FOOTBALL, MEMORY AND HERITAGE: THE STORY OF DJALMA SANTOS

The article aims at showing results from the project ‘Football, Memory and Heritage: a Collection of Oral History Interviews for the Football Museum’. The research was performed at the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary History of Brazil (FGV, Rio de Janeiro) in partnership with the Football Museum (São Paulo, Brazil). The article shows, on the one hand, how the interest in soccer and its patrimonial and institutional aspects in Brazilian society has been increasing since the creation of collections of testimonies by institutions such as the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro (1965) and in São Paulo (1970), and the Football Museum, opened in 2008, which follows the latest world expographic standards. On the other hand, the article seeks to explore the raw material of testimonies collected from former players of the Brazilian team, who played in the 1958, 1962 and 1970 World Cups, the years the team were champions of the world, in order to put up for discussion how the complex relationships between history and national memory operate in the sports universe. The central argument to be raised in the article is that, in the discourse of former players such as Djalma Santos and others still living, the nostalgia for a bygone era of victories rekindles an important discussion for the collective imagination. The demarcation of boundaries between a glorious past – close to national roots – and a present of defeats or failures marked by ‘forgetting’ the true form of national play, activates a rhetoric built not only by the athletes but by an expressive fraction of the sporting press and the more general public opinion in which the national sporting memory is seen as impregnated with representations associated with nostalgia, loss and alienation from a ‘golden age’ of authentic Brazilian football