This work investigates the relationship between modernity, discipline and the formation of professional soccer players. It discusses modern soccer as a disciplining institution with rules, norms and scientific principles (positivities), which is aimed at producing, manipulating, individualizing, coaching and improving the individual's body and making the player docile and utilitarian. Modernity, characterized by secularization, subjectivation, the triumph of instrumental rationality, the mastering of nature and the emergence of the modern individual, makes human beings into a knowledge object. The empirical field of this investigation is composed by minor categories of the Sport Club Internacional (Rio Grande do Sul-Brazil). The study finds that the social production of soccer players is a process of disciplining, adaptation, socialization, coaching, development and improvement of physical and technical potentialities of athletes, besides the management of their genetic potential. It is a disciplining, pedagogical and civilizing process characterized by regulation, control, institutionalization and rationalization. Soccer players are labor force resulting from disciplining, physical, technical and tactical practice, as well as the development of their genetic capacities.
modernity; soccer; body
