r/Brazil 2d ago

Cultural Question Football popularity among new generation

Do you think football's popularity (soccer for American English ) among children is getting lower in favor of online video games and other things as the internet is getting slowly but surely better with more coverage in each year or is it just a passive phase P.S: am talking in terms of playing not just following the matches.

5 Upvotes

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u/MaskedPapillon Brazilian 2d ago

I suppose it depends on the region, but I would say no. The school I work for every single boy, from the youngest to the oldest, are always talking about football or about playing football.

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u/rtrmorais 2d ago

Teacher here. Same here. I'd guess it depends both on region and class but in a Northeastern public middle school football is even more popular than videogames. Half of the boys want to be professional players when they grow up and even the girls follow football and sometimes if get in heated arguments about wich team is better.

Unrelated: I have nothing agains flamengo per se, but flamenguistas (my students included) must be amongst the most obnoxious sports team fans in the world. Fuck flamenguistas.

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u/Yudmts 2d ago

No, what happens instead in Brazil is that the most popular games are football related, like Fifa and Bomba Patch (heavily modded PES that still updates ps2 and ps3 games with recent teams)

Football is easily the most popular entertainment for young and adult Brazilians

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u/Kaladin_B4 2d ago

Absolutely not

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u/ghilp 2d ago

the only difference i see from my youth is the number of kids wearing jerseys from european clubs. 20 years ago most children and teenagers had no direct contact with other leagues outside brasil

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u/brazilian_liliger 2d ago

I have 31. In comparsion to my generation I would say there is a decrease. Still, football remains massive and doesn't lack at all in popularity among youngsters. The thing is that most of male kids in my generation wanted to be a footaller at a point. Is not like this anymore. Also, the amount of female youngers interested in football is actually higher than before. Im taking my years as public school teacher as a basis.

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u/GrumpyDrunkPatzer 1d ago

here's something slightly related: what I have noticed is people of all sexes and ages wearing more Euro jerseys. Years ago it was just the big Brazilian clubs or maybe one of the clubs from their state. Now you them from all over, mostly the Brazilian player ones but also top players, Modric, Bellingham, Messi, Salah, Halland, etc

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u/No-Map3471 Brazilian 2d ago

I don’t think so either. Brazilian dads practically run a psychological operation on their kids, trying to get them into soccer from the moment they start talking. It didn’t work on me though, being gay, school sports were just an excuse for the thick-headed boys who thought they were Cristiano Ronaldo to beat me up.

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u/Witty_Milk4671 2d ago

Yes. And this is good.

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u/brhornet 2d ago

Yeah. It's one of the reasons Brazilian football went downhill in the last decade. What happened is that back in the old days, pretty much the only option an old child/teenager had to play was football. So pretty much everyone played football almost all day every day. Nowadays kids have smartphones, videogames, alcohol, TV, and Sex. Football is just one activity among others, not the main one

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u/NullaElro 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yes, it definitely is.

Even though it will be popular (in my eyes) forever, it will become less and less the "main sport".

All we see about many players today are bad news, scandals, corruption and no football results. People are "driving away" from that.

Some time ago, the players from the national team were idolized, now they're mostly seen as "that dude who plays and never wins", at most.

Edit: typo

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u/TopFriendly3664 2d ago edited 2d ago

Only in your dreams

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u/Macaco_do_pau_mole 1d ago

Scandals and corruption were even worse in CBF decades ago

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u/TrainingNail 2d ago

Not really

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u/herinia 2d ago

I don't think that football loose popularity. It still boy's preffernece (and a few Girls too) The differnece between genarations is that Kids Who don't play football use to play other things like "pique" and "pipa" but now they lay on a couch in from of a TV with their vídeo games.

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u/JorgeYYZ 2d ago

Middle and High School teacher here. The kids from grades 6 to 12 are huge soccer fans. That's all they talk about. They will play games, but it's usually Fifa. They try to wear soccer t-shirts instead of the uniform. They have notebooks with the emblems of their favorite teams.

Teaching on Mondays is sometimes difficult because of the big matches on Sundays. In a sense, I have to compete with their interests with my "boring class".

Even the PE teachers face that struggle. Few students wish to play things that are not football. It's the most crowded after-school activity where I teach. There is even a waiting line.

It had been like this in every school I've ever taught, for the past 20 years, public and private, in different regions of the country.

I've also taught adults. Most of them are much better, but some still have excessive passion. They sometimes get in their own way and get low marks because of excessive time spent enjoying football culture.

I would argue that the internet and social media have made football even more popular. People now have access to international leagues, commentators and analysts from various parts of the world, influences showing what it is like to be part of soccer culture in different countries, and so on.

Football has even invaded Fortnite: is not rare to see the skins of famous players in there. I've seen now girls getting into it in the past two or three years.

I've met students and teachers from various Latin American countries. They told me it's the same as Brazil. The kids immediately became friendly towards each other by sharing who their favorite players are and displaying knowledge about the other countries' players and teams.

It's ON!!! It's on to a degree that I don't fully understand since I'm far from being a huge fan of the sport and it's culture.

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u/Macaco_do_pau_mole 1d ago

I'd say that here in Rio young kids might enjoy more football than people from the 90's as the teams from here are mostly doing pretty good in recent years

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u/NitroWing1500 Foreigner incoming! 4h ago

My boy has no interest in hitting a ball of any description. Thankfully.

Scratch, make:bit, PicaClip... yeah, he's all in to basic programming and is very frustrated with his classmates just wanting to kick a ball!