In the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship dealing with soccer, or fútbol, emerged as the province of anthropologists and sociologists. The study of Latin American soccer in particular has tended toward this disciplinary path, and with some good cause. Roberto DaMatta and the late Eduardo Archetti produced pioneering inquiries into soccer with compelling, elegantly presented anthropological research. In-depth historical studies about Latin American soccer, however, have been scarce. With the excellent Citizens and Sportsmen, historian Brenda Elsey has provided scholars and general readers with the first English-language academic monograph dealing with the history of soccer in Latin America. She has also helped soccer to take its rightful place alongside topics like mass media, folk music, and religion in the growing historiography of popular culture in Latin America.While Elsey’s topic and documentary base are rooted in popular culture, her arguments are political. As the title indicates, the protagonists of Citizens and Sportsmen are the working-class Chileans — soccer players, officials, and fans — who since the early twentieth century have found in their local soccer clubs effective vehicles for political action. This widespread politicization of both amateur and professional soccer, Elsey argues, did not occur on the same scale in neighboring countries like Argentina, Brazil, or Uruguay. Though this point merits further exploration, it helps explain the author’s selection of Chile as the object of analysis above other, more predictable sites of study.A major strength of the richly detailed study lies in its ability to overlay a larger narrative of Chilean political history on an examination of Chilean soccer. The book is organized chronologically, and Elsey locates each chapter within a broader periodization of twentieth-century Chile history. Chapter 2, for instance, chronicles the demands for political participation of urban worker-players unfolding amid the political tumult of the Arturo Alessandri and Carlos Ibáñez years. Chapter 6 deals with the increasing leftward politicization of barrio soccer clubs in the years leading up to and immediately following the election of Salvador Allende.It would be a mistake, however, to see this volume as merely reproducing canonized Chilean history. Its most important contribution to the historiography of Chile is in documenting the emergence of neighborhood soccer clubs as accessible, widely used public spaces — far in every sense from the conservative bastions of Chilean civic activism that have been well studied in recent years. The study foregrounds amateur, working-class Chilean players, and the result is a portrait of Chileans attempting to shape policy from the bottom up. Although Elsey treads lightly on this point, the sum of her evidence shows the evolution of soccer into a key vehicle for left-leaning political militancy.Citizens and Sportsmen showcases Elsey’s talent for bringing together the many disparate topics intersecting with the Chilean soccer world throughout the twentieth century. In some places the ties between her broader intervention and the individual components of the chapters are stretched thin, as is the case in chapter 4, which deals with ethnicity and racial discourse. Large, nationally known professional clubs — sometimes rooted in immigrant communities or emphasizing populist iconography, as with the Colo-Colo team — offered symbolic gestures of inclusiveness to Chileans who had been relegated to the peripheries of national belonging. But the evidence presented here does not contribute directly to the central argument about political participation.In one sense this reflects the burden and the privilege of those creating groundbreaking, broadly conceived research. Elsey is in the position of producing the first academic monograph about a matter of profound national significance. Her point of departure explains why her book takes on the entire twentieth century, and why, by the same token, its analysis is not evenly spread in a geographical or chronological sense. In Argentina and Brazil, players and teams from the provinces and borderlands were used to channel regionalist movements intended to combat the centralization of power. Any similar revelations about the Chilean interior, however, are largely excluded from this tale, though tantalizing hints surface throughout the text (pp. 27, 65 – 68, 135 – 36). Its beautifully written epilogue notwithstanding, the book ends with the fall of Allende, leaving the last 30 years of the century unexplored. This is due, as Elsey describes, to the lack of surviving documents in the wake of dictatorship. The reader may be left wondering, however, about the fate of amateur clubs amid the utter commercialization of Chilean soccer during the neoliberal years.Overall, Elsey has given us a well-executed, sorely needed national case study relevant to Latin America’s most popular sport. It is jargon free and appropriate for undergraduates as well as scholars interested in political history, sports studies, or popular culture. Its strengths guarantee that it will be a measuring stick for the studies of Latin American soccer sure to emerge in coming years.
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Dec 22, 2023
Neveen Abdalla 
Open Access
