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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