A Brazilian in Gwangju: Fan Support for Their Teams

By Diego Teixeira Setton

To this day, the most-spoken topic between me and my dad is football. He won’t admit it, but making sure I grew up supporting the same team as him was as important as me getting good grades at school, and I am sure many others youngsters in Brazil had the exact same experience while they were growing up.

Being so involved with a sport from such a young age naturally allows it to develop into a passion. Your football team is almost a key part of your personality. You can find intense discussions about the latest match almost anywhere you go: at bars, in schools, at restaurants, on taxi rides, in lines, etc., someone will be talking about football.

The best part about football was always going to see a match at the stadium; nowhere else have I seen anything close to the atmosphere created by the fans. In Brazil, no one watches the match sitting down. Even before getting to the match, people are already singing and jumping outside the arena – sometimes holding flares, too!

Inside, organized fan clubs (torcidas organizadas) are responsible for setting the tone. They prepare huge banners to show off at the matches, bring drums to aid in the cheering, and sing many songs throughout the 90 minutes of the match – only stopping to celebrate a goal or to curse at opposing players and the referee (and sometimes their own players, as well).

However, at the same time, passion can provide an amazing atmosphere and support; it can also bring out the worst in people (the amount of alcohol usually consumed during football matches doesn’t help). Organized fans have the unfortunate reputation of being seen as extremely violent, often even compared to organized crime. And it is true, members of these fan clubs can become overly aggressive. Protests and harassment of players when they don’t perform can get pretty serious, and fights between rival fans are not uncommon – even leading to deaths. It got so bad that rivalry matches in my city are only allowed to admit fans of the home team, as fights broke out so often that authorities weren’t able to control the violence.

Still, going to the stadium back home is an unmatched experience. Being able to shout, cheer, and jump to your heart’s content, all while celebrating or cursing together with a complete stranger sitting next to you, as if they were a member of your family, is unparalleled. There has not been one time that I have left a match without losing my voice. Being a fan in Brazil is almost like being the twelfth player on your favorite team. Home support really matters.

I was a bit disappointed when watching sporting events while living in the United States, as they felt more like entertainment than passion. The games felt almost like an afterthought, and fans of all the teams and sports were often limited to two very uninspired chants – shouting “Defense, Defense” and singing “Let’s go team” over and over again. At a Chicago Bulls basketball game that I attended, Dunking Donuts held a halftime event where you could scan a QR code and make a bet on a virtual race. A donut, a bagel, and a coffee cup would be racing, and if you picked the winner, you could win a free donut. During that short, pre-determined race, the arena was incredibly loud – louder than they had been for the whole game – and it made me quite confused.

On another occasion, I had the chance to watch a Champions League match between Benfica and Monaco, in Lisbon. While the fans there were definitely passionate and vibrant, there were still a few moments when no one would be singing, making it far from what I was used to in Brazil.

For these reasons, I wasn’t expecting much from the fans when I attended my first Kia Tigers game in Gwangju. I didn’t imagine Korean fans would be loud and passionate the way South American fans are, as it seems that you need a little bit of that third-world spark to reach such intensive levels of devotion to a sports team.

To my surprise, the fans started singing very loudly, and not only that, they also seemed to have a different song for each player that stepped up to bat. The fans kept up their intensity throughout the entire game, and even the opposing fans were able to make some noise of their own. By the end of the baseball game, the whole stadium was arm in arm, singing a song – which I couldn’t fully comprehend – prompting me to embrace my friends and try to sing along, evoking a feeling that I had only ever managed to experience while attending football matches in Brazil!

Even if it didn’t quite reach the same level of atmosphere as that created by Brazilians supporters (Korean fans are much more civilized when watching a game: They sit down in their seats and don’t take off their shirts or curse as much as people back home), Kia Tigers fans impressed me a lot with the passion they have watching their games. It was the closest thing I had experienced to attending a football match back home, and it managed to make me a fan of a new sport that I hadn’t normally watched before.

It was truly worth it, both for the memories I made with friends and for the experience of attending the baseball game itself. I will attempt to continue watching the Tigers whenever the time-zone differences allow me to, and I hope I can learn the songs for the inevitable next time I am able to attend a Kia Tigers game at Champion’s field in Gwangju.