Football, Globalisation And Local Identity In Brazil

Although football possesses its own well-known attractions which justify its irrefutable claim to be a world game, we agree with Joan-Eugeni Sánchez (1992:295), for whom many times the success of a diffusion process of any particular innovation depends more on its social and territorial origins than on its supposed intrinsic advantages. Summing up, British global supremacy at the end of the 19th century was essential to the spread of football1. In this context, about the diffusion of modern sports, Allen Guttmann (1994:173) points out that this is basically a flow from centre to periphery. It is not a mere coincidence that England and the United States (the imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries) are the only countries whose main sports were not created overseas: football, rugby and cricket among the English, American football