The (non-) right to sport in Brazilian youth academy football

The study seeks to understand grassroots football as a space of contradiction between the recognition of sport as a right and its expropriation. To this end, the work is based on an exploratory, qualitative approach, supported by documentary mapping of national and international instruments dealing with the right to sport and child and youth labor, such as: Convention and Charter on the Rights of Children in Sport, Federal Constitution, the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA), the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education (LDB), main sports legislation, International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions, as well as the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT) and the National Plan for the Prevention and Eradication of Child Labor. In this sense, theoretical reflection shows that, despite a set of protective mechanisms, the premature promotion of children and adolescents in training regimes reproduces the demands of professional sporting excellence, resulting in the expropriation of the right to sport in favor of market interests. Therefore, it constitutes a veiled form of labor performed by developing footballers.

Keywords
Football; Sports training; Labor; Right to sport