“There will not be a World Cup”: The Kratophanous Power of the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil

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.