Class, Ethnicity, and Color in the Making of Brazilian Football, José Sergio Leite Lopes

Brazil is the titan of international soccer tournaments; it boasts more FIFA World Cup victories than any other competing soccer nation. As the author Lopes begins, soccer has been globalized in Brazil. There has been a transition from “national to multinational” and Brazilian athletes are entering new spheres of athletic competition in East Asia- such as Japan (Lopes 240). This worldwide expansion, I believe, is oftener studied by economist, sociologists, and historians too often in the modern context. There is much validity to suggest that this connectivity, as we know it today, emerged after the resurgence of neo-liberalism in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s policies of deregulation and privatization. However, Brazil’s history of football, the now indispensable feature of the country’s culture, displays the same notions of globalization.

Football was brought to Brazil by the European immigrants long before the era of Reagan and Thatcher. In fact, British influence played the most direct and influential role in bringing football to South America. Educated students of respectable lineage in Brazil’s peerage system began to form clubs. Soccer at this point was a form recreation reserved for the elite of Brazilian society. The author notes how the clubs were places for “urban socializing” and that soccer’s expansion was the result of the efforts of “scholarized urban elites” (Lopes 243). As Professor Xiangming Chen notes in his book on urban studies, cities are places of cosmopolitan activity; fast-changing popular culture is born in cities and is modified in cities, mostly. Soccer’s evolution in the cities of Brazil, such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, is consistent with this verifiable truth that urban areas are the centers of budding cultural developments.

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Soon after, children and adolescents from blue collar backgrounds were able to view the games as stadiums and events reached more depressed areas of the city. More importantly, factories and corporations promoted football as leisure activity between managers and labor. Many lower class supporters became fiery footballers. Bangú Club, originally founded by educated Englishmen, became notable for its romanticization of the “worker-player” (Lopes 245). The team Vasco da Gama, founded by Portuguese immigrants, became rather successful through hiring players from working-class suburbs. I found this feature of Brazilian football interesting in that during a time when elitism governed social traditions in the 19th century, there were vehicles available whereby the plebiscite could elevate himself. This feature is particularly notable given that this mobility took place in a country with an aristocracy. The Empire of Brazil dissolved in 1889, during waves of Italian immigration, along with it titles of nobility.

I will discuss in more detail Italian influence on Brazilian soccer in the next section; however, equally important is the treatment of blacks and mulattos in soccer. Certainly, the elitism in Brazilian football extended negatively to black people. As Discovery Atlas, the documentary series, discusses, Brazil is a very diverse nation with a large portion of multi-racial denizens. Many are descended from African slaves, while others are descended from the offspring of native Amazonians and European colonizers. White athletes were given preferential treatment in soccer. Exclusivity was rampant in all clubs. Blacks were also scapegoats for World Cup defeats, such as the loss in the 1950 World Cup. I find racism nonsensical in sports in particular. Much talent is to be found in minorities; to disenfranchise their ability to perform results in such loss of potential in victory-power and makes the recruitment process inefficient.

Italian Immigrants, Brazilian Football, and the Dilemma of National Identity, Gregg Bocketti

Brazilian football would not be the entrenched institution it is today without the influence of Italian migrants. To begin, Italian made their way across the Atlantic in search of employment mostly. Many were left with working in laborious agricultural positions. However, as more arrived, they began to form their distinct place and identity in Brazilian society. They formed neighborhoods, churches, schools, and football clubs. They explored ways they could integrate themselves into Brazil through sports. At this time, the football establishment in Brazil looked to Great Britain as a model and emulated the British style of athleticism. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro becomes nuclei of nascent soccer activity.

The firm elitist caste in Brazil presented obstacles to Italian inclusion in football. The historic club Palestra Itália formed to provide ethnically Italian players, coaches, or others interested in football a place to discover themselves. Sociologically, Italian immigrants in Brazil, the peak of migration in the 1890s, follow similar patterns of immigrant settlement. Their trends show how humans find comfort in solidarity with those they find similar. Forming ethnic enclaves, which Italians did, illustrates that. Also, this pattern, as replicated by scores of other immigrants, illustrates that as a group of foreigners becomes more rooted in an area, the more integrated into a society they become as generations are born.

Italians developed an economic presence too. Many businesses were opened by Italians in the southeast of Brazil and much money flowed into Palestra Itália. The football club asserted ” a distinct identity” (Bocketti 285). The team, besides from promoting sports, became a method by which Italians achieved economic and social viability in South America. It celebrated Italian holidays and donated to Italian charities. Clearly, the club was invested in preserving its cultural image as an Italian organization. Overtime though, the club would become just as much Brazilian as it was Italian.

During the fascist era in Italy, alien coaches and players were rooted out of soccer in Italy to racially purify the sport. Because of the difficulty Italian players encountered when finding employment in Brazil, many returned to their ancestral homeland to fill the vacuum left by Mussolini’s purges. As Brazil lost many of its finest athletes, the campaign to professionalize football in South America gained increased momentum. Nationalist fervor took place as the patriotism of Italians footballers in Brazil was questioned. However, most of these players considered themselves Brazilian as much Italian. Nevertheless, I believe these key points illustrate the highly successful integration of Italians into Brazil as well as the profound impact Italians had on the professionalization and expansion of football in the country.

Additional Quotations

1. “football could be adopted as a pedagogical and disciplinary technique for ‘total institutions,’ a technique invented by the elite English boarding schools but applicable to shaping working-class youth in various types of institutions” (Lopes 246).

2. “it [football] established an identity between players and the public, united in their adherence to a common project of social emancipation through sport” (Lopes 256).

3. “Sport was one site where immigrants and their descendants could find the means with which to negotiate the integrative process largely process upon their own terms” (Bocketti 302).

Questions

1. To what extent is Brazilian football a native institution of that country or merely an import from Europeans?
2. Was football Italians’ way of preserving their national origin as Italians or more of a way of remaining competitive and integrating in a foreign land? Was that integration voluntary or merely a product of the time passing?
3. What is the tipping point that causes the masses or those in authority to realize that racism, against blacks in Brazil’s case, is unjust?