“I do not want to go to Brazil.”
To National Football League executives, who have worked for years to bring Friday night’s opening-weekend game to Brazil, the comment from Philadelphia Eagles player Darius Slay on his podcast last week had already gotten off to a bad start.
Then it got worse.
“They already told us not to leave the hotel,” he continued. “The crime rate is crazy. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, N.F.L., why do you all want to send us somewhere with a crime rate this high?”
He had told his family to stay home, he added, and hoped he would make it home safely. Because “boy, they’re talking about it is crazy down there.”
Slay was not the only Eagles player concerned. AJ Brown, a wide receiver, told reporters he planned to stay in his hotel room after the team had given players a long list of “don’t do’s” for Brazil. The list included “a lot, honestly,” he said. “Even as simple as just walking down the street with your phone in your hand.”
What the Eagles staff apparently did not mention: Philadelphia is far deadlier than São Paulo.
Last year, São Paulo registered 4.2 murders per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in Brazil. In Philadelphia, the murder rate was six times as high, at 26.1 per 100,000 people, even surpassing the murder rate of 23.1 across Brazil, according to the Homicide Monitor, a database of government statistics from the Igarapé Institute, a research institute that studies security.
And it is not just Philadelphia. Most cities with N.F.L. teams had higher murder rates, and some much higher. São Paulo had less than a third of the murders per capita as the following N.F.L. cities, starting with the highest rate: New Orleans, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Washington, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Buffalo, Houston, Nashville and Jacksonville.
New York, one of the safest big American cities, also had a slightly higher per capita murder rate than that of São Paulo. And with six homicides in 2022 and a population around 100,000, there even were more murders per capita in quiet Green Bay, Wis., home of the Packers, the team playing the Eagles in Brazil.
Friday’s matchup is part of the N.F.L.’s push to expand its brand internationally. But the league is finding that expansion is not without headaches.
Each international game involves sending more than 100 athletes abroad, and the recent comments about Brazil shows that such trips mean the league must contend with that very natural human instinct — a fear of the unknown — especially when team officials deliver warnings that may or may not overemphasize the dangers of a destination.
People “are a little afraid of things they don’t know,” Tanner McKee, a backup quarterback for the Eagles, told reporters in Brazil on Thursday. “We’re in a country where many of them haven’t been, they don’t speak the language, they don’t know anything about Brazil.”
McKee was speaking in Portuguese. He spent two years in Brazil as a Mormon missionary and as a result has become a sort of cultural translator for his teammates as they prepared for the trip south. “They’re going to have experiences that’ll change their view,” he said.
Yet the comments — which also included a social media post from a third teammate questioning whether Brazil was safe — have made headlines in Brazil and upset some of the very people the N.F.L. is aiming to capture.
Henrique Baessa Santos, 20, a law student in Brazil who recently became interested in the N.F.L., said the situation had been disappointing. Realizing some players “didn’t want to come here and have said these things about Brazil, as if they were going to get robbed if they only left their hotel, it’s kind of sad,” he said. “It’s not like if it was a new problem, or a problem that the U.S.A., especially Philadelphia, didn’t have.”
Crime comes in different forms and Brazilian cities do have a notorious problem with phone theft. Young men from poorer neighborhoods frequently travel to wealthier areas to snatch phones out of people’s hands or pockets. Last year, there were 1,782 such thefts per 100,000 people in São Paulo.
Philadelphia and other U.S. cities don’t release specific data on phone theft, but the numbers would probably be far lower. Philadelphia, for instance, had 367 robberies or thefts of any kind reported per 100,000 people last year.
Such petty theft in Brazil has fed a perception that crime is worse than it is, including among Brazilians, said Robert Muggah, a security expert at the Igarapé Institute who lives in Brazil. “It’s the experience of having it happen to you, a family member or a friend,” he said.
“There continues to be a perception that Brazil is a dangerous place,” he added. But when considering violent crime, “São Paulo is one of the safest cities in Brazil and even in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
He said São Paulo had achieved that success partly by employing technology to map and target crime, but also because the police had often been violent themselves. His institute does not count killings by police in its homicide rates, but that would send numbers up in Brazil.
The police kill roughly 6,000 people in Brazil a year, he said, compared with about 1,000 in the United States.
The fears of traveling to Brazil even sparked some confusion among players. Josh Jacobs, a Packers running back, said in an interview in June that the teams could not wear green in Brazil because of gang-related issues with the color.
In reality, the São Paulo soccer team Corinthians asked the Eagles to refrain from wearing green in its home stadium — where Friday’s game is being played — because the Eagles are technically the home team and green is the signature color of Corinthians’ archrival, Palmeiras.
The Eagles will wear black and white, like Corinthians, and the Packers will wear green.
On Thursday, the Brazilian media peppered players and coaches with questions about the comments. What did Eagles officials tell players about Brazil?
Nick Sirianni, the Eagles head coach, ignored the question. “Ever since we’ve gotten here, it’s just, everything’s been world-class,” he responded.
Slay, the player who had made the most critical comments, did not speak to the press. He had issued an apology two days earlier.
“I want to apologize to anyone I offended,” he wrote online. “Looking forward to playing in your beautiful country.”
He posted his apology to Brazilians on X, the social network that, because of a legal dispute, had been blocked across the country days earlier.
The post Eagles Players Feared Crime in Brazil. Have They Considered Philadelphia? appeared first on New York Times.
