“You will be eternal as time and you will bloom every Spring”: The football team as an identity phenomenon

Abstract

The following article analyses the football game as an identity phenomenon. Football has ceased to be simply a sport to become something extremely complex and articulated, from a politic, economic, social, and cultural point of view. Its diffusion on a global scale has produced and produces identity forms of affirmation and differentiation. These forms concern the name of the team, the geographical and social-economic position of the club and its supporters, the politic-religious identification and the violence and sectarianism that it usually involves. The last part of the article introduces a research – work in progress – about the self-perception, the meaning and the value that Club Atletico Penarol from Montevideo has for their supporters. The text concludes willing to prove how football is today stimulated by a dialectical tension between two nowadays processes like globalization and identity. At this point, the article mentions the establishment of non-recognized squads such as the ones formed by nations without a state that, through football, claim their voice.