The internationalization of football and the ongoing creation of a transnational sports community in the early twentieth century interacted with processes of national and regional differentiation. The article shows that, in Brazil, football served as a means for the elite of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to forge and express their regional identities. Adopting a global and regional perspective, an attempt is made to understand these processes of differentiation between the two cities based on the analysis of given sporting events. The text starts from the assumption that regional and national identities and spaces are constructed from transnational interaction and negotiations. In the specific case of football, the aim is to ascertain the standardizing and differentiating effects that the process of its globalization implied.
regionalism; the São Paulo identity; history of football; Brazil
