The relationship between sports, especially football, Brazilian national identity, and 'race', has received considerable attention. The hypervisibility of football, however, obscures the relationship between Brazilian identity with another sport that was partially 'invented' in Brazil: futsal. This paper examines migrant Brazilian football and futsal athletes, through an analysis of their life-histories. The study combines life-histories, a re-construction of long-term historical processes that inform and condition the specificity of Brazilian identity, and media discourses to construct a novel perspective on the relationship between 'Brazilianness' and sports.