CBF carries out campaign to depoliticize the national team shirt

The CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) already had everything ready. As soon as the presidential election was over, the entity would start a campaign imagined by President Ednaldo Rodrigues since March this year, when he was elected: to depoliticize the national team’s shirt.

The official version is that, on the eve of the World Cup, the confederation wants to “celebrate the passion” of the Brazilian people for the national team. But the idea of ​​trying to remove the yellow shirt from political polarization in the country is not new.

“Our message is one of encouragement. Football cannot live without its fans. And connecting people of all ages, places, colors, races, ideologies and religions to football is our purpose,” said Rodrigues.

Since 2015, when the protests against the government of President Dilma Rousseff (PT) began, the national team shirt has been used as a symbol of the right. It is also used by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), who was defeated in the presidential elections at the end of last month by PT Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In the protests that followed the election, Bolsonaro supporters can be seen wearing the national team uniform. Oppositionists began to refer to him as “the shirt of the CBF”, not of Brazil.

At the party of Lula’s supporters, in São Paulo, PT members shouted that the team’s yellow was “ours”, giving the connotation that it should belong to everyone, not just a political spectrum.

The message matches what the CBF wants, even more so with the election ending almost 20 days before the start of the World Cup. The Brazilian debut will be on the 24th, against Serbia.

Partly for this reason, there was discomfort with Neymar’s public support for Bolsonaro. The message had been passed that players should abstain from demonstrations before the election. But nobody had the courage to charge the main player of the team.

The confederation’s idea is that, at every opportunity, managers, players and coaching staff reinforce the message of unity. The consequence of this would be to depoliticize the yellow of the uniform and make anyone feel embarrassed to wear it and be identified as a Bolsonaro supporter.

Minutes before the announcement of the 26 summoned, CBF presented a commercial that had been prepared by Yeap Filmes in recent months. With a sequence of images of people wearing the national team’s shirt, the soundtrack is the song “Ela me faz so Bem”, by Lulu Santos.

The video, in a 30-second version, was broadcast on television stations.

CBF’s concern is institutional, not commercial. The entity has not yet been able to present its claim to Nike regarding the payment of royalties for the sale of the shirts. As he does not receive anything, the rise or fall in the sale of uniforms does not affect the confederation’s cash.