The Poor “Wealth” of Brazilian Football: How Poverty May Shape Skill and Expertise of Players

Abstract

Worldwide, 1.3 billion people live in Poverty, a socio-economic status that has been identified as a key determinant of a lack of sports participation. Still, numerous athletes around the world have grown up in underprivileged socio-economic conditions. This is the case in Brazil, a country with around 13.5 million impoverished citizens, yet, over decades, many of its best professional footballers have emerged from its favelas. In this article, we explore the role of the socio-cultural-economic constraints in shaping the development of skill and expertise of Brazilian professional football players. The methodological and epistemological assumptions of the “Contextualized Skill Acquisition Research” (CSAR) approach are used as an underpinning framework for organizing and analyzing data. Results suggested that, at the exosystemic level of Brazilian society, Poverty emerges as an influential constraint that can potentially enrich football development experiences of Brazilian players. Poverty, however, is not the direct causation of outstanding football skill development. Rather, from the perspective of ecological dynamics, Poverty creates specific contexts that can lead to the emergence of physical as well as socio-cultural environment constraints (e.g., Pelada, Malandragem) that can shape affordances (opportunities) for skill acquisition. These ideas suggest the need to ensure that environmental constraints can support people to amuse themselves cheaply, gain access to employment opportunities and maintain health and well-being through (unstructured and more structured) sport and physical activities in dense urban environments such as favelas, inner city areas, and banlieues. For this purpose, design of open play areas and even parkour installations can provide affordances landscapes for physical activity and sports participation in urban settings.

The role of family and football academy in developing

“…This places football in Brazil as a potential site of upwards socialeconomic mobility. This can also be seen as a source of motivation for many Brazilian children to pursue a professional football career (Uehara et al, 2021). However, the support of family alone is not enough for the achievement of success.…”

“…However, the mesosystem is not the only context that shapes behaviour, but rather just one among many different socio-cultural systems of constraints that may facilitate expertise acquisition in Brazilian football. Data on other constraints, such as pelada, malandragem and poverty have been presented elsewhere (e.g., Uehara et al, 2018;Uehara et al, 2020;Uehara et al, 2021).…”

“…Families that board their children at the football academies, place their complete trust in the clubs to provide the youngesters with not only football training but also educational and pastoral care. In many cases, the clubs provide better educational means for the players than the families themselves would be able to, because they are usually from a low socioeconomic status (Uehara et al 2021). Thus, overall, these mesosystemic contraints strengthen the means for the player to achieve success.…”

An ecological dynamics perspective on designing urban nature environments for wellbeing and health-enhancing physical activity

“…For the casual park visitor, the affordances of built features must be accessible, yet challenging, and in harmony with the variability of nature affordances ( 25 ). So, urban parks can benefit from design features that allow visitors to explore different forms of PA, that actually resemble an exploratory activity such as parkour, in the sense of activating all cognitive and perceptual-motor capacities ( 59 ). This could be achieved, for example, by adopting a concept of ‘ all roads lead to Rome ', where several pathways that would end up at the same place, or at an exit of the park, would demand different skills and capacities, from the standard flat road, to the irregular cobbled road, the uphill dirt track, the scattered rock path crossing a water stream, the small knee-high bush fence obstacle, the climbing wall over a bush fence, to the climbing bars over a small chasm.…”

Excellence in sport performance. The Russian psychophysiological approach

“…Sports talent detection and development is currently actual and studied from various perspectives: genetic [1], relative age effect [2][3][4], brain activity [5][6], personal characteristics [7], social factors [8][9].…”