Let me see your hand, you don't have a goalkeeper's hand": ethnographic study on an aspiring soccer player in Brazil

Abstract

In the football universe, the trajectory of a player until reaching the professionalization involves several requirements that are not always clear. Among them are some bodily characteristics that can sometimes boost a player, sometimes can be a reason for refusal. Faced with this scenario, the objective of this article is to investigate, through the circulations between spaces where soccer players are trained, how the body components height and palm extension, from their symbolic values, are related to the constitutions in the formations of football player. For this, we carried out an ethnographic study in which we followed the trajectory of an aspiring goalkeeper and the different moments in which these bodily components were activated by those responsible for keeping him or not in the clubs. We conclude that some conceptions of football universes are more about productions of meaning from contexts than hegemonic cultures, as in the case investigated, in which the height and dimension of the hand needed to be understood symbolically associated with the constituted social spaces.