Group profile: The 1982 World Cup in Spain in the oral accounts of the players of the Brazilian National Team

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the 1982 World Cup from the perspective of the native and remembrance discourse of the players of the Brazilian National Team, recorder for an Oral History project coordinated by me. We propose to shift the axis of the usual source of information to reconstruct the event organized by FIFA—the articles of the sports press in the coverage of the Brazil’s participation and in the construction of the meaning of the victories and defeats in each quadrennium—to describe the reminiscences of athletes directly involved in the tournament. The observations focus not only on what is said and shared by the interviewees, but also on the generational profile and social belonging of the athletes, seen in greater amplitude. This last aspect enables us to understand the configuration of Brazilian football at that time, in which the recruitment of players was based on the representativeness of the national association teams of the time, in particular the Rio de Janeiro–São Paulo–Minas Gerais axis, and reflected the competitive matches of regional forces in the composition of the national team. The text is structured in three moments. The first moment is dedicated to presenting the context of the project from which the primary data are extracted and the potentials of using Oral History in the creation of alternative sources of research about football in Brazil. The second concerns the state of the art of the theme, with the bibliographic review of journalistic and academic pieces about the 1982 World Cup, in order to list the existing works, identify their emphases, map their approaches and verify their underlying strategies. The third and last moment concerns the analysis of the reports of the 10 athletes interviewed, in order to highlight prosopographical elements of the trajectory of this group of players and the way in which the collective memory of the event selects certain matches, moves and memorable situations to the detriment of others, especially those related to the preparations of the tournament.