This Brazilian Soccer Team Plays for a Chance to Battle Their Prison Guards





For one week each year, the Geraldo Beltrão maximum security penitentiary in João Pessoa, Brazil holds a soccer tournament for the prisoners. Five-member teams from the various cells compete against each other on a barbed-wire-encircled sand court until there’s just one left standing.

The winning team members each get a box filled with rice, beans, and other basic food items. More importantly, though, the winning team also gets to play against the prison guards for the grand championship.


This year Italian photojournalist Nicolò Lanfranchi was there to document the tournament for Colors magazine, and he followed the prisoners as they trained and played.


“It’s an event that people take very seriously,” he says. “And it’s a good way to release tension.”


Lanfranchi’s photos are timely, as the World Cup starts this month in Brazil and his work raises questions about an overcrowded prison system and the vast sums of money Brazil is spending to host the event.


Nicolò Lanfranchi shot photos at the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 - Football (June 2014).

Nicolò Lanfranchi shot photos at the Geraldo Beltrão Penitentiary for COLORS magazine, issue no. 90 – Football (June 2014).



The article in Colors points out that since 2008, Brazil has spent $670 million dollars on prisons and prison upkeep as opposed to $3.5 billion on new soccer stadiums. At the moment there are 400,000 inmates living in prisons that are only meant to hold 260,000 people. Things are so bad a Brazilian judge proposed using the new World Cup stadium in Manaus as a temporary detention center for a nearby, overcrowded prison once the tournament is over.


The Geraldo Beltrão prison, where the tournament takes place, is overcrowded as well. Cells that were meant to hold seven people sometimes hold 15. Lanfranchi says the prison tournament is probably a response, at least in part, to these conditions. Prison officials want the prisoners to have the chance to get out and enjoy themselves, but they also get media attention.


“Someone at the prison is trying to make a name for themselves,” he says.


In the end it was players in Cell 15 this year who beat all the other prison teams and made it to that last game. Like some of the most gut-wrenching World Cup games of all time–Italy and Brazil in 1994 and Italy and France in 2006–the prison guard game ended in penalty kicks. Lanfranchi says he can’t remember the final score, but he does remember that the guards won.


“The prisoners were pretty sad,” he says. “They really wanted to kick the guards’ asses.”



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