Brazilian soccer: the style, the game, the history

Abstract

Since the 1938 World Cup, the Brazilian way of soccer has increasingly become textualized and stereotyped. Journalistic, marketing, even historical and anthropological discourses all contributed to naturalize Brazilian performances on the soccer fields, either relating them to some assumed Afro-brazilian’s “innate” bodily skills or to further Afrobrazilian bodily practices – such as samba or capoeira. All this was so intense that nowadays the Brazilian way of playing soccer is an explicit form of cultural life, which internationally reflects the global image of Brazil. The aim of this paper is to present a semiotic perspective on the process of formation and discoursivization of the Brazilian way of soccer. More specifically, we will seek to describe how is the result of the interplay among different glocal layers: 1. the rise and the fall of the amateur soccer, played by the elites of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and marked by the assumption of European trends and habits; 2. a local interpretation and application of the game rules, particularly the charge rule, which was strictly interpreted as a foul (favouring the development of a less physical way of playing); 3. the reconfiguration of the social and ethnic tension – that pervaded Brazil after the slavery abolition – inside (and then outside) the soccer fields; 4. the discursive globalization – via
soccer – of the Afro-brazilian characters (such as ginga) in the whole Brazilian culture.