VIBRANT - Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology E-ISSN: 1809-4341 [email protected] Associação Brasileira de Antropologia Brasil Sander Damo, Arlei The Training of Football Players in Brazil VIBRANT - Vibrant Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, vol. 6, núm. 2, diciembre, 2009, pp. 29- 49 Associação Brasileira de Antropologia Brasília, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=406941908003 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative The Training of Football Players in Brazil Arlei Sander Damo1 Brazil’s capacity to continuously foster football talents is internationally acknowledged. It is rightly said that Brazil is a bottomless celeiro de craques (storehouse of football stars). But this metaphor might be outdated, given the changes in professional training in recent decades. Rather than think- ing of Brazil as a storehouse for supplying players ready to be recruited by the market, as the term celeiro suggests, what is seen in practice is a tightly articulated network of agencies and agents aimed at turning youngsters into professionals. Training centers, whether autonomous or linked to traditional football clubs, have a leading role in this process. Their success stems from the abundant supply of teenagers and children available to the networks spe- cialized in recruiting and selecting these talents, the vital technologies for improving them, experts in the coordinated management of such processes and other factors. Since some of the football players trained in Brazil are destined to the international market, the special characteristics of this flow should be high- lighted. The sources used herein are non-ethnographic; they were published by the agencies involved in intermediating transactions or even by the spe- cialized media. The data is part of an ongoing study aimed at understanding the flow of players and images across national borders.2 The first part of this article lends support to the second, whose main source is ethnographic re- search on the training of players conducted between 2001 an d 2005, in which 1 Professor, Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Federal University at Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. 2 Since football players are at times treated as individuals and at other times as commodities, I use the terms “training” and “production” interchangeably. In describing the pedagogic investments made in specialized centers, the term ‘training’ is undoubtedly more convenient. However, in order to unders- tand the logic of club directors, and especially of the players’ agents, the term “production” is preferred. 29 I compared the models prevalent in Brazil and France.3 In that study, I showed that in order to become a professional player, more is needed than a natural inclination towards the practice – what some call a “gift” and others “tal- ent”. In other words, the Brazilian success in grooming and training players, notable for both its quantity and quality, is achieved thanks to a network of multiple and relatively well-articulated devices that go beyond the limits of the football field. The market for Brazilian pés-de-obra 4 Football players have been crossing borders for quite some time. The very dissemination of football association, whose genesis dates back to mid nine- teenth century Britain, was the work of amateur players. These were for the most part expert technicians working in railroads, electrical utilities, the textile industry, ports, banks and other businesses marking British commer- cial and industrial dominance at the time. In the case of Brazil, the promo- tion and popularization of football was also championed by the sons of lo- cal elites, especially those returning from studies in Europe, where they had learned to enjoy that sport. There are, however, salient differences between the flux of professional players with which I am concerned here and that of 100 or 150 years ago. When amateur competition was predominant, player transfers were not me- diated by money. The players did not – or were not supposed to – receive any pecuniary retribution for their sports performance. Progressively, amateur- ism lost momentum and players, especially those with less means, began to accept compensation for their time and effort on the field. In the 1930s, football enjoyed a well-established public following in many of Europe’s and South America’s large cities; so it became possible for clubs to charge football fans for their tickets. Part of the money collected was used to at- tract players from smaller, or even rival, clubs. This eroded the basis of 3 In order to avoid citing my own work, I refer the reader to my Ph.D. thesis (Damo, 2005) and to the book published thereafter (Damo, 2007) for a more extensive and better-documented discussion of virtually all arguments included here about the training of players. 4 The term pés-de-obra, a neologism in Portuguese, is derived from the common phrase mãos-de-obra (manpower, or labour power), substituting mãos (hands) for pés (feet) to highlight the labor relations involved in playing football. 30 vibrant v.6 n.2 arlei sander damo amateurism. Many of its advocates, especially the more orthodox, abandoned football for other sports. There were even cases in which clubs banned foot- ball altogether, attempting to forestall what they saw as degeneration. In Brazil, an agreement made in 1933 among clubs in the two leading cit- ies of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is considered the watershed in the tran- sition from amateurism to professionalism. Part of the reason for the deal made by the football club directors was that the advocates of professional- ism had finally achieved the hegemony towards which they had been strug- gling for over a decade. Another factor was the need felt by Brazilian clubs to protect themselves from ever-bolder Uruguayan and Argentinean competi- tors. They had already lured Domingos da Guia and Leônidas da Silva, top Brazilian stars at the time, with appealing and regularly-paid wages. Given the increasing threat of a drain of Brazilian stars, the strategy was to legalize the payment of football salaries in Brazil. Clubs established criteria for regulating the transfer of athletes in order to prevent plundering by foreign clubs. The contracting party was respon- sible for paying compensation in case no agreement was reached with the player’s-“owner” or manager. It was also established that an athlete could not play for more than one club at a time. In practice, this turned him into an immaterial asset of the club to which he was attached. The deal struck by the club officials allowed only a unilateral breach of contract by the employer. If the athlete abandoned the club because of a dispute, the club had no way to require his return. It could, however, withhold the player’s release certificate. This would prevent him from signing a contract with another club. Inspired by practices in other countries, this apparently simple mechanism grew into the so-called “pass law” – which created a polemic that lingers until today, albeit now disguised under the new label “federative rights.”5 Although the football market was still very incipient in the 1930’s, the agreement among club officials turned athletes into commodities. They could be bought and sold according to the interests and purchasing power of the clubs. A form of barter, however, prevailed. A deal made in 1954 be- tween two clubs from Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s Southern most state, illustrates this point well. Grêmio, at the time an already solid and nationally- 5 The safeguard mechanisms were almost simultaneously adopted by all leagues wherever football was already consolidated during the 1930’s. For further details on the Brazilian process, see Caldas (1990) and Pereira (2000). the training of football players in brazil 31 known club, hired the fullback Airton from Força e Luz, a modest team spon- sored by the public utility company that ran the city’s streetcars. The pay- ment included part of Gremio’s old stadium bleachers. Airton, the player, was promptly nicknamed pavilhão [bleacher pavilion] by local, sportswriters, commentators and team supporters. Inclusion of second-hand sports materi- al – balls, uniforms, etc – in transactions for athletes between top and smaller clubs was routine until not long ago. Also common was the direct trading of players – one for one, two for one, and so forth. The current stage of player commoditization, which corresponds to the consolidation of football as a highly profitable spectacle, gradually crystal- lized after the 1950s. Europe’s economic recovery was a decisive factor, but the transnational articulation of agencies for controlling and managing foot- ball, such as FIFA and its subsidiaries, was even more important for the de- velopment of a football expansion policy, driven by capitalist ethics. Although the commoditization of athletes is our focus here, it is worth remarking that the consumption of goods associated with football is much broader. The current situation can be considered in terms of three large ex- change circuits: a) a market of symbolic goods, composed of the spectacles in the field and their reproduction in the media, including daily news reports; b) a market of players, that is, a circuit of buying and selling athletes, as op- posed to a market for players,; c) a market of material goods, involving the equipment used to play football by both laymen and professionals, especially fashions inspired by the sport.6 In this new landscape, Brazilian athletes play a paramount role – quite differently from what happens with the sporting events and products developed here. In any case, even the burgeoning export of players is influenced by certain variables that are worth explaining.