Jogando na retranca: a racionalidade neoliberal nos discursos e práticas do futebol-negócio brasileiro

Abstract

In a context of continuous adaptation of football to business modes of management, neoliberalism, interpreted as a rationality, aims to produce a new football culture. This research aimed to understand how the discourses and practices of this football-business have been produced, reproduced and elaborated by different groups of agents of Brazilian football. To fulfill this objective, the research carried out documentary analysis from various sources, produced directly and indirectly by investment agencies focused on sports analysis, specialized press, club leaders and fan sectors in Brazil. It was observed how neoliberal rationality had an impact on different aspects of Brazilian football. At its discursive level, the business language is widely reproduced in an uncritical way, especially among sports journalists and club leaders, but also among sectors of the fans. On an organizational level, the advent of the SAF materialized the neoliberal solution to the crisis of the associative clubs, establishing itself as a business and management model to be copied. It was also found that new fan subjectivities have been molded with the objective of producing a fan-consumer subject adapted to this new football culture. It is concluded that, with the focus on the suppression of politics, perceived as the activity capable of producing tensions to an established order, neoliberalism has managed to establish itself, until this moment, as the hegemonic order in the football field