Globo released today (5) the list of professionals who will be sent to Qatar for coverage of the World Cup at the end of the year. The presence of only two narrators from open TV and two from SporTV on the trip stands out. If, in the case of the paid channel, the choices of Luiz Carlos Junior and Milton Leite show the strength of the “time at home” of both, in the case of TV Globo the indication shows the situation of Galvão Bueno’s succession at the station.
In addition to Galvão himself, who will bid farewell to Globo at the World Cup after four decades of interrupted trajectory for less than a year in 1992, the company will send Luis Roberto to the on-site broadcasts in Qatar. Cléber Machado, with more than 30 years of experience, will narrate from Brazil, as well as relatively recent hires for the channel, such as Gustavo Villani and Renata Silveira.
Escalated to face-to-face coverage, Luis Roberto paints today as Galvão’s successor on Globo from 2023. In recent years, the narrator has already been playing prominent national games on the broadcaster, in addition to replacing the channel’s main announcer in the final of Liberators 2019, when Flamengo was champion against River Plate.
In this ocasion, Galvão Bueno was scheduled for the game, but suffered a heart attack days before the decision. The connection between Luis Roberto and the football do Rio, which gave the substitute the chance to narrate a game on national television that had more audience than the last four World Cup finals.
In the midst of an economic crisis and a skyrocketing dollar since the beginning of the pandemic, the team that goes to Qatar is leaner than the sent by Globo to Russia in 2018. On the occasion, Globo’s three main narrators (Galvão, Cléber and Luis Roberto) were on Russian soil. SporTV sent, in addition to Luiz Carlos Junior and Milton Leite, announcers Jader Rocha and Júlio Oliveira, who will now be in the studios sharing narrations with Everaldo Marques, Natalia Lara and Rogério Corrêa on the channel.
Cléber Machado had already been out of a campaign made by the business area of Globo for the advertising market, as reported by the website Notícias da TV last month. The absence on the trip interrupts a sequence of participations in loco in the World Cup coverage that had been going on since 1994.
In the 2002 edition, also marked by cost cuts, a surge in the US currency and the broadcaster’s exclusivity on open TV, the narrator was the only one to accompany Galvão Bueno in his role on Asian soil. Luis Roberto, at the time, narrated and presented programs in Brazil, despite having traveled to France in the previous World Cup.
Cléber Machado has been with Globo since 1988 and has narrated all the World Cups since then. This will be the ninth edition with his voice, albeit from the station’s studios in Brazil. Luis Roberto, who already had stints with the same group on the radio and worked at ESPN Brasil, arrived on open TV in late 1997 and debuted in early 1998.
Starting next year, Globo will experience a scenario that it only knew for a few months in 1992, when Galvão Bueno left the station to lead the sports team of Rede OM, a station from Paraná that today is CNT and had project to be among the largest in the country. Cléber Machado at the time “inherited” some events, such as formula 1. It was his narration of a historic race in Monaco, when Ayrton Senna won after an emotional battle with Nigel Mansell in the last laps.
Galvão Bueno’s absence will come precisely in the year that Globo will resume the Libertadores broadcasting rights, after three years of exhibitions on SBT. It is in this context that Luis Roberto will have to assume the role of “number 1” of narration in the network. The next stage is to know if Cléber Machado will have his contract renewed with the channel. In 2018, he signed a four-year renewal which ends just after the next World Cup.
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