ttps:////»https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd»>
Everything indicates that it was created by fans of the Vasco football team, during the 1920s. At the time, fans of the club from Rio de Janeiro adopted a very efficient tactic to encourage players on the field. For each positive result, the athletes received a cash prize collected by the fans. The value depended on the score and was inspired by numbers from the jogo do bicho. A tie, for example, was worth «a dog», which corresponds to the number 5 in the animal. In that case, the boleiros pocketed 5 thousand réis. A common victory usually yielded “a rabbit”, the number 10 in the game, or the equivalent of 10 mil réis. But the most coveted reward was precisely “a cow”, the number 25 – that is, no less than 25 thousand réis, paid only in historic victories or title conquests.
Over time, the expression “make a cow” or “make a crowdfunding” came to be used whenever a group of people split a common expense. Decades later, the word “vaca” or “vaquinha” was also used to name the 100 Cruzeiro bills. “In the animal game, it also represents the group of numbers ending in 00. The association must have come from there”, says philologist (a student of language and words) José Pereira da Silva, from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) ).