's club team was playing in the big leagues, against Brazilian megaliths like Rio de Janeiro's Flamengo and São Paulo's Corinthians. Just this weekend, the team lost 1-0 to São Paulo's Palmeiras, one of the country's most successful teams.
On Twitter, one fan noted this rapid upwards rise, concluding "They didn't stop until they got to heaven."
2009-Série D
2012-Série C
2013-Série B
2014-Série A
2016-Final da Sul-americana.
Não se cansaram de subir e chegaram ao Céu.#ForçaChape— Na Redonda (@FutNaRedonda) November 29, 2016
As the team prepared to board the flight this morning, to their first international competition against Medellin team Atletico Nacional for the final of the Copa South America, the hearts of those living in Chapecó swelled with pride at their team's rise. And this morning, at news of their team's fall, those same hearts broke. It's a sickening feeling the folks in Huntington can relate to.
