Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at Brazilian football players who live or have lived abroad, especially in countries of the "South" (Africa, Asia, Australia or Latin America) and the BRIC countries (Russia, India and China) based on their professional careers and trajectories of mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The dissemination of Brazilian football players abroad, even if not recent, has heightened in the 21st century, presenting a large symbolic impact given its strong presence in the global media and the colonization of masculine imaginations exercised by football. In addition to the player-celebrities at global clubs in Europe, there is also a numerically significant flow of non-famous players who look for work in countries that are unlikely destinations for other Brazilian emigrants such as China, India, Korea, Morocco or Uruguay.

Based on multi-site ethnographic research conducted since 2003 about the careers and lifestyles of Brazilian players living in more than 10 countries, the paper tries to understand the transformations in their daily lives caused by the emigration experience. It also compares them to celebrity players who work at global clubs in Europe. It addresses cultural, political and economic implications of this form of circulation.

I argue that categories such as frontier, migration, immigrant/emigrant and transnationalism should be questioned, given that they are redefined in the flow of specialist laborers - like these athletes - who travel between countries in constant movement.

In the same way that in other professional trajectories, such as those of diplomats or intellectuals, these displacements are constituted in circulations beyond state borders, with periodic returns to the country of origin and that in recent years there has been a more accentuated return. I show that life abroad takes place in protected bubbles, where the relations of the protagonists are more translocal than transnational.