Figurando o esporte moderno: algumas reflexões sobre esporte, violência e civilização

Abstract

This paper falls into two distinct but clearly inter-related parts. In the first, a summary is provided of the basic figurational findings which show how the ‘Association’ or ‘soccer’ form of football developed first of all in England in the nineteenth century. Basically what is show is how status rivalry led to the emergence in that context of the soccer and Rugby games, both of which were then beginning to become more ‘civilized’ than their medieval antecedents. In that context, a summary is provided of the core features of Elias’s sometimes misunderstood theory of civilising processes’. The paper ends with a figurational examination and diagnosis of ‘football’ or ‘soccer hooliganism’, a problem which is still sometimes falsely represented as ‘the English disease’ but has now become a problem which is literally world-wide in scope.