Unit 41
Brazilian Football Fans
Brazil is famous for its carnivals, beautiful women and football. You can change your wife but you cannot change your mother and your football club. If you are a real fan, you will cherish your team second only to your mother and be more faithful to your team than to your own spouse. Consequently, once you have chosen your team you will despise the other teams for as long as you live. If a team other than yours is playing against a team from St. Paulo, for example, in the finals of a national championship, you will simply ignore the entire event. Under all circumstances, a true fan will only acknowledge the existence of his own team.
The unresolved question is just how a fan chooses a team. Is it purely random? Or are there social, psychological, economic and or political factors involved? Given the central importance of the sport of football in Brazilian life, this is not a frivolous contemplation.
The word passion is never far away from any attempt to get under the skin of football in South America. There is no lack of evidence to suggest a growing passion for football in South America. Football established itself in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay less as a competition between cities, more on the basis of club rivalry within cities.
The political, economic and cultural uses of football in Latin America are summarized as "a device" in the quest for national identity; as an arena "constructively" manipulated by politicians and generals; as an agent of political, socio-economic, and cultural elites in order to stunt working-class and popular consciousness and revolt; as a rare potential "bottom-up" medium of challenging dominant perceptions in order to create more suitable psychological and cultural conditions for social change; and as a bodily, psychic, and spiritual extension of the individual and community senses ... The dominant orientation of Latin American football, especially at the professional level, has been towards a nationalistic, authoritarian, class-based, and gender-specific manipulation of the sport by political, military, socio-economic, and even cultural elites.
In the early years of the century, old-style establishments -- factory management boards and the like-representatives of Latin American's elite, made attempts to form relationships with working-class. At times this took the form of patronage, with an established club funding an affiliated local team. At other times, it took on other dimensions -- managers encouraging the creation of football sides among the workers to foster company loyalty and, perhaps more importantly, to divert employees' attentions away from the more damaging spirit of industrial unrest. In these early relationships formed between the elite and the masses in football, can be seen the origins of one of the most compelling arguments in the analysis of football in Latin America: that football serves as an opiate of the masses, an instrument of mass control. |