Football, memory and heritage: a project for the creation of a collection of oral history interviews for the Football Museum

Abstract

The aim of our project is the creation of a body of oral interviews (registered in both audio and video) with football players who participated in the national Brazilian team in all the nineteen tournaments of the World Cup,which were held between 1930 and 2010. The mapping of the Brazilian participation in international tournaments embodies the record and analysis of life histories of this group of players, considering only those who are stillalive, with the prevision of recording of about 150 hours of documentary interviews on the national sports history. In view of the next World Cup, which will be held in 2014 in Brazil, our aim is to supply documentary material inorder to relate, through a critical and diachronic perspective, sports memory to collective memory and the historyof the country through the last eighty years. These afore mentioned interviews will be registered, treated andanalyzed by researchers from the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC) at Fundação Getulio Vargas, in partnership with coaches and researchers of the Football Museum, whichis headquartered at the Paulo Machado de Carvalho Municipal Stadium (Pacaembu), in order to constitute a library shared by the two institutions. The constitution of this documentary corpus will allow the register and analysis ofthe report of central characters of the Brazilian Professional football, especially those athletes who becameemblematic figures of our national identity. Apart from being accessible to a broad audience at the Library andMedia Library at the Centro de Referências do Futebol Brasileiro (CRFB/MF), the collection will be available online on the website of the CPDOC and will be the basis for two products resulting from our research: a book and aDVD. The material will be available for future researchers and will provide new analytical interpretations on therole of sports in the collective construction of national memory. (AU)