At the 2026 World Cup, the main teams are full of athletes whose parents were born in other countries.
The most obvious case is that of France, where 20 of the 26 players are children of immigrants. Among them is striker Kylian Mbappé, whose father was born in Cameroon and his mother is of Algerian origin.
Germany, England and the Netherlands follow the same trend, with teams that reflect societies deeply shaped by migratory flows in recent decades.
But there was a time when the Brazilian team also experienced a similar phenomenon and was largely made up of children of immigrants.
In the first half of the 20th century, while Brazil attracted large numbers of foreigners, Italian, German, English and Spanish surnames – such as Lorenzato, Mutzenbecher, Neville and Ojeda – became common in the national team.
Several of these athletes reached the national team after standing out in clubs founded or attended by immigrants, many of which still exist today and played a central role in the spread of football throughout the country. Palmeiras, Corinthians, Vasco, Cruzeiro and Bangu, among others, belong to the group.
When Brazil won its first title, the 1919 South American Championship, at least five title holders were children of immigrants.
One of them was striker Friedenreich, the son of a German. Another, Neco, had a Portuguese father. Three players, Marcellino, Barbuy and Bianco, were sons of Italians.
The five projected themselves in football in São Paulo, where, in 1920, foreigners made up 35% of the city’s population, according to IBGE.
Origin of football in Brazil
The person responsible for introducing football to Brazil came from an immigrant family, Charles Miller, from São Paulo.
The son of a Scotsman, Miller discovered the sport while studying in England and brought it to Brazil in 1895.
Another Brazilian-British, Oscar Cox, helped to spread football in Rio de Janeiro by participating in the founding of Fluminense, in 1902. Within a few decades, rich Rio families embraced the sport, taken over by associations that had other sports as their flagships – such as Flamengo and Botafogo, initially focused on rowing.
At the same time, the sport also became popular among the Brazilian lower classes, swelled by the millions of Europeans, Arabs and Japanese who migrated to the country between the 19th and 20th centuries.
The strength of the coffee industry transformed São Paulo into an important industrial hub and destination for immigrants. At that time, several football clubs emerged that brought together foreigners – such as Germânia, founded by the German community, Esporte Clube Sírio, from the Arab colony, and Portuguesa de Desportos.
Other amateur teams, formed mainly by workers, competed in tournaments in the floodplains of the Tietê, Tamanduateí and Aricanduva rivers – origin of the expression “floodplain football”.
Several of these groups brought together Italians – the largest foreign community in São Paulo at the time – and provided players for two clubs founded at the time, Corinthians and Palmeiras.
In Rio, workers founded Bangu, and Portuguese immigrants created Vasco.
Palmeiras Foundation
“That Italian who was marginalized in a society in São Paulo dominated by aristocratic coffee growers, through football, began to have an identity and gained a sense of belonging”, historian Fernando Galuppo, author of seven books about Palmeiras, born as Palestra Itália, tells BBC News Brasil.
He says that the creation of the club, in 1914, sought to bring together immigrants from all parts of Italy. Until then, Italian families in São Paulo met in associations in their province of origin. It had only been a few decades since Italy had been unified, and many migrants who left the country for Brazil did not speak Italian, but rather regional languages.
The founders of Palestra published advertisements in newspapers to attract footballers from the colony. Among those who responded to the call were athletes born in Italy and many children of Italians – such as, according to Galuppo, Heitor (Ettore) Marcellino, Amilcar Barbuy and Bianco Spartaco Gambini, the three present in the Brazilian team that won the 1919 South American Championship.
Before moving to Palestra, Gambini and Barbuy played for the club that would become the team’s main rival, Corinthians.
In a master’s thesis presented at USP in 2014, historian Marco Aurélio Duque Lourenço addresses the hypothesis that the rivalry between the two clubs was born with the transfer of players and feuds within the Italian community.
Lourenço remembers that the word rival comes from the Latin “rivalis”, one that inhabits the same bank of the river – and that the two clubs always trained on the left bank of the Tietê (decades later, the third biggest club in São Paulo, São Paulo, also set up a training center on the same side of the river).
From workers to workers
Author of “Football Explains Brazil”, journalist Marcos Guterman says that Corinthians was founded four years before Palestra to attract immigrants of all nationalities and poor Brazilians.
“It was a club of workers for workers: the idea was that the fans made the team, not the other way around.”
The fourth son of foreigners from the 1919 team came from Corinthians – Manuel Nunes, known as Neco.
Antonio Roque Citadini, the club’s lifelong advisor and author of a biography about the player, tells BBC News Brasil that Neco was the son of a Portuguese man who lived in Bom Retiro, an immigrant neighborhood in São Paulo.
The fifth son of a foreigner, Arthur Friedenreich, started his career at Germânia and was the highlight of the victorious campaign.
With a German father and a black Brazilian mother, the athlete symbolized at the same time the projection of foreign and black descendants in a sport initially dominated by the national white elite.
Fernando Galuppo says that, in the early days of football in São Paulo, rich families “campaigned against the inclusion of popular elements in the game”. Several of them attended Club Athletico Paulistano, at the time Palestra Itália’s main rival.
When the two clubs faced each other, columnists from the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo who were also members of Paulistano “referred to the Palestra players with all kinds of insults and insults”, according to the historian.
“It was a real clash of classes: the team of the Italian factory floor worker against that of the aristocrats and coffee barons.”
At the time, poor Italian immigrants were discriminated against in São Paulo and treated by pejorative terms, such as carcamanos and italianinhos.
On the other hand, Galuppo states that Italian-Brazilian players have never been challenged in the Brazilian team. “The persecution happened much more at the domestic level than at the national level.”
For Marcos Guterman, black players on the national team suffered more questions than the children of immigrants in those years.
In “O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro”, a classic of national sports literature, released in 1964, journalist Mário Filho says that Barbosa, Juvenal and Bigode – three black athletes – were unfairly blamed for Brazil’s defeat in the 1950 World Cup final, a stance that, for him, indicated racism among the population.
“When the Brazilian accused Barbosa, Juvenal and Bigode, he accused himself”, wrote Mário Filho.
Guterman says that, at the time, there was talk that “there were too many black people in the team.” “So much so that, in the 1954 World Cup, there were almost no black people on the team.” Brazil fell in the quarterfinals.
Redemption occurred in 1958, with the victory of the first World Cup under the leadership of Pelé. Since then, black people have become a permanent presence in the team.
Persecution in World War II
Even though, according to the researchers interviewed, xenophobia in Brazil against athletes who were children of immigrants was not as strong as in current Europe, Brazilian players and clubs linked to Japan, Germany and Italy suffered great pressure during the Second World War (1939-1945), when the Getúlio Vargas government broke ties with the three nations.
The Germânia club, which launched Friedenreich, was forced to change its name, becoming Pinheiros.
Palestra became Palmeiras, removed the colors of the Italian flag from the shield and removed all Italian leaders. The club even asked for safe conduct so that members could attend the team’s games in other cities.
Galuppo states that the repression of Italian identity may be behind a habit still present among Palmeiras residents. “It’s the only crowd that, while the national anthem is playing, sings a parody over the anthem.”
In Belo Horizonte, another club created by Italians and which was also called Palestra Itália was renamed Cruzeiro.
Horn and end in pizza
Under the Vargas government’s strong nationalist agenda, foreign words associated with football were Brazilianized. Even so, Galuppo says that terms created by Italian-Brazilians who attended stadiums survive to this day in the national vocabulary, such as the verb cornetar (criticize, complain) and the expression “finish in pizza”.
“The expression emerged at Palestra, where pizza dinners appeased members after heated debates”, he states.
Galuppo says that World War II accelerated the Brazilianization of Palmeiras and other foreign clubs. In the following decades, as immigration to Brazil slowed down, the presence of children of immigrants in the national team was diluted.
With the end of the world conflict, he states that Italian-Brazilian clubs were no longer officially persecuted, but that the crisis was only really overcome in 1965, when Palmeiras represented Brazil in a match against Uruguay, at Mineirão. The Palmeiras athletes won the game 3-0.
Peace was sealed.
