ABSTRACT
The relationship between sports, especially football, Brazilian national identity, and “race” has received considerable attention. However, the hyper-visibility of football obscures the relationship between Brazilian identity and another sport that was partially “invented” in Brazil: futsal. Futsal is a football-based game played on a court created in the 1930s. There are many stories about the game’s origins, and the most widely accepted suggests that futsal was created in Uruguay and spread across South America. This chapter combines athletes’ life histories with a reconstruction of long-term historical processes that inform and condition the specificity of Brazilian identity to construct a novel perspective on the relationship between “Brazilianness”, “race”, and sports.
