ABSTRACT

This article aims to evaluate how the notion of gift behaves in the soccer contexts. The discussion will involve the articulation and dialectical perception of two contiguous and constitutive conventional domains of the practice, playing and rooting for, taken as sensitive qualities and foundations of what will be metaphorized as soccer culture. From the point of view of the analytical and methodological proposal of the socalled relations model, we seek to argue in favor of the perceptions of the gaze, a connective faculty between those two domains, which judges theextensions of meanings that the gift can reach. The central argument is that we are facing not so much systems as contextual spreads of the gift, bringing together what sociological and historical symbolic conventions have kept apart and hierarchized, the practices of playing in relation to roorting for.

KEYWORDS
Soccer; playing; rooting for; gaze; gift; anthropology of sports practices