More Than a Club's President. Why Does the "Ethos of Honor" Still Pay off in Portugal and Brazil?

The personas of the presidents of clubs still remain under-scrutinized in sociological and anthropological literature on sports. Which is all the more surprising since clubs’ management constitute places of (besides sporting) social, economical and political resources accumulation and trade, therefore being outstanding sites to observe how society and the specific worlds of politics and sport intertwine at diverse plans, situations and national and even international contexts.

The paper to be presented intends to contribute to fill this gap, focusing on two (major) illustrative cases in Brazil and in Portugal, Eurico Miranda, president of Vasco da Gama between 2000 and 2008, and Pinto da Costa, president of FC Porto since 1982. Incisively, the purpose is to show that historical and sociological restitution of such rather controversial characters – charismatic and often portrayed as “outlaws” by adversaries and diffuse social representations – cannot be accomplished apart from the study of deep-rooted transformations that both Brazilian and Portuguese societies faced in the last thirty years, including their inclusion in various power and culture worlwide networks, i.e., their participation in diverse global arenas.

In this setting, we shall favour an approach that allows us to enhance a straight comparison between Brazil and Portugal. We will then work from the assumption that the “ethos of honor” housed (or incorporated) in the successful management of both, Eurico Miranda and Pinto da Costa, can only be found in societies without a solid public sphere, i.e., societies in which the meaning of action and the conception of common good are not produced by an universal and codified morality; hence, societies pervious to “selective grandeur”.