Sport, communication and sociology

a reading of the academic trajectory and intellectual production of Ronaldo Helal

Abstract

This article aims to reconstruct the trajectory of Ronaldo Helal, one of the pioneers of the introduction of sports in the Communication and Social Sciences as academic fields. The reconstitution of his formative path and bibliographic production intend to demonstrate the milestones of the maturation of a method aimed at the identification of a nation’s media narratives through collective sports such as professional football. Over the course of three decades, the author has been developing a methodology for analyzing journalistic discourses about the performance of the Brazilian National Team in the quadrennial FIFA tournaments, better known as World Cups. We thus argue that a differential of Helal’s perspective on the construction of sports nationalism has been a continuous shift of his gaze when choosing foreign sources – newspapers from Uruguay, Argentina and France – to understand the relations of identity enunciated by printed media about Brazil and the supposed nature of Brazilian players. Such decentralization allows the researcher to unveil the construction of identity stereotypes, while also raising questions about the paradigm of the nation’s “essence” in competitve international events. Finally, it is proposed that the ability to build an authorial work is also related to the concept of “travel as a vocation,” mobilized by anthropologist Fernanda Peixoto to address a tradition of intellectuals who interpreted Brazil, thanks to a symbolic-spatial movement of approach and distancing, with the specular recognition of national otherness and differences.