The Training of Football Players in Brazil

Brazil’s capacity to continuously foster football talents is internationally acknowledged. It is rightly said that Brazil is a bottomless celeiro de craques (storehouse of football stars). But this metaphor might be outdated, given the changes in professional training in recent decades. Rather than thinking of Brazil as a storehouse for supplying players ready to be recruited by the market, as the term celeiro suggests, what is seen in practice is a tightly articulated network of agencies and agents aimed at turning youngsters into professionals. Training centers, whether autonomous or linked to traditional football clubs, have a leading role in this process. Their success stems from the abundant supply of teenagers and children available to the networks specialized in recruiting and selecting these talents, the vital technologies for improving them, experts in the coordinated management of such processes and other factors. Since some of the football players trained in Brazil are destined to the international market, the special characteristics of this flow should be highlighted. The sources used herein are non-ethnographic; they were published by the agencies involved in intermediating transactions or even by the specialized media. The data is part of an ongoing study aimed at understanding the flow of players and images across national borders.2 The first part of this article lends support to the second, whose main source is ethnographic research on the training of players conducted between 2001 an d 2005, in which