ABSTRACT
Brazilians comprise a “global football workforce” as the largest national group of migrant players in contemporary football. Previous ethnographic studies have revealed that Brazilian athletes value the opportunity to move across borders. In constructing mobile aspirations, athletes from the Global South attempt to embody a form of respectable masculinity. Although their movement benefits many parties, sports migrants are among the sports industry’s most visible and precarious nodes. Athletes are regularly subjected to short-term contracts and premature career termination due to injuries. This chapter analyzes how migrant Brazilian football and futsal players construct narratives about their careers, express masculinities, and embody religious symbols. Engaging with Talal Asad’s “anthropology of secularism” and Saba Mahmood’s analysis of a contemporary women’s religious movement in Cairo inspires this chapter. This chapter argues that Asad’s and Mahmood’s analyses of the relationship between religion, agency, pain, and suffering open paths to new understandings and interpretations of the subjective experiences of contemporary sports migrants.
