Neo-rituals under construction. How and what do the finals of the CONMEBOL Copa Libertadores tell us?

Abstract

This paper analyses the ritualization that has evolved around the Copa Libertadores de América finals: the most important football tournament in South America at club level. It seeks to understand its evolution from the beginning of the twenty-first century, paying attention to the confrontation between different national realities and the subcontinental institutions that govern football in the region, particularly the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (CONMEBOL). Applying a methodology based on the audiovisual dimension of the event, and analysing multiple categories of ritualization, it can be seen that the institutional weakness of CONMEBOL has hindered the transmission of a clear message via the tournament. This has made it difficult for the tournament to consolidate itself as a unifying force for football in the region, and has prevented CONMEBOL, at least so far, from being able to lead a citizenship project around football in South America.

Keywords:

• Ritual
• football
• globalization
• broadcast
• South America

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 For a thorough review of the origins of Latin American football and its influence by the British Empire, the works of Brown (2015) and Wahl (2007) can be reviewed.

2 ‘Much of the apparatus of contemporary nations, of the nation-state organization of societies, including the form of their particularities—the construction of their unique identities—is very similar across the entire world’ (Robertson 2012, 199).

3 In 1965, the Copa de Campeones de América tournament adopted the more popular name of the Copa Libertadores. In this article, we will refer to this tournament as the Copa Libertadores.

4 The most classic references in South America are Eduardo Archetti (2001, 2016) and Pablo Alabarces (2000, 2018) in Argentina; and Roberto da Matta et al. (1982) and José Sergio Leite Lopes (1998) in Brazil. However, the expansion of national literature throughout the subcontinent, as well as a number of multi-ethnic studies conducted in this century, draw a much more complex picture of the football phenomenon.

5 These concepts have been dealt with in depth in a previous work. We understand a ritual as a ‘performance of reiteration open to innovation that is assumed to have certain efficiency over social processes and whose symbolic consistency is mediated by a more or less contingent communicative context’. From this, we also speak of neo-ritual to refer to a ‘performance ever more open to innovation, which is assumed to have less efficiency over social processes and whose symbolic consistency is more floating and mediated by a more contingent communicative context’. (Castilla, González-Ramallal and Mesa López 2019).