Introduced to the region by the British, football has become the most popular sport in much of Latin America. Requiring little in the way of equipment–a ball, some more or less flat ground–it is played by kids, young people, and adults throughout the region. Local clubs attract and generate fierce partisanship, while national teams, which have had remarkable success on the world stage (Brazil has won the FIFA World Cup five times, more than any other nation; Uruguay and Argentina have won it twice each), are the focus of enthusiastic national pride. Stars such as Pelé and Maradona (arguably the greatest players ever to grace a football pitch) elicit devotion and adulation, not least when they seem to incarnate a narrative arc that takes them from rags to riches on the basis of skill, artistry, and perhaps also cunning.
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- Galeano, Eduardo. Soccer in Sun and Shadow (selection). Trans. Mark Fried. London: Verso, 1998.
- Sant’Anna, Sérgio. "In the Mouth of the Tunnel". Idols and Underdogs: An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction. Ed. Shawn Stein and Nicolás Campisi. Glasgow: Freight, 2016. 53-83.
Eduardo Galeano videos
Gol:
Thinking Football Film Festival 2012 – Eduardo Galeano:
Fútbol y dictadura: El Mundial 78 con la mirada de Eduardo Galeano – #FútbolPasión – Osvaldo Ardiles:
Eduardo Galeano sobre el Maracanazo de Uruguay ante Brasil 1950 – #FútbolPasión – Alcides Ghiggia:
Fútbol y racismo, por Eduardo Galeano – #FútbolPasión – Entrevista con Lilian Thuram (Francia):
Eduardo Galeano in Conversation: Children of the Days:
Football videos
History of Football: South American Superpowers
Lineker in Brazil: The Beautiful Game
Gods of Brazil: Pelé and Garrincha
David Goldblatt – Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer:
Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ Was More Than Just A Goal:
Cine Chileno: Historias de Futbol. Pelicula Completa 1997:
Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.
- Bar-On, T. "The Ambiguities of Football, Politics, Culture, and Social Transformation in Latin America". Sociological Research Online 4.2 (1997): 1-17.
- Bellos, Alex. Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
- Elsey, Brenda. Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
- Elsey, Brenda, and Joshua Nadel. Futbolera : A History of Women and Sports in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019.
- Filho, Mario. The Black Man in Brazilian Soccer. Trans. Jack A. Draper III. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
- Nadel, Joseph H. Fútbol! Why Soccer Matters in Latin America. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014.
- Salazar-Sutil, Nicolás. “Maradona Inc: Performance Politics off the Pitch”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.4 (December 2008): 441–458.
- Wilson, Jonathan. Angels with Dirty Faces: How Argentinian Soccer Defined a Nation and Changed the Game Forever. New York: Nation Books, 2016.
- "The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty" (Galeano 2). What's the relationship between football and aesthetics, on the one hand, and commerce, on the other?
- How and why does Galeano focus on what we might call "ideal types": the goalkeeper, the fan, the manager, and so on? What's the relationship between the individual and their role(s) in football?
- What's the relationship between spectator (or fan) and player in football?
- What are the various ways in which football helps to construct or support a sense of individual or group identity?
- Sant'Anna tells a story of a (disastrous) 7-1 defeat. What's the importance of winning in football (or even, in sport more generally)?
- What's the relationship between the coach and the players in Sant'Anna's story?
Football questions
who holds the power here? Is it the fans or the players?
Has football changed, or have the ways we view it, follow it and think of it changed? Is the game still the same game, whether it is played casually on a street or professionally in a stadium?
what do you associate soccer with?
Should the ways in which culture has affect sports be publicized so that more people would be able to relate or view it more openly?
Is it important for the moral of games such as soccer for communities to come together?
How can soccer reflect culture, and how may culture reflect soccer? Which has more impact?
Why do you think the reality of each agent in football is being portrayed negatively, even if the author himself is a fan of football?
As you can tell from my post I think that the author [Galeano] was overly dramatic throughout the article. Do you think that his dramatics enhanced or worked against the overall message that the article was trying to portray?
Has the way we consume sports changed the way players behave? How much more pressure do they have to endure because of how televised and profitable their sport is?
If one-day football magically ceases to exist, what changes do you imagine would happen in Latin America’s societies?
is football itself changed as our view of it and feelings about it change? What will happen to the game, and it’s fans, if football continues to be industrialized/monetized?
Were there similar class associations with sports where you grew up? Did you find yourself pushed in a certain direction with participation or opinion due to those connotations?
Why are some places more invested in sports than others?
Notes from class discussion (March 17, 2021)
