Dando tratos à bola: futebol e Brasil

Abstract

Football, an elite sport in its early days, was soon “taken up” by lower classes. Incorporated into a melting pot consisted mainly of black and mixed-blood people living outside the “official society” – the political, citizenship and market domains – football was reinvented from another type of body intelligence. At the sametime, it set in motion the forces of oral tradition and of the emergent mass culture, and has become a powerful mythical narrative of the country. From the 1930s on, the sport has intertwined with the modern myth of the mixed-race people’s nation to such an extent that it has become the myth itself. Acting simultaneously, its legends ofsuccess and failure have aroused collective wishes and fears; and they bring forth inside the field, through plays and goals, the possibilities for the country as a nation and for Brazilians as a people.