Soccer & Society

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The ‘beautiful game’ and its dilemmas: sports

migration, ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘race’

José Hildo De Oliveira Filho

To cite this article: José Hildo De Oliveira Filho (2022) The ‘beautiful game’ and its
dilemmas: sports migration, ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘race’, Soccer & Society, 23:1, 32-43, DOI:
10.1080/14660970.2021.1918678

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2021.1918678

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SOCCER & SOCIETY
2022, VOL. 23, NO. 1, 32–43
https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2021.1918678

ARTICLE

The ‘beautiful game’ and its dilemmas: sports migration,

‘Brazilianness’ and ‘race’
José Hildo De Oliveira Filho
Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University in Prague U Kříže, Jinonice, Czechia

ABSTRACT
The relationship between sports, especially football, Brazilian national
identity, and ‘race’, has received considerable attention. The hyper-
visibility of football, however, obscures the relationship between
Brazilian identity with another sport that was partially ‘invented’ in
Brazil: futsal. This paper examines migrant Brazilian football and futsal
athletes, through an analysis of their life-histories. The study combines
life-histories, a re-construction of long-term historical processes that
inform and condition the specificity of Brazilian identity, and media dis­
courses to construct a novel perspective on the relationship between
‘Brazilianness’ and sports.

Introduction: the ‘beautiful game’

In 2006, Nike released its ‘Joga Bonito’ [The Beautiful Game] campaign. Featuring football stars of
that time, the campaign’s name and soundtrack called attention to the ‘natural’ relationship
between ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘football talent’. In one specific advertisement of this campaign, called
‘Joy’, Eric Cantona invites the public to watch a number of videoclips from Ronaldinho’s early
career in futsal. As the ad develops, Ronaldinho’s childhood futsal skills are intercut with images of
him as an international football star. At the end of the ad, Cantona tells the public: ‘So my advice to
you is . . . Never grow up my friends’.
Nike’s campaign constructed a carefully crafted image of Brazilian players, and Ronaldinho
especially, as ‘naturally gifted’, and ‘child-like’. If Brazilians do not fully reach ‘adulthood’, Brazilian
footballers would best embody the ‘playfulness’ sports spectators like to see in professional sports.
Cantona’s final advice: ‘Never grow up’ also constitutes an invitation to the eternal youth that the
consumption of sports equipment promises the public.
Nike’s ad not only juxtaposed the images of a child and an adult, and infantilised Ronaldinho,
but also framed his transition from futsal to football as a triumph of his ‘natural talent’. The footage
of Ronaldinho’s childhood apprentice years on the Grêmio futsal team, the same football club that
would later sell him to European football, both reveals and conceals the origins of these skills, as well
as the specificity of Brazilian international footballers, namely, the fact that Brazilian players
practice both football and futsal in their childhood and adolescence.1 In this sense, this paper is
an effort to further examine the relationship between football and futsal in Brazil, understood here
as an ethnographic continuum between the futsal and football industries.2 As the Nike campaign
shows, using Ronaldinho as an example, the incorporation of futsal into the analysis of Brazilian
footballers’ career trajectories opens room for a novel understanding of Nike’s investments in
commercializing Ronaldinho’s football skills.3

CONTACT José Hildo De Oliveira Filho 79411295@fsv.cuni.cz Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University in
Prague U Kříže, Jinonice, Czechia
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 33

Throughout this paper, I strive to answer the following questions: What long-term historical
processes inform the invention of ‘Brazilianness’ as a separate and discrete identity? How is
Brazilianness constructed in relation to football and futsal? What discourses create and maintain
Brazilian ‘uniqueness’?
In this paper, I argue that Brazilianness, like other national identities, is constructed as being
intrinsically-related to ‘modernity’. In this sense, I align with contemporary nationalism studies that
examine the emergence of ‘nationalism’ as a phenomenon produced in Europe, since the eighteenth
century.4 According to these perspectives, the constitution of a variety of technologies for governing
such as censuses, the construction of memory – particularly by establishing museums – mapping,
and the rise of news corporations constructed national identities as ‘imagined communities’.5 As
I will demonstrate, nationalism studies allow me to question the long-term historical processes
involved in the creation of ‘Brazilianness’.
Debates in nationalism studies have been helpful to the construction of my framework of
analysis of ‘Brazilianness’. In approaching ‘sports’ and nationalism, I was obliged to include
a critical perspective on ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in my analysis. Critical perspectives on ‘race’,
Brazilianness and sports, both futsal and football, constitute the uniqueness of my current
work.
Since the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a number of detailed analyses of Brazilianness and sports,
especially football, have appeared. Roger Kittleson’s ‘The Country of football: Soccer and the making
of modern Brazil’, and David Goldbatt’s ‘The futebol nation: The story of Brazil through Soccer’.
A previous account by Alex Bellos, entitled ‘Futebol: The Brazilian way of life’ is one of the most
recently published analyses about Brazilian identity and football for the English-speaking public.
While these accounts are rich and detailed, their approach to ‘race’ and Brazilianness is somewhat
problematic. Kittleson’s analysis of Brazilianness and football focuses on what he sees as a gradual
acceptance of Black and Brown football players into professional football. Thus, Kittleson6 cannot
construct an analysis of racism in contemporary football. Goldblatt’s7 and Bellos’8 analyses operate
very much in the same way. These authors confined discussions about ‘race’ and football to the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither Kittleson nor Goldblatt systematically include
futsal in their analysis of Brazilian identity and sports. Only Bellos considers futsal in his analysis of
Brazilianness.9
This paper is thus divided as follows. At first, I will detail the methodological issues I have faced
in my current attempt to produce an ethnographic account of Brazilian sports migrants in both
futsal and football. I will then examine the question of a uniquely ‘Brazilian style of playing football’.
Throughout this paper, I analyse both futsal and football as an ethnographic continuum, and the
consequences of contemporary racism in these sports industries.10 The purpose of these analyses is
to achieve an in-depth understanding of how ‘race’ and ‘sports’ have come to be constructed as
marks of Brazilian nationhood, and how ‘race’ and ‘Brazilianness’ have come to be constructed as
marks of Brazilian football.

Data and methodology

This chapter is part of a multi-sited research project designed to understand the career and
migration trajectories of Brazilian sports migrants in both futsal and football.11 I have completed
16 life-history interviews with Brazilian athletes working in Portugal, Austria, the Czech Republic,
Lebanon and Israel. The interviews lasted between 30 and 90 minutes and were transcribed and
coded manually. From the beginning of my fieldwork, I have noted that athletes were more willing
to be interviewed after I assured their anonymity. I interpret athletes’ willingness to participate in
my study after the offer of anonymity as a form of distancing myself from the sports press. From my
first contacts, athletes were sure that I would not ask them about sports results. In my first
approaches, I would raise topics such as the beginning of their career, religion and family to
avoid being seen as a sports fan.
34 J. H. DE OLIVEIRA FILHO

Formal interviews were accompanied by informal conversations with one football agent, and one
futsal coach who was also a migrant and complemented by media discourses and life-history
interviews publicly available online. In this paper, I complemented primary empirical evidence
with secondary data, by examining four interviews with Brazilian athletes conducted by the Museu
da Pessoa [People’s Museum] (https://museudapessoa.org), an online museum whose aim is to
collect life-histories of Brazilian people. These methodological strategies allowed me to construct
a unique perspective on the relationship between futsal, football, Brazilian national identity and
‘race’.
Throughout my fieldwork, I have sought to have face-to-face contact and interviews with
professional athletes. The interviews are complemented by limited fieldwork observations, mainly
in futsal. I was allowed access to some futsal training sessions because one Brazilian coach I met in
the Czech Republic, and futsal players in other countries provided me limited access to the behind
the scenes world of the futsal industry, such as access to moments with teams after matches. I could
also observe the routines of second-division football players in the Czech Republic.
While life-history interviews have been used in various ways in the social sciences, there seems to
be a consensus about the need for researchers to reflect on the situations mentioned in the
narratives that are later analysed.12 Benneyand Hughes,13 and Pierre Bourdieu,14 who reflect
from diverse theoretical standpoints on the possibilities and limitations of interviews, have noted
that interviews interrupt the flow of everyday life. In this sense, one of the main limitations of
interviews is the ever-present possibility that they will generate extraordinary discourses. While
Hughes and Benney saw the generation of extraordinary discourses as arising from the widespread
use of interviews by the mass media, especially TV, these sociologists’ analyses point out that the
interaction between researchers and interviewees constitutes a crucial feature of the interview
processes. In this sense, interviews have come to be conceptualized as an intersubjective method.
Usually, interviews must be complemented by other methodological strategies to assure the con­
textualization of interviewees’ discourses.
Because of my difficulty in gaining permanent access to the world of professional football,15
I opted to make use of life-history interviews during my fieldwork.16 Life-history interviews also
allowed me to connect the personal narratives and the institutional and social settings from which
they emerged.17 In this paper, I use both my fieldwork observations, and athletes’ life-histories to
reconstruct long-term historical and macro-sociological processes. These processes, as I hope to
demonstrate, inform and condition athletes’ identification as Brazilian, their professionalization
and later migration.

Sports, ‘Brazilianness’ and race

While the rise of newspapers in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century18 had a decisive
role in the invention of various nationalisms in the continent,19 the invention of a Brazilian
national identity was a nineteenth-century historical process. The arrival of the Portuguese royal
family20 in the territory that is now Brazil, in 1808, fleeing Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal, was
a central temporal mark of ‘Brazilianness’. The presence of the Portuguese royal family has been
considered vital to Brazilian identity because Brazil was the only former colony to host ‘the leader’
of a global empire. The Portuguese royal family was also responsible for a series of negotiations
with the Spanish empire that led to the current Brazilian borders, especially those in Southern
Brazil.21
At the end of the 19th century, the proclamation of Brazil as a republic, through a military coup,
culminated the political efforts to construct ‘nationhood’. Throughout the nineteenth century,
literary figures such as José de Alencar contributed to the construction of Brazilianness through
a series of novels that romanticized the native indigenous population.22 One of the long-term
legacies of nineteenth-century nationalistic discourses was the constant use of the idea of ‘race’, and
‘racial-mixing’ to account for Brazilian distinctiveness.23 In the twentieth century, the powerful
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 35

construct of ‘race’, as well as sports, in particular, football, gained a prominent role in constructing
a distinct Brazilian national identity.24
In highlighting the distinctive characteristics of Brazilian players, social scientists and sports
commentators frequently point to Brazilians’ ‘dribbling abilities’, ‘ball control’ and ‘fast thinking’. It
is as if there is a ‘uniquely Brazilian’ way to play football. In 1938, Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto
Freyre connected Brazilian capoeira and football style with the country’s alleged racial mixture.
Commenting on Brazil’s successes facing the national Polish and Czechoslovak football teams,
Freyre termed Brazilian football as ‘mulatto football’.25
Freyre’s analysis of Brazilian football is consistent with his examination of Brazilian identity.26
Like previous novelists, Freyre saw Brazilian identity arising from racial mixture. Indigenous,
European and Black people mixed more or less harmoniously to form what we now consider
‘Brazilian people’.27 Sociologists Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes,28 Octávio Ianni, and Fernando
Henrique Cardoso29 have criticized Freyre’s anthropological and historical studies. These sociolo­
gists have examined persistent racial inequalities in housing, employment, income, health and
education to dismiss the claim that Brazil constitutes a so-called ‘racial democracy’, in which ‘races’
have ‘harmoniously mixed’.30
The study of football can provide fertile ground to test these ideas and debates, as numerous
Brazilian scholars have pointed out. The collective nature of the game, its status as Brazil’s ‘national
sport’, and the possibility of recognizing black footballers as stars, can inform both theories of
racism à la brésilienne, and contribute to debates about a more democratic Brazil. The inclusion of
black people ‘in the game’, in the early twentieth century, informs much of the contemporary debate
about racism in Brazilian football.31 Brazilian social scientist Mário Filho, in looking at ‘the past’
and the struggles black athletes faced in their early attempts to play football professionally,
‘historicize their present context’. As such, black and brown footballers, who have achieved celebrity
status, were seen to participate in a continuousstruggle against racism.
As I will analyse in the next section, my fieldwork provides a different perspective to these
debates. As I approached Brazilian athletes, I was gradually able to decouple ‘race’, ‘sports’ and
‘national identity’. As I got closer to footballers and futsal players, I could see that Brazilian social
scientists were not entirely wrong to suggest that there is a Brazilian ‘style of play’, but this ‘style’
should be analytically disentangled from both past struggles against racism and a racially-mixed
Brazilian identity

Is there a Brazilian ‘style of play’?

The Brazilian style of play, I argue, is constituted by a continuum between football and futsal.
Professional footballers tend to practice both of these sports in their apprentice years, until they
come to specialize in one. A recent BBC report32 lists at least 10 players on the Brazilian national
squad in the 2014 FIFA World Cup who had been registered at futsal teams in their childhood and
adolescence. Media discourses about Brazilian footballers also reveal the importance of futsal.33 In
media reports about Phillipe Coutinho,34 Romário, Oscar, Willian, Ronaldo, David Luiz, Rivelino,
Ronaldinho,35 and Neymar,36 futsal’s role in developing these footballers’ skills is seen as crucial.37
Alex Bellos38 has also noted:
The prodigal son of football’s Brazilian offspring is futsal, which has been so successful that it is estimated to be
the most practiced game in the country – more than football itself. Futsal is a five-a-side indoor football,
played on a basketball-size court, with twenty minutes each half and a small ball. Players need to be very fast,
versatile and have great domination of the ball. Futsal looks like a cross between ice-hockey and football. The
ball, which rarely bounces, is passed around like a spherical puck. The game is eulogised having nurtured
several of the most gifted Brazilian footballers, such as Rivelino and Zico. It is regarded as an incubator of the
Brazilian soul.

In this sense, far from being ‘innate’, a characteristic of a unique Brazilian ‘racial mixture’,
professional athletes’ skills are carefully cultivated in both indoor futsal courts and outdoor football
36 J. H. DE OLIVEIRA FILHO

pitches.39 At an interview with the Czech press on the occasion of a friendly football match between
the Czech Republic and Brazil on 26 March 2019, Felipe Conde,40 a migrant Brazilian futsal couch
in the Czech Republic, remarked,

Reporter: Will we see players at Eden Arena that you have had the opportunity to work with during your
career?

Felipe Conde: Yes, I personally know Philippe Coutinho,41 Alan,42 Lucas43 and others who couldn’t come
because of injury. I worked with many of them on the Vasco de Gama team, where they began their big
careers. They were very young, but were already considered the jewels of Brazilian football. For example, I met
Marcelo44 playing futsal for Fluminense. It is important to say that all these players were involved in futsal
since childhood [my translation].

Felipe Conde’s previous professional experience, as a coach on Vasco da Gama, a Rio de Janeiro-
based sports club, allowed him to meet the players he named. Conde also affirmed that futsal may be
more popular than football in Brazil. Conde does not comment more on this issue, but I propose
that one major reason for futsal’s popularity in Brazil is twentieth century urbanization processes.45
The role of Brazil’s urban landscape is rarely examined in sports migration studies. One exception is
Arlei Damo’s46 doctoral thesis that emphasizes the influence of street and grassroots football in the
constitution of Brazilian professional athletes in Brazil and France.
In my fieldwork, Brazil’s urban landscape seemed to appear only from afar, when athletes
mentioned their places of origin.47 Pedro’s life-history, however, struck me because of the impor­
tance of his home city of Rio de Janeiro. As a footballer working in the first-division in Israel, Pedro
told me that his family composed of military-men was of significant importance in his late
professionalization in football. As Pedro was growing up, his sports ‘talent’ was recognized through
futsal. He was selected to play for a private school’s futsal team. His career as a footballer only
became more serious when he was scouted by Flamengo staff to play futsal for the club. In the
beginning, Pedro only trained in futsal at Flamengo. When he began to train in both football and
futsal, his routine conflicted with his school. His mother then insisted he should quit Flamengo,48
and finish high-school. Only after he finished high-school did his mother become more supportive
of his attempts to construct a career in football. However, Pedro would not have been able to
achieve an international career in football if he would not have played in the ‘Favelas Cup’49 where
he met his current football agent.
In most life-histories of athletes, however, the urban landscape was usually mentioned only as
‘the street’, as it emerged in Damo’s analysis. However, because I sought to understand futsal and
football as interrelated sports, I soon discovered that ‘the street’ could lead professional athletes to
various school and career trajectories. Jessé, a futsal player currently working in Slovakia, told me he
was scouted to play for a private school futsal team on the streets of his home city of Fortaleza. Jessé
used the opportunity to play for the school team to both finish high school and pursue a career in
futsal. After acquiring experience as a futsal player in Ceará state, he migrated to Paraná, a state in
Southern Brazil.50 From there, Jessé was well positioned to pursue a migration route to Central and
Eastern Europe, and to the Middle East.
Because I conducted fieldwork with Brazilian migrant athletes, far from Brazil, my analytical
perspective had certain limits. The fact that I did not conduct fieldwork in Brazil was the main
limitation of my current analysis. Recently, the work of Enrico Spaggiari51 points to fruitful
dialogue between sports studies and urban studies. Analysing a local escolinha de futebol [football
academy] in Guaianases, a peripheral neighbourhood of São Paulo, Spaggiari deconstructs the
view of São Paulo’s peripheries as sites of crime and poverty. Spaggiari’s focus on both grassroots
football and urban studies provides a foundation for future research on sports in the urban
landscape.
In my fieldwork, personal histories and the neighbourhoods in which athletes’ grew up often
served as background for a reflection about athletes’ future plans. As Aristóteles, a futsal player in
Portugal who later moved to the Czech Republic, told me:
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 37

My process of adoption was like this, my mother adopted me when I was two-days old. She raised me to be just
like I am, a calm guy. I am grateful for the way she’s handled things. You know, the place where I live is a place
where there aren’t a lot of good things, you know what I mean? Drugs, criminals.

Instead of referring to Portugal or the Czech Republic as his current residency, Aristóteles’ narrative
merged his past and future, marking his present as a migrant athlete as only a temporary, although
valuable, experience.52 Aristóteles’ use of the present tense to refer to the place where [he] comes
from as the place he currently lives [‘where I live’] is telling of both his attachment to the periphery,
his adoptive parents, and his future plans.53 In his life-history, Aristóteles constantly remarked how
he missed going to his undergraduate physical education courses in Brazil. Before accepting an offer
from a Portuguese futsal team, he had played for a private university futsal team, with a scholarship
for undergraduate education as part of his benefits. Aristóteles’ life-history also illustrates the recent
growth of private higher-education institutions in Brazil, and how some of these intuitions have
tried to construct their brands through the establishment of corporate futsal teams.54
In the next sections, I will analyse other athletes’ life-histories illustrate the importance of
practicing both football and futsal in athletes’ routes to professionalization and migration.
Athletes’ practice of both of these sports, during their childhood and adolescence, opens both
football and futsal to ethnographic scrutiny as related sports industries. This helps reconsidering
race and racialization processes in the lives and careers of Brazilian migrant athletes.

Futsal and football: further thoughts on ‘race’

I understand that the exploration of an ethnographic continuum between football and futsal with
migrant athletes allows re-interpreting the relationship between Brazilian national identity, sports
and ‘race’. Even when Brazilian athletes see themselves as ‘white’, notions of ‘racial purity’ racialize
them, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In an informal conversation with Matias, a long-
term migrant futsal player in Hungary, he told me that he accepted an offer to play in the Czech
Republic but returned immediately to Hungary because none of his new Czech teammates would
greet him or shake his hand. Matias’ reception in the Czech Republic heightened his perception of
racism in the futsal industry, which I have identified in most Brazilian athletes’ life-histories in
precarious housing, contracts and employment conditions as forms of racializing Brazilian
athletes.55 Brazilian migrant futsal players often told me about precarious housing conditions,56
and found that the treatment they received inwork experiences in Central and Eastern Europe
compared unfavourably with those in other futsal leagues around the world. In these narratives,
I was able to see both local forms of expressing racism, and how migrants’ responded to it.
In analysing current racialization processes in futsal, the history of football migration offers an
instructive background. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Brazilian republican
government increased the influx of European migrants to Brazil by institutionalizing
a transnational migration policy designed to ‘whiten’ the Brazilian population through a process
of ‘racial mixing’. As a result of this policy, in the 1920s and 1930s, white Brazilian footballers with
European ancestry were allowed to return to Europe.57 While these Brazilian athletes were not
officially considered migrants, their place of birth often weighed against them. Migrant South
American footballers in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s were often portrayed as exotic, creative
and undisciplined.58
In contemporary football, Brazilian athletes confront stereotypes in daily life. At a friendly match
between a first-division and a second-division team, promoted to ‘test’ the possible ascension
of second-division footballers to the elite level in the Czech Republic, I heard comments that
Brazilian players have better technique than Czechs, while Czech footballers are more ‘disciplined.’
In referring to Joaquim, a Brazilian footballer in the Czech league, an U.S. sports agent indicated the
characteristics that made his ‘play a very “Brazilian” football’. According to the agent, Joaquim
would keep the ball at close range, showing great dribbling and ball control. While these supposedly
38 J. H. DE OLIVEIRA FILHO

‘typical’ ways of playing football could be analysed as a bodily technique,59 or even a bodily hexis,60
an embodied mythology, I would argue that from the point of view of sports administrators and
agents, these characteristics amount to a romanticized and profitable image of ‘Brazilianness’, as
footballers who learn to play ‘naturally’ on the streets. The ‘ball control’ exhibited by Brazilians was
often used as proof of their apprenticeship on the streets.
When I asked Joaquim about the beginning of his career as a footballer, I found a distinct
answer. He said he began practicing football more seriously in his ‘bairro’ [neighbourhood] in the
city of Belo Horizonte. In Joaquim’s narrative, his apprenticeship years in his ‘bairro’ were not at
all ‘natural’. He said his family enrolled him at a local ‘escolinha de futebol’ [football academy]
with the sole intent of allowing him to make friends in a new neighbourhood. His professiona­
lization was followed by the contacts that the local coach had with established football clubs in the
city of Belo Horizonte, Atlético Mineiro and Cruzeiro. He described his local football academy as
the first contact with systematic discipline through sports pedagogy. Joaquim’s remarks were
common among the Brazilian athletes I interviewed. When asked, Brazilian athletes distance
themselves from any discourse concerning ‘the naturalness’ of their skills. Similar exoticising
images of migrant athletes’ ‘natural sports skills’ have also been analysed by Agergaard and
Engh61 and Ungruhe.62
In this sense, far from constituting a settled issue in Brazil, the persistence of racism, the presence
of a majority black population and the legacy of the long-term slave trade,63 intersect with national
sports, football and futsal, in complex and varied forms. Media discourses, academics, and social
movements participate in ongoing discussions about the possibilities for Brazil to achieve a more
racially-equitable distribution in leadership positions, resources and democratic participation.64
The construction of ‘race’ and ‘Brazilianness’ as analytical categories in social studies of sports
requires careful attention. For instance, as my fieldwork in futsal developed, I often heard players
evoking their European ‘origins’ to claim ‘whiteness’. Futsal athletes made these claims to avoid
othering and racism, and to construct ‘Brazilianness’ as being compatible with their European
ancestry. In this sense, I interpreted athletes’ current discourses about the compatibility between
‘whiteness’ and ‘Brazilianness’ as a long-term consequence of the emergence of nationalism in the
Americas.65 As in the case of white Brazilians allowed to return to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s,
some contemporary Brazilian athletes tend to recognize that, when racial lines are clearly demar­
cated, as in the case of futsal players in Central and Eastern Europe, racialization includes all
Brazilian athletes, even those considered ‘white’ in their country of ‘origin’.

Final thoughts: the beautiful game and its dilemmas

The British describe what they see as a Brazilian style of play as ‘the beautiful game’.66 As with other
stereotypical images of nationhood, the images of Brazilianness and football usually portray
Brazilian athletes as child-like, and to embody a supposedly lost European ‘joy’. Brazilians’ ‘natural
joyfulness’, proudly shown in both carnival and football, would appear to be enough to continue
producing footballers for the world market.
While still subjects of debate among social scientists, the presence of racism and racial inequal­
ities in Brazil shows the limits and possibilities of the various methodological tools and ethical
standpoints social scientists have developed. Since the 1930s, Brazilian social scientists have been
debating the best possible methodologies for understanding ‘race’ and racism in the country. In an
effort to contribute to these debates, my fieldwork with migrant Brazilian athletes points to a novel
interpretation of the relationship between ‘Brazilianness’ and ‘sports’. I have argued that Brazilian
national identity, Brazilian migrants’ racialized athletic bodies, and the precarious working condi­
tions Brazilian migrants currently face should be viewed as distinct and interrelated processes. The
relationship between ‘Brazilianness’ and the racialization processes experienced by migrant
Brazilian athletes allows questioning the diverse and conflicting views of ‘race’ found within various
sports industries.
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 39

Notes
1. SeeKittleson, The Country of Football;Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way.
2. See Filho, O negro no futebol.
3. Futsal is a variation of football, played indoors. Football and futsal exhibit a ‘family resemblance’
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, aphorisms 66–7), since futsal was derived from football. Bellos
(Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way) depicts the emergence of futsal as a Uruguayan-Brazilian ‘invention’,
during the 1930s and 1940s. According to Bellos, Juan Carlos Ceriani from the Uruguayan branch of the
YMCA, was responsible for conceiving an ‘indoor football’. However, most of the rules, and sports equipment
that characterize ‘modern futsal’ were developed later in Brazil. Although futsal has been present in Brazil
since at least the 1940s, professionalization occurred much later. There has been a professional futsal league
since the late 1990s in Brazil.
4. Gellner, ‘Ernest Gellner’s Reply’.
5. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
6. Kittleson, The Country of Football.
7. Goldblatt, Futebol Nation.
8. Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way.
9. Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way; In Kittleson’s (Kittleson, The Country of Football) analysis, futsal is only
mentioned four times and always in connection to footballers’ careers. His analysis of both Ronaldinho’s and
Ronaldo’s careers only briefly mentions futsal. Goldblatt (Goldblatt,Futebol Nation) refers to futsal twice. In
his first mention, futsal and football are discussed as sports that officially banned women until 1979. In
his second allusion, he analysed clashes among football fans. These clashes also occurred at futsal courts.
10. In his ‘Program for a sociology of sports’, Bourdieu (Bourdieu,‘Program for a Sociology’, 155) wrote: ‘one of
the difficulties in the analysis of sporting practices resides in the fact that the nominal unity (of tennis, skiing,
soccer) that statistics assume (including the best and the most recent ones, such as those of the French
Ministry of Cultural Affairs) conceals a dispersion, more or less pronounced depending on the sport, of the
ways of practicing it. Also concealed is the fact that this dispersion increases when the growth in the number of
practitioners (which can result solely from a greater incidence of practice among those categories that already
practice) is accompanied by a social diversification of the practitioners. Such is the case with tennis, whose
nominal unity hides the fact that, under the same name, one finds ways of playing that are as different as cross-
country skiing, mountain touring, and downhill skiing are in their own domain’. In my current research, I try
to follow the dispersion of practices of both futsal and football, as well as the diversity of sports practitioners,
through an analysis of athletes’ life-histories. Without establishing an a priori link between football and the
working-classes, I try to understand various aspects that might influence athletes’ professionalization in either
football or futsal, highlighting athletes’ agency in both of these sports industries.
11. Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the World System’;Hannerz, ‘Being There’.
12. Bertaux and Kohli, ‘The Life Story Approach’.
13. Benney and Hughes,‘Of Sociology’.
14. Bourdieu, ‘Understanding’.
15. The universe of futsal has been more open to my presence. I have been able to follow futsal training sessions
because of a connection I made with a Brazilian coach in the Czech Republic. I scheduled formal interviews
with futsal players during league breaks, or before or after training routines.
16. Connell, ‘Lives of the Businessmen’;Crapanzano, ‘On the Writing’.
17. Atkinson, ‘The Life Story Interview’,Becker, ‘Interviewing Medical Students’; Becker, Evidence.
18. The establishment of Portuguese as the official language in the territory that is now Brazil depended on the
expulsion of the Jesuit religious missions in the eighteenth century. Until then, Jesuits had tried to spread an
artificial language, created by the priests. This artificial language was a mixture between Tupi, the language
spoken by indigenous people on the ‘Brazilian’ coast, and Latin grammar. This language was known as
Nheengatu, or good language. For an extensive analysis of the linguistic politics surrounding Nheengatu, see
Freire (Freire,Rio Babel).
19. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
20. The presence of the Portuguese royal family in Rio de Janeiro seems to explain why Brazilian nationalism
developed later than in other countries in Latin America – an issue examined by Benedict Anderson. The
current Brazilian imaginary is still very much tied to 1808.
21. See Schwarczand Starling, Brasil: Uma biografia.
22. Schwarcz, ‘Racismo no Brasil’.
23. The romantic nineteenth century novels have largely served to forge an image of ‘one mestizo Brazilian
people’.
24. Goldblatt, Futebol Nation;Kittleson, The Country of Football; Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way; In the
twentieth century, cinema was also used to construct a shared sense of Brazilianness. Since the Vargas era,
commercial agreements between Brazil and the United States stated that the exhibition of American movies
40 J. H. DE OLIVEIRA FILHO

should be preceded by a short Brazilian-made movie. The establishment of EMBRAFILME, a state-owned

cinema company responsible for producing and distributing Brazilian movies indicates the importance of
audio-visual products as technologies of nationhood. See for instance Bernardet (Bernardet,Cinema
Brasileiro) for a history of Brazilian cinema.
25. See Freyre, ‘Foot-ball mulato’;DaMatta, A bola corre mais.
26. Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala.
27. See also Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro.
28. Fernandes, A introdução do
29. Cardoso, Negros em Florianópolis.
30. While sociologists have usually used quantitative methodologies to understand racism in Brazil, Pierre
Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, in their contribution to debates over ‘race’ and ‘racism’ in Brazil, have used
the concept of ‘cultural imperialism’ to analyse what they saw as the global spread of particular American
concepts of ‘race’ around the world, and especially in Brazil. See Bourdieu and Wacquant (Bourdieu and
Wacquant,‘On the Cunning’).
31. Filho, O negro no futebol.
32. See Smith, ‘Futsal the Game’.
33. Classic works on sports migration have also useddiscourses found in the sports press to understand sports
migration and the relationship between nationalism and sports (see Klein, Sugarball: The American Game;
Maguire,Global Sport: Identity, Societies; Rial, ‘Porque todos os’).
34. ‘Philippe Coutinho’.
35. Smith, ‘Futsal the Game Behind Brazil’s Superstars’.
36. Beting, Neymar: Conversa.
37. The recent acquisitions by Real Madrid of Vinícius Jr. and Rodrygo illustrate the continuum between futsal
and football in Brazil. Both athletes began their professional careers at futsal academies (The Coaches
Voice,‘La Liga Player Watch’; Alves, ‘‘The Closest to Neymar’).
38. Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way.
39. See also Vasconcellos Ribeiroand Dimeo,‘The Experience of Migration’. Wagno de Freitas, a footballer in the
1970s, told Stela Tredice, in an interview for the People’s Museum: ‘Look, my life changed between the age of
fifteen and sixteen. When I reached sixteen, I was already an athlete. So I had to part ways from my childhood
peers, we used to play futsal, we used to play on the field, I used to play a lot. I was obliged to leave my peers.
We were already drinking beers, going out, we wanted to date, all that, and I, as a professional athlete, I was
training all the time. Alcohol and partying did not go well together, so you have to get away from your friends,
and I ended up losing my friends.’
40. Dejnožka, ‘Kouč Chrudimi’.
41. Philippe Coutinho, an attacking midfielder, currently plays for Bayern Munich and has played in four of the
world’s five most prestigious football leagues. For more information on Philippe Coutinho’s career see:
https://www.transfermarkt.com/philippe-coutinho/profil/spieler/80444
42. Allan is currently playing on Napoli. Allan plays as a central and defensive mid-fielder. For more information
on Allan’s career, see: https://www.transfermarkt.com/allan/profil/spieler/126422
43. Lucas is currently playing for Tottenham Hotspur F.C. For more information on Luca’s career, see: https://
www.transfermarkt.com/lucas-moura/profil/spieler/77100
44. Marcelo is currently playing for Real Madrid. For more information about Marcelo see: https://www.
transfermarkt.com/marcelo/profil/spieler/44501
45. Alex Bellos (Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way) also mentions the lack of space in Brazilian cities for football
pitches as crucial for the establishment of both futsal and other varieties of football, such as ‘society football’.
Bellos also analysed how the urban landscape changed in the late nineteenth century, especially in Rio de
Janeiro and São Paulo.
46. Damo, ‘Do dom à profissão’.
47. Wagner and Ward (Wagner and Ward,‘Urbanization and Migration’) have remarked that by the 1970s,
80 percent of the Brazilian population lived in cities. The increase in Brazil’s urban population was driven by
internal migration from rural areas. Due to the increasing importance of rural-urban migration, and the
growth of cities, during the 1970s and 1980s there was vibrant growth in urban anthropology studies in the
country, particularly at the University of São Paulo. Ruth Cardoso, Alba Zaluar, Eunice Durham, Peter Fry
and Teresa Caldeira are among the most prominent researchers in the field of urban anthropology in Brazil.
48. Rio de Janeiro based Flamengo is one of the richest and most popular football clubs in Brazil. Pedro’s life-
history was surprising to me because his early success at Flamengo did not persuade his mother to allow him
to pursue a career in football. She insisted he quit football to finish high school. Another striking feature of
Pedro’s narrative was that his mother’s insistence on his studies represented a form of caring for him.
49. The Favelas Cup has been part of an effort of ‘favelados’ (slum dwellers) to constitute a broad-base urban
movement throughout Rio de Janeiro. This movement has been accompanied by intermittent efforts to
urbanize and integrate favelas to the city of Rio de Janeiro. For a detailed analysis of the history of urbanization
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 41

movements in at least two favelas in Rio de Janeiro, see Gay (Gay,Popular Organization and Democracy). For
a global perspective on slums, see Davis (Davis,‘Planet of Slums’).
50. Paraná, a state in Southern Brazil is usually regarded by futsal athletes as having the best and highest-
paying state futsal league in the country. Migrating from leagues located in the North and Northeast states
to work in the Southeast and South Brazil is usually regarded as the first step to an international futsal
career.
51. Spaggiari, Família joga bola.
52. See Rial, ‘Rodar: A Circulação’.
53. In an attempt to break with the categories of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’, Arlei Damo (Damo,‘O uso dos
termos’) has called attention to the social logics of practicing football in Brazil. These social logics would
include institutions that are usually left out of the analysis by social scientists, such as schools. I have
incorporated Damo’s contribution in my attempt to construct life-history interviews.
54. Marques and Marchi Júnior (Marques and Marchi Júnior,‘Migration for Work’) have found that the
financial instability of futsal clubs is a constant factor in the lives of Brazilian athletes. They analysed the
discourse of futsal athletes and conclude athletes tend to devalue education as a path worth pursuing,
emphasizing the importance of sports. In my fieldwork, however, I have found that Brazilian athletes
usually develop very ambiguous feelings towards education. At least four futsal athletes, Jessé, Eduardo,
Aristóteles, and Renan, depended on scholarships to begin their professional careers in sports. The first
footballer that I came in contact with, Joaquim, told me that he watched his cousin’s PhD defence in
Europe. Joaquim told me this story to emphasize that he understood the value of a PhD thesis, and he was
willing to participate in my fieldwork. Pedro also told me about his mother’s pressures on him to complete
secondary school. From my point of view, the ambiguous feelings towards education arise from the
precarity of athletic careers. Athletes are constantly advised to make multiple investments in life in case
a professional sports career fails.
55. Matias told me this story after we both witnessed sports fans’ violent clashes at a futsal court in Hungary. I told
him how surprised I was to see how violent Hungarian fans could be. In our conversation about violence,
racism and sports, he offered reasons he would not live in the Czech Republic. Implicit in his account of
racism in the Czech Republic was a comparison with my situation, a black academic at Charles University in
Prague.
56. For an analysis of athletes’ complaints about housing in Central and Eastern Europe see Oliveira Filho
(Oliveira Filho, Athletic migrant religiosities).
57. Dietschy, ‘Football Players’ Migrations’.
58. See Lanfranchiand Taylor,Moving with the Ball.
59. Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’.
60. Bourdieu, ‘The Peasant and His Body’.
61. Agergaard and Engh,‘Globalization, Migration’.
62. Ungruhe, ‘Natural Born Sportsmen’.
63. Chalhoub, A força da escravidão; Chalhoub, Visões da Liberdade.
64. See Fry, ‘Cultures of Difference’;DaMatta, ‘Digressão: A fábula’.
65. Anderson, Imagined Communities
66. Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dino Numerato for his comments and inspiring criticism. I would also like to thank Marcin
Lubaś, Marta Klekotko, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska and Małgorzata Sacha for welcoming at Jagiellonian
University’s sociology department. Mayra Valcarcel’s and Jeffrey Hoff’s constant readings of previous manuscript
versions, insights and comments provided invaluable critical remarks to help bring my writing to its present
form.

Disclosure statement
This work was supported by CAPES number 88,881.171699/2018-01 full Ph.D. scholarship

Funding
This work was supported by the CAPES [88881.171699/2018-01] and SVV grant [260 596].
42 J. H. DE OLIVEIRA FILHO

ORCID
José Hildo De Oliveira Filho http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8774-1447

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