British economic interests in Latin
America, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, transported the game the English
called “football” to the Americas. Some scholars, such as Andreas Campomar in
his book Golazo! The Beautiful Game from
the Aztecs to the World Cup: The Complete History of How Soccer Shaped Latin
American, allege that the native Aztecs played a version of soccer well
before the nineteenth century. Players would use the lower half of their bodies
to propel a ball through a ring, and Campomar notes that the ball game was
“part ritual and part recreation, on which large wagers would be placed” (3).
But the game we know today was the result of British military and economic presence
in the region. Britain had interests in beef from Argentina, guano from Peru,
Bolivan (later Paraguayan) petroleum, coffee in Brazil, and railroad building
throughout the continent. During the latter half of the nineteenth century,
British sailors, railroad workers, engineers, managers and other workers
arrived to major port cities where they built infrastructure and established
social clubs, including rowing, cricket, and football (Parrish 27). The first
formal soccer team in the Americas was established by Charles Miller in Sao
Paulo, Brazil in 1894 after he returned from his schooling in England with
soccer balls and a set of rules (Parrish 27).
The game was first played only by the British, allowing them to engage in a cultural practice that they believed to be “modern and civilized” (Parrish 27). One Brazilian journalist, who witnessed the first soccer games in Rio de Janeiro, was amused by the los ingleses locos and their stitched leather ball: “…a group of Englishmen, a bunch of maniacs as they all are, get together from time to time, to kick around something that looks like a bull’s bladder. It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts” (qtd in Goldblatt 126). But the game soon spread beyond the confines of the exclusive British clubs and beyond the claim that football was an inherently European activity. In his Masters Thesis “How To Make a Foreign Idea Your Own: Argentine Identity and the Role Soccer Played In Its Formation,” Brandon Blakeslee notes that both the Argentine elite and the Argentinian lower classes adopted the sport as their own rather than an imitation of British society: “Argentine elites were permitted access to sports clubs and matches between schools but only as guests. […] Argentine guests to these clubs were the ones who saw the benefit of the sport and initiated the transfer [of ideas]. […] In the industrial areas of the docks and factories, the lower classes played the sport for company teams and with transitory British sailors” (6).
Due to the rapidly increasing urbanization and immigration in Latin America’s metropolises before World War I, soccer transformed from being an elite Englishman’s pastime to an obsession of the urban masses (Goldblatt 135). During the early 1900s, Buenos Aires was home to over 300 clubs who were playing in numerous official and unofficial leagues. David Goldblatt writes in his book The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer that “the newspaper reports of the era indicate that the gentlemanly amateurism and the ethos of fair play that British and Argentine elites had found a useful social lubricant were being swiftly abandoned by the new working-class and immigrant football of the barrios. At the bottom end of the social scale football served as an instrument of power and revenge” (134). In Brazil, the emergence of factory teams “opened up the hitherto exclusively white world of organized football to the first wave of black and mulatto players” (Goldblatt 137). Informal games isolated from the upper-class teams of the greater Rio de Janeiro area transformed into formalized clubs, and by 1923, Brazil had promoted a team of “poor whites, blacks, and mulattos” to Rio’s first-division league, where they subsequently won the championship (Parish 28). Many of these factory teams introduced players of color to the game, and these players helped accelerate the development of soccer throughout Latin America. Goldblatt writes, “What transformed the amateur football of these regions and made them mass football cultures was the defeat, or retreat, of the game’s old elites and the rapid colonization of the game by their respective working classes” (172). The world wars would eventually pull English concentration away from the Americas, allowing Latin America to establish the soccer culture we know today.
Works Cited
1930 Fifa World Cup Kick. Digital image. FIFA. N.p., n.d.
Web. 1 Oct. 2015.
Blakeslee, Brandon. "How to make a Foreign Idea Your
Own: Argentine Identity and the Role
Soccer Played in its
Formation." Order No. 1572547 The University of Texas at Arlington,
2014. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web.
30 Sep. 2015.
Campomar, Andreas. Golazo!: The Beautiful Game from the
Aztecs to the World Cup: The
Complete History of How Soccer
Shaped Latin America. New York City: Penguin, 2014.
Print.
Goldblatt, David. The Ball Is Round: A Global History of
Soccer. New York City: Penguin, 2008.
Print.
Parrish, Charles, and John Nauright. Soccer Around the
World: A Cultural Guide to the World's
Favorite Sport. Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014. Print.
