Football is the national sport of Brazil in every practical sense: it is the country's most popular game, the Seleção has won a record five FIFA World Cups (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002), and Brazil is the only nation to have played at every World Cup. No statute, however, names football as the national sport. The art that has held that title in official language is capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art promoted as a "national sport" under President Getúlio Vargas and made an official sport by the federal government in 1972. So the honest answer has two parts: football by devotion, capoeira by designation.
Football or Capoeira: What Brazilian Law and Custom Say
Brazil's formal national symbols are named in the 1988 Constitution and regulated by Law 5,700 of 1 September 1971, and there are only four of them: the flag, the coat of arms, the anthem and the national seal. Sports are not on that list, which is why the question of a national sport has to be answered from history rather than from a single clause of law.
The case for capoeira rests on two moments. After decades of prohibition, the Brazilian state legalised capoeira in 1937 and began promoting it as part of national culture during Vargas's Estado Novo. In 1953, after watching a demonstration by Mestre Bimba, Vargas declared that capoeira was "the only truly national sport". In 1972 the government made capoeira an official sport and attempted to publish standard competition rules, although those rules were never universally adopted by the schools.
The case for football is the country itself. Surveys cited on Wikipedia put the share of Brazilians who follow football at over 68 percent, and the game shapes the calendar, television schedules and the identity of cities from Porto Alegre to Belém. When foreigners ask about Brazil's national sport, they almost always mean football, and Brazilians usually answer the same way.
Charles Miller, Thomas Donohoe and the 1894 Arrival of Football
Two British-linked figures share credit for bringing the modern game to Brazil, and both of their stories turn on 1894. Thomas Donohoe, a Scottish master dyer, reached Rio de Janeiro on 21 May 1894 to run the dyeworks of a new calico-printing mill at Bangu, on the city's western edge, and that same year he organised football matches among the mill's workers on a pitch beside the factory.
The better-known name is Charles William Miller (1874–1953), born in São Paulo to a Scottish railway engineer and a Brazilian mother of English descent. Sent to school in Southampton in 1884, he learned the game in England and played for St. Mary's, the club that became Southampton FC. When he returned to São Paulo later in 1894 he carried two footballs and a set of Hampshire FA rules in his luggage. Miller organised football at the São Paulo Athletic Club and helped found the Liga Paulista de Foot-Ball on 14 December 1901. Its competition, the Campeonato Paulista, first held in 1902, is the oldest official tournament in Brazilian football, and Miller's SPAC won its first three editions. He also suggested the name of Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, founded in 1910 by five railway workers inspired by the London amateur side Corinthian FC.
The game spread quickly through immigrant and working communities. Rio de Janeiro's state championship, the Campeonato Carioca, began in 1906, and the national team played its first match on 21 July 1914 at Fluminense's Laranjeiras stadium against the English club Exeter City. The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) was founded the same year.
Five World Cups, From Sweden 1958 to Yokohama 2002
Brazil's first world title came in Sweden in 1958, with a 17-year-old Pelé scoring in the knockout rounds and the side beating the hosts 5–2 in the final. It made Brazil the first nation to win a World Cup outside its own continent. Four years later in Chile, without the injured Pelé for most of the tournament, Brazil beat Czechoslovakia 3–1 in the final.
The 1970 team in Mexico, led by Pelé, Jairzinho, Tostão, Gérson, Rivellino and captain Carlos Alberto Torres, won all six of its matches and beat Italy 4–1 in the final. Jairzinho scored in every game. As the first country to win three titles, Brazil kept the Jules Rimet Trophy permanently, though it was stolen from the CBF in 1983 and never recovered.
The fourth title took 24 years. At the 1994 tournament in the United States, Romário and Bebeto led the attack and the final against Italy at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena ended goalless after extra time; Brazil won the penalty shootout when Roberto Baggio missed. In 2002, in the first World Cup held in Asia, Ronaldo scored eight goals, including both in the 2–0 final against Germany in Yokohama. Brazil remains the only team to have won the World Cup on four different continents.
The Maracanã, the Maracanaço and the Mineiraço
The Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, officially the Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho, opened in 1950 to host that year's World Cup. Its name comes from the Maracanã River, itself named from a Tupi word for a local parrot. On 16 July 1950 it staged the deciding match of the final round between Brazil and Uruguay. Brazil needed only a draw, took the lead through Friaça, and then lost 2–1 to goals from Juan Alberto Schiaffino and Alcides Ghiggia. The official count of paying spectators was 173,850, and estimates of the real crowd run above 200,000, which would make it one of the most heavily attended football matches ever played. The defeat became known as the Maracanaço, and it led directly to a change of kit: the white shirts were dropped, and a yellow-and-green design by 19-year-old Aldyr Garcia Schlee of Pelotas was first worn in March 1954.
Club football filled the ground for decades. The 1963 Fla–Flu derby between Flamengo and Fluminense drew 194,603 spectators, still the club record. Terraces were later replaced with seats, and after the renovations for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics the capacity stands at 73,139, still the largest in Brazil. The stadium hosted the 2014 World Cup final and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Rio 2016 Olympics, and it is due to stage matches at the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup.
Brazil's other national trauma happened in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. In the 2014 semi-final at the Mineirão, Germany beat Brazil 7–1, the Seleção's heaviest World Cup defeat and its first competitive home loss since 1975. Brazilians named it the Mineiraço, deliberately echoing 1950.
The CBF, Série A and the State Championships
The CBF, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, organises national competitions and the national teams. Beneath it sit the state federations, which run the state championships that open each season in January. These state leagues are older than the national league: the current format of the Campeonato Brasileiro dates only from 1959, while the Paulista began in 1902.
Today Série A has 20 clubs, each playing 38 matches, with promotion and relegation to and from Série B. Palmeiras is its most successful club, and Cruzeiro holds the most titles in the Copa do Brasil, the national knockout cup, with six. The geography of the game is concentrated in the southeast and south: São Paulo has Corinthians, Palmeiras, São Paulo and Santos; Rio has Flamengo, Fluminense, Vasco da Gama and Botafogo; Belo Horizonte has Atlético Mineiro and Cruzeiro; Porto Alegre has Grêmio and Internacional.
The women's game has grown later and more slowly. The national team reached the Women's World Cup final in 2007 and won Olympic silver in 2004, 2008 and 2024. Marta is the best-known name in the women's game, and Brazil will host the 2027 Women's World Cup.
Capoeira From the 1890 Penal Code to UNESCO's 2014 List
Capoeira developed among enslaved Africans and their descendants in colonial Brazil, and scholars have traced possible roots to engolo, a Bantu fighting tradition from southern Angola. It first appears in an official document in 1789, recorded as a crime. Slavery in Brazil was not abolished until 1888, and two years later capoeira was written into the penal code of 1890 as an offence. In Rio de Janeiro, a violent street style known as capoeira carioca was associated with gangs and razors.
Modern capoeira took shape in Bahia. Mestre Bimba (1899–1974) opened a formal school in Salvador in 1932 and created capoeira regional, with set teaching sequences and an emphasis on fighting skill. Mestre Pastinha (1889–1981) founded his school in 1941 to preserve capoeira Angola, slower and more ritual, and distinct from the "national sport" approach. A game takes place in a roda, a circle of players, led by the single-string berimbau, with the rhythmic sidestep called the ginga at its base.
From the 1960s the Grupo Senzala in Rio spread an athletic style nationally, and in the 1970s mestres such as Jelon Vieira and Bira Almeida took capoeira to the United States. In 2014 UNESCO added the roda de capoeira to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising it as a place where knowledge is passed on and the memory of resistance to oppression is kept alive.
Five Olympic Volleyball Golds and Brazil's Other Strengths
If football is first, volleyball is a clear second in international results. Governed by the Confederação Brasileira de Voleibol, Brazil's men won Olympic gold at Barcelona 1992, Athens 2004 and at home in Rio in 2016, beating Italy in straight sets in the final. They have also won three World Championships and nine World League titles. The women's team took gold at Beijing 2008 and London 2012, both times beating the United States in the final, and holds the record of 12 FIVB World Grand Prix titles.
The same cities that dominate football carry these sports too, with the 11,800-seat Maracanãzinho arena beside the Maracanã, opened in 1954 and used mostly for volleyball, as its best-known indoor venue. Futsal and beach soccer, both small-sided cousins of football, are also played at a high level, so Brazilian football reaches well beyond the 11-a-side game. For more on the country behind these teams, see our Brazil country guide, compare other countries in our overview of national sports around the world, or meet the jaguar, which fills a similar symbolic role, in our guide to the national animal of Brazil.