Small teams, big disputes conflict, control and fame in a southern Minas Gerais football team

Abstract

The present work sought to approach soccer as a social phenomenon, seeing it as part of a broader social process. For this project, we carried out an ethnography with players, managers and fans of the Catanga Futebol Clube, an amateur soccer team from Passa Quatro, in the southern region of Minas Gerais. It was possible to understand how this collectivity actively participated in a dynamic involving mapping operations, in which these subjects were always attentive to actions and events, under the contours of an agonistic sociability that reinforced a latent conflict, whose reputation clashes guided aspects of these characters in social narratives. Thus, as representatives of a marginalized location in the city, the football team became a source of respectability and an opportunity to demonstrate the value of that place, through which the neighborhood was redefined by football through the conflicts of the fans.