Abstract
This article aims to collect evidence about the constitution of associative means of club-belonging, with the conformation of collective identities of supporting around Rio de Janeiro professional soccer throughout the 1930s to the 1960s. To that end, we mobilized journalistic sources capable of informing a conjunction of agents, spaces, and happenings that structured the history, the memory, and the sociogenesis of supporters’ groups in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the 20th century. We affirm that the day-to-day news of the sports chronicle, once systematized, even if reunited and exposed in a non-exhaustive manner, makes possible reconstituting aspects of the construction of said subfield, nucleated around the soccer professionalism and the sports facilities of the then capital of the Republic. Managers of entities and clubs, journalists, chronicle writers, and head of supporters’ groups are constituting parts of the social meanings and the cultural significances associated to the musical performance in the stadiums of this unexpected form of association, born on the conveyor belt of the structuration of an urban mass culture, focused on leisure and entertainment in the metropolises by a routine sports calendar. Thus, this article demonstrates, in a diachronic way, the process of public recognition of determined actors, from popular classes, and specific groups of fanatic supporters, legitimized by the media of the time, in conformity with the affirmation and expansion of soccer in the day-to-day of the city.
Keywords:
soccer history in Brazil; sports press; professionalism; organized supporters’ fandom; Rio de Janeiro city