Decolonialidade e futebol: o reconhecimento da identidade na formação do atleta

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate how the power relations configured throughout the constitution of the modern world still reflect today in the configuration of economic and social structures of the country, having as central focus the scenario of Brazilian football. From 1500, with the arrival of the Portuguese in the Brazilian lands, an intense process of colonization will be initiated, which will be marked by aggressive economic exploitation and segregationist cultural domination. The Lusitanian invests in the colony will have as priority the interests of the Crown and the centers of European power, which will make of Brazil an economic appendage for the production of raw material, product disposal and supply of precious metals. This economic base aimed at foreign interests has created obstacles to the country's internal development, which is still reflected in its economy, which remains dependent on the central European countries. In order, to consolidate this colonial domination project, the Portuguese matrix will use mechanisms of cultural subjugation to impose a Eurocentric standard of living on the new lands and eliminate traces of social manifestation of non-white populations (Indians and blacks) who will compose the Brazilian society. These colonialist actions will be justified by a false discourse of modernity and concepts of raciality, rooted in the world historical narrative will still reflect today on the structural bases of the country, concretizing a process of coloniality, that is, of colonial domination that extrapolates the landmarks of political and territorial independence of the colonized nations. The research seeks to bring the intimate relationship that football, an environment that extrapolates the sport scope and becomes a social environment in Brazil, would have with these colonial structures of power. It is also proposed a search for the decoloniality of this sport, which, being a democratic space that aggregates the different Brazilian races, could be used as a form of identity recognition. However, a decolonial project would only be possible if started in the bases of training of children in football, which requires a reflection on the very way the basic categories are being formed in the country.