Football and politics: Grêmio as a microcosm of the power struggle in Rio Grande do Sul.

Football clubs, especially those with traditional associative structures like Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense, constitute political microsystems that mirror, on a smaller scale, the power dynamics observed in nation-states. Like formal political systems, football teams possess mechanisms for democratic participation (elections for president and boards), complex financing structures (commercial revenues, membership contributions, transfers), institutionalized bureaucracies, and, fundamentally, their own political culture that regulates power struggles. Electoral campaigns in major clubs mobilize significant financial resources, articulate support networks that cross social classes, reproduce political marketing strategies, and often involve accusations of vote buying, manipulation of registrations, and irregular financing – practices that echo the vices of institutional politics. The difference is only one of scale, not of nature: what is at stake is always control over resources, symbolic prestige, and the capacity to shape the future of a community.

In this sense, Robert Putnam's contribution on political culture becomes particularly relevant. For Putnam, political culture is not merely a set of abstract values, but a structuring variable that permeates the behavior of individuals in multiple instances of their lives. A citizen who experiences clientelistic practices in a football club tends to naturalize these same practices in institutional politics; conversely, one who is socialized in environments marked by effective participation and transparency in decisions carries these values ​​to other spheres. Political culture, therefore, knows no boundaries between the "public" and the "private," between the "political" and the "sporting." It manifests itself consistently in the different arenas where individuals experience power relations, making football clubs privileged laboratories for observing, in real time, the transformations and continuities of the patterns of political behavior in a society.

Old and New Elites: Grêmio and Rio Grande do Sul in Parallel

The recent political history of Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense offers a remarkable parallel with the transformation process of the elites of Rio Grande do Sul. The club, traditionally controlled by families linked to the old Porto Alegre bourgeoisie – liberal professionals, established merchants, small and medium-sized industrialists who built their fortunes throughout the 20th century – found itself confronted with the emergence of new economic actors. These "new rich," often enriched through ventures in sectors such as export-oriented agribusiness, technology, the financial market, and real estate development, represent forms of capitalist accumulation distinct from those that consolidated the old elites. While the latter based their power on gradual accumulations, traditional networks of sociability, and a paternalistic management ethic, the new contenders for power bring a more aggressive, financialized logic, less committed to the rituals of symbolic legitimation that historically sustained the club's prestige.

The case of Marcelo Marques in the Grêmio elections perfectly illustrates this tension. A successful businessman without roots in the traditional Grêmio oligarchy, Marques was accused of trying to "buy" the election through strategies that scandalized the club's most conservative sectors: mass registration of new members during the election period, ostentatious use of financial resources for lavish campaigns, promises of multi-million dollar investments without due transparency about the sources, and, above all, a posture that challenged the tacit codes of deference to the club's "historical families." The reaction of the old ruling oligarchies was fierce and revealing: more than contesting the legality of the procedures, they sought to morally disqualify the candidate for his lack of "tradition," his ignorance of the club's "true values," and his supposed inability to understand what it means to "be Grêmio." In this context, the discourse of tradition functioned as a mechanism for preserving power, attempting to establish insurmountable symbolic barriers between those who "have always been there" and those who have only "arrived now with money."

This conflict mirrors, in miniature, the process experienced by Rio Grande do Sul in recent decades. The state, which in the 20th century was a relevant industrial hub on the national scene, experienced an accelerated process of deindustrialization and loss of economic centrality. The traditional elites of Rio Grande do Sul – linked to the leather and footwear industry, the furniture sector, family farming, and traditional livestock farming – saw their economic and political power dwindle in the face of the new configuration of Brazilian capitalism, increasingly concentrated in the Rio-São Paulo axis and oriented towards financialized and commodity sectors. Simultaneously, new economic groups emerged in the state, frequently linked to large-scale agribusiness, commodity exports, and specialized service sectors. These newly wealthy individuals do not necessarily share the same social networks, institutions, and cultural codes as the old elites, generating tensions similar to those observed in Grêmio. The dispute is not just about material resources, but about who has the legitimacy to represent the State, who truly "understands" Rio Grande do Sul, and who deserves to occupy positions of power.

The economic decline of the state, aggravated by successive incompetent conservative administrations that deepened the fiscal crisis, the deterioration of public services, and the backwardness in infrastructure, has created an environment of frustration and resentment that fuels both traditional political disputes and internal conflicts within football clubs. The feeling that Rio Grande do Sul has "fallen behind" in Brazilian modernization is echoed in the perception that Grêmio and Internacional also occupy peripheral positions in national football, constantly overlooked in favor of clubs from the Southeast in CBF decisions, in the distribution of television resources, and in the competition calendar itself. This double marginalization – economic and symbolic – provides the substrate upon which the most radical political reactions germinate.

The Radicalization of the Far Right in Football: Capitalism, Fascism, and Resentment

The radicalization of the far right in Brazilian football, particularly in the South, manifests itself through three fundamental characteristics that deserve close analysis. First, there is an almost sacrosanct appreciation for capitalist accumulation, which translates into the vehement defense of Public Limited Football Companies (SAFs) as the "only solution" for southern clubs. This discourse reproduces, without critical mediation, the neoliberal ideology that romanticizes wealth as the exclusive result of ability, merit, and hard work, concealing the processes of exploitation, inheritance, structural privilege, and often predatory practices that sustain great fortunes. In the context of football, the SAF is presented as a panacea that would eliminate "associative incompetence" and bring "business efficiency," ignoring that the transformation of clubs into private companies can mean the expropriation of the symbolic and material patrimony built by generations of fans, the loss of democratic control over institutions, and the complete subordination of sporting interests to the logic of profit. What is ultimately venerated is not football or the club, but capital itself, in a reversal of values ​​that transforms the means (financial resources) into the ultimate end.

Secondly, we are witnessing the emergence of a fascism that presents itself as "anti-system," capitalizing on real perceptions of inequity in institutional politics and football. This phenomenon has roots in structural causes: the peripheral position of Rio Grande do Sul in the Brazilian federative arrangement, which has intensified with the economic concentration in the Southeast; the lack of effective representation of Southern clubs in decision-making processes centered on the Rio-São Paulo axis, whether in the CBF (Brazilian Football Confederation) or in television rights negotiations; and the widespread perception that the ruling elites – both in politics and in football – form a corrupt and incompetent caste that perpetuates its privileges regardless of popular interests. Contemporary fascist discourse skillfully channels these legitimate frustrations into authoritarian solutions, promising to "cleanse" institutions through "strong," "technical," and supposedly "non-political" leadership (when, in fact, they represent the most brutal and undemocratic form of politics). In football, this manifests itself in the idolization of authoritarian managers, in the defense of exemplary punishments against "corrupt politicians" within the club, and in the disdain for mechanisms of associative participation, seen as "chaos" and "amateurism".

Finally, there is the pervasive feeling of being constantly harmed, which permeates both the politics of Rio Grande do Sul and the football of the South. In the political sphere, Rio Grande do Sul cultivates a narrative of marginalization within the federal pact: proportionally lower receipt of resources from the Union, economic policies that favor the Southeast at the expense of other regions, and a lack of federal investment in local infrastructure. True or exaggerated, this feeling structures the political perception of a significant portion of the people of Rio Grande do Sul and fuels both resentful regionalism and adherence to radical political projects that promise to "break with the system." In football, this resentment finds privileged expression in the issue of refereeing: there is a widespread belief that clubs from the South are systematically harmed by referees, who supposedly favor the "big" clubs from the Rio-São Paulo axis. Regardless of the factual veracity of these claims (which would merit rigorous statistical analysis), what matters is that this sentiment is real and structural, functioning as a totalizing explanation for defeats and failures, removing agency from the clubs themselves and their management and projecting responsibility onto an external and conspiratorial "system." This victim mentality, while understandable in the face of real power imbalances, becomes politically dangerous when used to justify anti-democratic solutions and to refuse any self-criticism about internal shortcomings.

Conclusion: Political Culture and the Anticipation of 2026

Understanding the processes, reasons, meanings, and justifications behind the internal political movements of sports organizations like Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense proves to be not only an interesting intellectual exercise but also a solid analytical space for understanding and even anticipating broader political trends, including those that will manifest in the 2026 elections. This is because, as Putnam demonstrated, political culture orders the ways in which citizens understand all instances of power they experience in their daily lives. There isn't one political culture for football, another for municipal politics, and yet another for national politics; rather, there is one political culture that manifests itself consistently and structures the behaviors, expectations, and reactions of individuals in all these spheres.

Internal disputes within football clubs, therefore, are not mere epiphenomena or sociological curiosities: they are sensitive barometers of social tensions, conflicts between old and new elites, processes of political radicalization, and transformations in the values ​​that guide collective action. When we observe, in Grêmio, the resistance of traditional oligarchies against the entry of new economic groups, the growing appeal to authoritarian and commercialized solutions (SAFs), the victimhood discourse on arbitration, and the fascination with unregulated capitalist accumulation, we are, in fact, observing on a reduced scale and with accelerated temporality the same phenomena that structure contemporary politics in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil. The citizen who defends an authoritarian businessman to "bring order" to the club will tend to defend similar proposals in institutional politics; the one who normalizes vote-buying in team elections will hardly be indignant about clientelist practices in municipal politics.

Thus, by analyzing the elections in the major football clubs of the South, the disputes over sports management models, and the discourses that mobilize the fans, we are actually anticipating and better understanding the movements that will unfold in 2026. The political culture that manifests itself in the relationship between club members and directors, between clubs and supposedly impartial "regulatory" entities, and between the periphery and the center of the Brazilian football system is the same culture that will structure electoral choices, reactions to economic and political crises, and the future projects that will compete for hegemony in the country. Ignoring this dimension, treating football as mere entertainment disconnected from "serious politics," is to miss a precious opportunity to understand the profound dynamics that move Brazilian society – including its most worrying tendencies towards authoritarianism, destructive resentment, and the commodification of all spheres of social life.