Why This Misunderstood Neighbourhood 9000 Miles From Brazil Has Its Biggest Superfans

Lyari is 9,000 miles away from Brazil, but this neighbourhood of 2-3 million people in Pakistan’s largest city Karachi is home to some of its biggest superfans.

With Brazil football shirts on their back or Brazil flags as capes, everyone’s eyes were glued to a public screen showing a do-or-die quarter final FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia. Some sat on the roofs of police vans surrounding the crowd; gang violence has been down in this neighbourhood for years, but a police presence is constant.     

Each time Brazil scored, music blared and the crowd went wild. 

“All day I think about Brazil. I eat, sleep and breathe only Brazil. If Brazil is eliminated, my World Cup is over,” Javaid Carlos, told VICE World News, swinging his hips as he performed the traditional Baloch dance of Lewa on top of a police van. Carlos used to have the last name Ibrahim, but renamed himself after legendary Brazilian defender Roberto Carlos. 

“They’re our brothers. They look just like us. They dance just like us. They call it Samba, we call it Lewa.”

In Pakistan, Lyari is often called “Mini Brazil,” because of its obsession and love for the Brazilian national football team. During the World Cup, images of Pakistan’s “Mini Brazil” have gone viral; A live telecast of fans celebrating in Lyari even made it to Globo Television, Latin America’s largest television network. Brazilian audiences were transfixed, fascinated and confused. Online comments ranged from, “We love this, but we don’t understand. Why?” and “How? We’re so far away.”

But distance aside, there are commonalities between the two disparate cultures. 

You turn a corner in Lyari’s maze-like narrow streets and you might feel like you’re in a Brazilian favela. Lyari also has its own distinct culture from the city surrounding it. Most of Lyari’s residents are ethnically Baloch and Sheedi, many of whom are visibly Black and trace their ancestry to East Africa. In present day Pakistan, most Sheedis also identify as Baloch, making them a marginalised community within a marginalised community in Pakistan. 

 Lyari’s residents face racism, marginalisation, and stereotyping in Pakistan. The colour of their skin, texture of their hair, twang in their dialect, shape of their bodies are all used as cannon fodder for crass jokes in mainstream media. 

“We seldom see anyone like ourselves on television. We have no one to look up to and go like, ‘I will be like that person up there,’” Muzammil Elahi, a local businessman and Brazil supporter, told VICE World News.

Sports journalist and commentator Ahmer Naqvi told VICE World News that cricket “tends to be the most popular in regions where the state is present and receives its benefits.” 

“Football, on the other hand, has thrived in regions where the state is absent or has an unfavourable relationship with it,” he said. “This is true for the Balochistan coast, the rest of the Balochistan province, the Gilgit Baltistan province and Lyari.”

But without support from the Pakistani state, athletes from Lyari don’t go far. It’s a theme that frequently comes up in the neighbourhood’s music and rap scene, which has a national audience. In their song Players of Lyari, LUG, aka Lyari Underground, a popular band from the area, produced a song on their experience trying to breakthrough as footballers. One of their lyrics—“Practise hard all year, only for the coach to select a non-Lyari player”—speaks directly to their struggles. 

The party is run by the son of slain former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Bilawal Bhutto, and although his party has a strong ethnic Sindhi base, it’s leaned heavily on the Baloch residents in Lyari for decades to help it win in Karachi, Sindh province’s biggest city. 

“Everyone now knows about Pakistan’s little Brazil,” Waqas Shaukat, a PPP member and key organiser of the World Cup match screenings in Lyari, told VICE World News at one match. “It’s a bit odd though that they didn’t think about mentioning us [our party] in it.”

The match screenings are a form of not-so-subtle election campaigning, and with local elections due to be held next month, PPP anthems blare from the speakers in between the football broadcast.

Lyari’s love for football has been used as a pawn by Pakistani politicians for years, much like football has been used by politicians in Brazil. The 1970 World Cup win was enthusiastically hijacked by Brazil’s military government for propaganda purposes. More recently, populist Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters often wear the Brazil football shirt to rallies in an attempt to appropriate it for their far-right movement.

In similar fashion, years ago, Bilawal’s parents held their wedding reception in 1987 at the Kakri Ground, another football stadium in Lyari. Commentators at the time called it a wedding and a campaign rally. Two birds with one stone.

Benazir’s father and PPP’s charismatic founder Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto won two national elections from Lyari in 1970 and 1977, before being deposed by a military coup and executed in 1979. His hanging marked the start of a 12-year-old brutal military government marked with violence, curfews and censorship.

Once democracy finally returned to Pakistan in the 1990s, political parties started vying for the Lyari vote, often in violent ways. Two gangs drew territorial battle lines across the neighbourhood, aligning themselves with Karachi’s rival political parties—the PPP and the MQM, which, at the time, enjoyed patronage from Pakistan’s military. Both parties had strong policy leanings to their own ethnicity. Lyari’s Baloch residents were only a priority when political groups wanted to cash in on their vote bank.

Meanwhile, football played into gang politics too. Arshad Pappu, a gang leader who was aligned with the MQM, was brutally murdered by Uzair Baloch, a rival gang leader in 2013. Baloch went on to film himself playing football with Pappu’s decapitated head near Lyari’s Gabol Park. Baloch, a dual Pakistani-Iranian citizen, went on the run, but on April 7, 2020, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after a speedy military trial. 

With Baloch and Pappu out of Lyari, the days of its active gang wars are history. But the battle scars are still visible—the most prominent being heavy state security. It isn’t unusual to get frisked and patted down a few times by police when visiting the neighbourhood. Ramzan Baloch, one of Lyari’s oldest and most respected historians, said there was “a time when Lyari was the most peaceful part of Karachi.”

“People used to move here from other parts of Pakistan for jobs and security 40 years ago, there was no curfew, no target killing,” he told VICE World News. 

“People have understood that you have to govern Karachi and Lyari with love. There is no other way,” he added. “There was only love here before hate was injected. But hate’s impact has fallen and we see love rising. And where there is love, there is love for sports and progress.” 

Everyone knows everyone in Lyari, the moment you walk in you’re immediately welcomed as an outsider. They know they have a bad reputation and go the extra mile to make sure you have no problems while visiting. It’s not unusual to end up with a self-appointed chaperone acting as a quasi-guide. 

That’s what happened to many of Karachi’s residents who saw Lyari going viral for its Brazil fanfare, as many outsiders showed up in the neighbourhood for the first time to watch the Croatia vs Brazil match. 

As the match went into extra time. Flailing their hands up in the air, the fans in Lyari were hoping for a miracle. When Brazil’s Neymar scored at the 106th minute there were euphoric screams, when Croatia’s Petrovic equalised at the 117th minute there were collected gasps. And when both Brazil’s Rodrygo and Marquinhos missed their respective penalties, there was pain in the air in the stadium tens of thousands of miles away from Brazil. 

Children, unable to bear the tension, started covering their faces while peeking through their fingers to check the score.

In the end, when Brazil lost in a nail biting penalty shootout, the crowd just sat there stunned, in shock and silence. The feeling was a familiar one. Playing a beautiful game, but not making the final cut. 

 Follow Bilal Hassan on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.