Gestão da carreira de futebolistas profissionais: Perspectiva dos gestores referente à transnacionalização

Abstract

Football arises in the history of Humanity around the 19th century, during its development it became one of the most popular professional modalities in the World. Brazil is ranked as one of the biggest exporter of football players for the international market. Young players dream to be part of renown football teams and to participate in great sporting events. As well as Brazil, Portugal too has a deep relationship with football and lives the sport intensely. Many Brazilian athletes seek not only the beginning of their European football experience in Portugal, but also the achievement of higher heights in International football. The massive number of International player transitions show that Brazilian players are held valued. This internationalization imposed the need of learning to live with cultural differences that can compromise their usual routines, as many of them travel to countries in which culture is drastically different from their homeland, and end up facing difficulties. When the athlete is not able to overcome these barriers, the consequences can make them experience minor effects such as feeling unmotivated, having difficulties in adapting to new social groups, to consequences like falling into depression, or compromising their professional capacity. The goals of this work are to identify and characterize the factors related with the adaptation to the transnationalization of Brazilians, professional football players, classifying the factors that relate to clubs and athletes, and, at last, number the levels of priority the factors related with the adaptation of athletes. This search adopted the qualitative analysis format, using a content analysis technique applied to semi-structured interviews. The selection of the candidates was made using convenience sampling techniques, composing it by 4 top managers of professional Portuguese clubs. In order to gather information, an audio recording device was used, the Express Scribe Transcription trial software for the transcription of the interviews, and Nvivo 11 for the codification of information. The results of the interviews' analysis identified influential factors in the adaptation of Brazilian athletes, and after discussing them before literature, were characterized for better comprehension. It was also pointed out the presence of factors that are related to clubs and factors that concern the athletes. Ultimately, this analysis allowed to categorize the identified factors according to different levels of priority, based on models of monitoring for professional athletes. The results of this work reinforce that the support of the development of these factors, in addition to boosting up the athlete's careers, it can also amplify the earnings of the clubs. These organizations improve the athlete's success rate in European football and contribute to the profitability and security in the investments made based on Brazilian promises. The investigation is concluded by proposing to clubs the creation of departments dedicated to the monitoring of athletes, the qualification of professionals to operate in it and the development of actions aimed at preventing crisis in the athletes' careers.