ISSUE V
MAY 2025
MAY 2025
Accidental Theorist: Juninho Pernambucano
What would former Brazilian national football team player Juninho Pernambucano’s theory of international affairs look like?
By Ingrid Nielsen
Juninho Pernambucano is a Brazilian soccer player best known as the all-time leader in scoring from free-kicks, with 77 goals. Not even Lionel Messi has surpassed him. Yet. Juninho, as he is commonly known, earned only 47 caps for the Brazil men’s national team between 1999 and 2006. He only played in only World Cup, in 2006. He played his club football in France, for Lyon, making 248 appearances and scoring 75 goals. Juninho became a club legend at Lyon, leading them to seven consecutive Ligue 1 titles.
However, in recent years, the now-retired player has drawn attention not for his former exploits on the field but for his stances on political and social issues. It is also how we can deduce what kind of international affairs theorist he would have been, had he chosen this as a career. In short, he’d show a disdain for authoritarianism and elites, a concern for the poor and working class, and a vocal critic of racism in South America.
In the 2018 Brazilian elections, Neymar, Ronaldinho Gaúcho, Rivaldo, and many other prominent Brazilian footballers, both current and former, announced their support for right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Juninho was one of the few who backed Fernando Haddad, the left-wing candidate of the Workers’ Party, having contributed to his presidential campaign by producing and promoting content on his social media platforms. (Some commentators have inferred that of active Brazilian national team players, only Richarlison, of Tottenham in England, and Vinicius, of Real Madrid in Spain, are not Bolsonaro supporters.)
During the 2018 election, which Bolsonaro won, Juninho criticized his former teammates as well as Neymar: “At heart, I am grateful to the clown [Bolsonaro]. He showed us that those who sit to eat with us and share our food are closeted fascists. It could be any relative or a friend. Reactionaries will not be welcome in my house or my life.” Juninho told THE (UK) GUARDIAN that he had distanced himself from 80 to 90% of his friends and family due to disagreements over politics.
Junior argues that the Brazilian elite does not understand the harm caused by the country’s significant inequality. (South Africa is considered the world’s most unequal country by Gini index, with Brazil ranking second.) For Juninho, Brazil’s establishment “does not have empathy and is teaching us not to have it too.” Professional footballers often forget that they once were poor. By supporting Bolsonaro, footballers like Neymar, Ronaldinho, and Rivaldo have turned their backs on millions of Brazilians who face hunger and poverty. “Brazilians have had to watch as the national team’s captain and star player, Neymar, turned his back on the more than 30 million hungry Brazilians and the 120 million who live on the cusp of food insecurity and backed Bolsonaro as part of a supposed fight against a non‑existent communist threat.”
When Eduardo Bolsonaro, a congressman and the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, claimed that no one had been murdered by police in Brazil in the same way as George Floyd, a Black man murdered by Minneapolis police in the US, Pernambucano pushed back forcefully. He reminded Bolsonaro and the media that Brazilian police had killed countless Black people. “There are thousands of George Floyds in Brazil and thousands more who have suffered in silence, unknown to us. It’s inhumane to claim that Brazil has no George Floyds. These shootings happen every day. Gay people are persecuted too—and that’s one of the things that angers me most about Bolsonaro’s supporters.”
Brazil’s football success has been closely identified with the yellow “home” jerseys worn by its national teams. But since 2018, the jersey has taken on a political dimension, co-opted by Bolsonaro’s supporters who wore it at rallies while waving the national flag. Writing ahead of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, former midfielder Juninho expressed dismay over this shift. In THE GUARDIAN, he wrote: “After Russia 2018, the political hijacking of the historic and highly respected yellow Brazil national team jersey, designed to boost Bolsonaro’s nationalist movement, made millions of Brazilians disown and refuse to wear it, even for a World Cup.”
Before the last World Cup, Pernambucano wrote an op-ed addressing one of Brazil's challenges: reclaiming the national flag and the iconic yellow jersey, which Bolsonaro had co-opted as nationalist symbols.
While left-wing politicians and commentators, such as Juninho, have encouraged Brazilians to wear the jersey again after Bolsonaro lost the 2022 elections, many remain hesitant, fearing they will be mistaken for Bolsonaro's supporters.
There may be hope for better days. Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled that Bolsonaro must stand trial for his role in conspiring to overthrow the government in 2022 after his election loss to Lula. Following a slow start, Brazil seems poised to qualify for the 2026 men’s World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
Football is a national passion in Brazil, and a successful championship could help kick-start a sense of reconciliation among Brazilians and aid in their recovery of identity, as it did for Argentina in 2022.
Ingrid Nielsen is completing an MS in International Affairs at The New School.