Soccer—football in most of the world—was an import in southern South America just as baseball was in hispanophone Middle America and cricket in the anglophone West Indies. In all three cases, the local recipients, with time, adapted the import to express their own cultural style and political needs. Tony Mason’s volume essentially provides a summary of the “criollization” and “massification” of soccer, primarily in Argentina and Brazil and secondarily in Uruguay.
Almost until World War I, soccer was a British activity (perhaps more in Argentina than elsewhere), promoted by elite schools, clubs, and visiting British teams. At the same time, the sport was already spreading geographically outward, socially (and ethnically) downward. Recipient-country players and institutions eventually rivaled the foreigners, Spanish and Portuguese terminology replaced English, and international contests among teams from neighboring countries surpassed those against European visitors.
The interwar decades brought South America soccer status. Uruguay captured Olympic gold in 1924 and 1928 and both hosted and won the first World Cup in 1930. Soccer talent migrated to Europe; increasing professionalization brought more exploitation of players and thoughts of unionization. This period also witnessed the growing use of sports for political objectives, which, if relatively mild under leaders such as Getúlio Vargas, was carried to greater extremes by dictatorial and military regimes after World War II. This trend was made possible by the perceived popularity of soccer in most South American countries. (Pelé, who personified that popularity, merits an entire chapter by himself.) If soccer did not always help politicians strengthen their base, it did, Mason argues, facilitate national integration and the winning of limited European admiration.
Some of that admiration, however, is canceled out by the extensive rudeness and violence Mason finds in South American, especially Argentine, soccer. Even if “more people are football-mad in South America than anywhere else” (p. 118) and feel that soccer expresses their national spirit and style, this is not enough, even in victory, to overcome their countries’ “limited equality of opportunity, weak democratic system, and societies bitterly divided against themselves” (p. 131). Nevertheless, on the field, “South Americans discovered a balance between team and individual which made their play effective and graceful” (p. 157). Mason hopes they never lose that.
This provocative and entertaining book helps fill a large gap. Previously, apart from Janet Lever’s Soccer Madness (1983), along with articles by such authors as Roberto da Matta on Brazilian soccer as festival, Robert M. Levine on soccer in Brazilian society and politics, Steve J. Stein on soccer in the process of lower-class resistance and expression in Peru, and Eduardo Archetti on soccer, violence, and gender identity in Argentina, few scholarly analyses of the sport in South America were available in English (and not many more in Spanish or Portuguese). Although he misses some promising sources and leaves some questions unanswered, Mason, a respected British student of the social history of soccer, has given future researchers a solid place to start.
