Marcos Frutos

EVANGELICALISM AND THE DECLINE OF BRAZILIAN FOOTBALL 🇧🇷 After yet another World Cup defeat Brazil is again soul searching - “Why has Brazil become so bad at one of the only things it still used to be good at?” One of the most popular explanations among Brazilians this time is the rise of evangelicalism in Brazil, especially Pentecostalism. The argument goes that this has ‘spiritually’ undermined the Brazilian team. At the 2022 census about 27% of Brazil’s population over 10 identified as evangelical Protestants. In 2000 the percentage was 15.4% and in 1980 6.6%. A common explanation for this growth is that Pentecostal and evangelical churches were able to expand so rapidly over the past half century because they offered a new version of Christianity that prioritised close-knit local communities, energetic worship and a ‘message of personal transformation’ (and some also say in a derisive sense more ‘accessible’ ‘lower barrier to entry’ version of Christianity, with everything that entails) that especially resonated with ‘urban and lower-income’ Brazilians during Brazil’s comparatively economically and culturally stagnant recent history. In particular, with the kinds of demographics who lived in or adjacent to Brazilian favelas that football wunderkinds used to be drawn from This is a kind of version of the other main explanation I have heard for Brazil’s decline; that it lost its swag, its samba, its Latin flair - or ‘duende’. You can’t really empirically prove these claims of course and both arguments (see more of this other argument below) make different root claims but the commonality they share is that Brazilian football used to have a kind of playful Latin - maybe you could say Catholic - magic to it. It was very flashy and improvised but it was also a sort of highly skilled dance that you ‘flowed’ with, it was almost liturgical. (Argentina for instance a team that still has a bit more of this) The Evangelical argument extends into how it has affected social dynamics in the favelas too. I can’t really speak on how accurate these claims are but apparently it has made families more cautious and less communal, less inclined to ‘let kids go out and play’ ie play football with other favela kids - the focus is instead on ‘staying safe’ and ‘individual hard work at school’. For the players from this new milieu that still do get selected for top-flight football then the effect is it makes them more individualistic, less inclined to cooperate, less likely to see it as ‘a group dance’ and more inclined instead to ‘just charge in’ etc This is what they say! You are free to buy into that however much you want. Possibly a lot of this is just ‘cope’ so-called from a country that maybe too much ties its entire identity to football. Does seem to me that part of the finger-pointing too is you can spin it as a kind of neo-colonialism, in a cultural sense. That it comes from America, from the West. You can see quite extreme left wing Brazilian accounts repeating this claim so you do have reason to be a little sceptical in that In any case the decline is obviously multi-causal - you can also point to the rise of European football, lack of money, bad tactics or coaching, changing tactics worldwide that no longer favour Brazil, everybody else is just that good now etc. On the right, you will hear too that the decline is related to the decline of the Brazilian nation generally ie greater incompetence all round. It isn’t just that lost their Latin - or Catholic - flair, it is that they became more ‘Third World’. Evangelicalism in this sense then would be less a problem of Calvinist Predestination Teutonic Weberian Protestant Work Ethic Protestantism - more a problem of, in the extreme, Sub-Saharan African village church with a corrugated iron roof Evangelicalism Either way there is a general feeling that the death of Brazil football represents the loss of a version of the national soul - that Brazil has now somehow changed for the worse