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Brazilian sportswomen have arrived in the twenty-first century burdened with a heavy inheritance, which has been called the gendered twentieth century sporting legacy. In relation to football, this heritage includes not only gender and sexuality discrimination but all multifaceted obstacles to playing the sport, such as no access to facilities, equipment and funding. This chapter analyses the careers of three Brazilian women who played in a major tournament organised by the São Paulo Football Federation (FPF), the Paulistana, where orthodox-gendered practices and concepts prevailed to control the bodies of the players. This analysis considers aspects of socialisation and sporting elements in the lives of the participants, derived from informal conversations as well as structured interviews which were inductively framed. As such, the data were analysed by understanding the social division of the professional and corporal practices in society and the representations that permeate Brazilian society regarding the role of women in that society at that time, in the late 1990s. The chapter uses the micro-context of these players' biographies to show how women's football is embedded in macro-contexts of oppressive gender structures in Brazil and South America. The findings show that whilst conceived to be a tournament to promote women's football in Brazil, the 2001 championship was an attack against women's footballers and their human rights. The orthodox rigid gendered rules, which prevented many women players participation, transformed the tournament into a ‘circus’ that received criticism across the whole country, including in the National Parliament.

Football is deployed into various segments and consists of a complex value chain, with interrelationships and circularities. It is relevant in various segments and therefore it is important to understand the structure. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a model of a football value chain and the managerial implications inherent to this chain.

This research used a field study as its methodology, developing a semi-structured questionnaire containing open-ended questions about the representativeness of the football value chain. In-depth interviews with specialists in football were performed to collect data.

The results of the interviews indicated that the theoretical model is representative. Furthermore, through validation, the relevance and representativeness of the football value chain was shown, as well as its interrelationships with the other commodity and service segments. In addition, it was found that this segment is relevant and influential in the national and international market, and can be considered a factor of economic and social development.

This paper provides a view of the actors who make up the football value chain, and also supplies a complementary view to the models of chains presented in the theoretical review, enabling the provision of evidence on the axis with greater added value as a new step. The limitation of this research involves the context approached, because as identified throughout the investigation, this context is complex and dynamic. In this way, the linear approach used to construct this chain led to a reduced view of reality and of present relationships.

The model shows the presence of the main actors and the structure for the transformation of raw material into a final product, and is useful to understand the existing relationships and the layers of added value.

The evaluation of the conceptual model of football value chain confirms that this is a professionalized chain, which generates a significant number of direct and indirect jobs.

The authors propose a model of a football value chain which is complementary to the theoretical review developed, exposing a linkage of the players present in this chain and at what stage they are present, and supplies the managerial implications inherent to this.

The purpose of this paper is to report a critical analysis of the plan recently launched by the Chinese Government for the development of the football industry in China. The analysis encompasses the impact exerted by the new policy instrument on the Eurocentric trend that configured the power relations in the football realm, as well as the challenges raised by barriers deeply rooted in culture that Chinese authorities should face in order to foster pervasive change and thus create the conditions for success.

The analysis of the policy document has been carried out under the light of the theory of innovation, namely, the contributions of Peter Drucker, who looks at innovation as a means to foster change in the social and economic environment, inducing new patterns of behaviour and creating new habits. This theoretical framework provides ground to the analytical endeavour because the Chinese plan for football development presents the overall goal of shifting the habits of sporting practice and consumption.

The first and most visible “innovative” effect of the policy took the form of a shock provoking an unprecedented change in the geopolitics of football and the inherent disturbance in the traditional Eurocentric structure of football power relations. At the domestic level, the Chinese Government is assuming the “educating” role in order to change behaviour and habits, that is, to ensure the transformative power necessary to overcome barriers deeply rooted in culture. Accordingly, rather than the availability of financial resources, the capacity to materialise this pervasive switch in behaviour and habits in terms of football practice and consumption is the major challenge, the one of a social innovation endeavour.

The research reported in this paper provides an original and innovative approach to the analysis of a sports relevant public policy document, namely, because of the theoretical framework wrapping up the analytical endeavour.

This paper discusses the evolving nature of the symbolic meaning of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Exploring the kratophanous power of soccer in Brazil, we seek to explain how the relationship that Brazilians had with the 2014 FIFA World Cup reflects profound changes in a mutating society that has deep emotional connections with soccer but at the same time has started to reject the misuse of public resources and struggles to see corruption as a fact of life.

The authors conducted a netnography on Facebook communities and on Instagram, reviewed documentaries and short films, as well as press articles on the subject. Data was collected both retrospectively and concurrently. Analysis used open coding, moving up from the emic meanings extracted from the texts to an etic account of the phenomena (Cherrier & Murray, 2007; Thompson, 1997; Thompson & Haytko, 1997).

We argue that the duality of the Brazilian culture and the kratophanous power of soccer help understand the evolving nature of the relationship Brazilians had with the 2014 FIFA World Cup. We sustain that soccer in Brazil is viewed both as a sport – representing democracy and the hope of social mobility – and as an industry – echoing dissatisfaction with the status quo. Even if ideologically opposed to what the event represented, consumers were bound by very strong cultural connections built around soccer as a sport, a national passion. This changing nature of feelings and attitudes echoes marketplace tensions of a country passing through a democratization maturity process and of a culture in which its citizens find it easier to attempt to be many things at the same time than to take a stand.

This research analyzes the role of social tensions and national passions in relation to a global industry (soccer) and a mega event (the FIFA World Cup). We have looked at the influence of macro cultural forces and tension forces in a sporting event as our findings cannot be understood outside the context of network-based power (Labrecque, vor dem Esche, Mathwick, Novak, & Hofacker, 2013) with Brazilians mobilizing the structure of social networks in favor of their contextual interests. The tense and dynamic political environment in which this research was conducted shed some light on why the #naovaitercopa changed its meaning overtime.

The context of this research contributes to the literature on boycotting (Kozinets & Handelman, 2004; Lee, Motion, & Conroy, 2009), considering that most previous studies had not extensively explored situations where protests arise, obtain significant engagement, yet end up being unsuccessful. We answers the call made by Izberk-Bilgin (2010) for understanding how and why consumer attitudes toward certain types of consumption may change overtime and we demonstrate how the FIFA World Cup possesses kratophanous power in Brazil, and how this characteristic, which is strongly rooted in local culture, contributed to the failure of the boycott.

This study aims to investigate the moderating effect of soft power on the relationships between affinity toward country, country image, cosmopolitanism and preference on the internationalization of Brazilian cultural products.

This survey used data collected from a non-probabilistic sample of 478 Portuguese respondents, which was further analyzed using the partial least squares technique.

Affinity related to Brazil, the image of Brazil and cosmopolitanism influenced preference, and this, in turn, influenced the internationalization of Brazilian cultural products. Soft power moderated the relationships between cosmopolitanism and preference, country image and preference and preference and internationalization of cultural products.

This study focuses on the internationalization of a cultural product from one particular emerging economy (Brazil) to a specific developed economy (Portugal). Thus, the findings are bound to this specific context. However, it contributes to the field of international marketing research by concentrating on the moderating effects of soft power in the relationship between the investigated constructs.

In the case of Brazilian cultural products, i.e. music, emphases on Brazilian unique resources, i.e. the beauty, excitement, fantasy, mystique, prestige, etc. of natural resources, may be important features to be taken into consideration in national cultural policies.

The study contributes to the international marketing and consumer behavior literature by showing that consumer preference, affinity toward country and cosmopolitanism are important antecedents of the internationalization of cultural products.