The Estádio Evandro Almeida holds something like fourteen thousand people, which by the standards of Brazilian top-flight football is the size of a large high school sports day. Locals call it Baenão, the big little ground, and the name is a joke that turned sincere.
It sits in Marco, in the middle of the city, with houses pressed up against it and a petrol station close enough that you can hear the attendants watching the game. There is no car park worth the name. You arrive on foot from the neighbourhood, which is the whole point.
why we prefer it
Mangueirão is the big ground, the state’s proper stadium, and it holds about fifty-five thousand. It is where the club plays the biggest fixtures and where the national league sends its cameras. It is also a bowl built for a city twice this size, with the crowd spread out over tiers and the sound going up into the sky. A sell-out there is magnificent and strange. It feels like watching football in a stadium-shaped field.
Baenão is the opposite. At fourteen thousand the terraces are close enough to the pitch that you can hear the tackles and hear the players swear. The away end is right there. The drum stands behind the goal and the rhythm comes off the roof and lands on the grass. When the ground is full it is a single loud room, and the noise the crowd makes has nowhere to go except onto the pitch and into the players.
There is a generation of supporters, mine included, who saw their first Re-Pa at Baenão and have never accepted any substitute.
the ground’s own history
Evandro Almeida was a journalist and a sporting figure in this city, which is the kind of name a neighbourhood ground gets when the neighbourhood wants to remember someone. The stadium has been added to and patched up and renovated in pieces over the decades, and it looks it: a bit of concrete from one era, a bit of paint from another, a roof that has opinions about rain.
Everything about it is walkable. You can leave your house twenty minutes before kickoff and make it. The children in the surrounding streets treat the matchday crowds as a normal feature of their week, selling water and sweets between the legs of adults who are still arguing about the lineup.
the closeness
People who visit from Europe ask how a club of our size and history can prefer a ground this small when there is a modern stadium sitting empty across town. The honest answer is that football is better close up.
At Baenão you recognise people. You see the same faces in the same places, decade after decade. The seller who gives the kids extra farinha, the man in the third row who has not changed his cap since the nineties, the families in the same block every game. A ground you can walk to in twenty minutes becomes part of the city’s furniture, and a ground you drive an hour to and park in a field does not.
When Baenão is full and the game is a Re-Pa, there is nowhere in Brazilian football that feels tighter. Fourteen thousand people with their knees against the pitch, the drum going, the whole neighbourhood outside listening to the roar through the wall.
I love Mangueirão for what it is. But my club lives in Marco.
