Beach Volleyball Management in Brazil

Abstract

From its creation to the current times, beach volleyball has been showing a significant growth in the global scenario in terms of competitive sports practice and was one of the sports that took the least amount of time to enter the official program of the Summer Olympic Games. Throughout this process, Brazil became one of the world’s strongest powerhouses in this sport, earning hundreds of international prizes and making it strategic for the Brazilian Olympic Committee (COB) in winning Olympic medals for the country. In the Rio de Janeiro 2016 edition of the Olympic Games, Brazil achieved the Olympic championship in the men’s competition and the women achieved the Olympic vice-championship. The model that was adopted by Brazilian beach volleyball and is used to this day has shown to be successful regarding the titles and profits achieved for financial backers and sponsors. It has, in fact, become a reference for the national confederations for other sports and even those from other countries. As stated by Pizzolato (2004), “the modality’s management is seen as an example of action for the field’s professionals. The CBV is seen as the best and most structured confederation currently active in Brazil”. Throughout the beach volleyball regulation process and the sport’s subsequent incorporation as an Olympic sport, priority was given to the creation of official regulations that aimed to guide its competitive practice, allowing the athletes to participate in official competitions without needing to be tied to clubs, teams, or schools. Even today, for their participation to be possible, each athlete needs only to be registered in their respective state federation, which must be a member of the Brazilian Volleyball Confederation or, in the case of international competitions, with one of the national federations that is a part of the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) – such as the Brazilian Volleyball Confederation – (CBV). With this in mind, we believe that it is important to understand the impacts that this process of structuring beach volleyball in Brazil has had on establishing degrees of autonomy and dependence for this modality as a sportive practice in the country, building from an understanding of the operational dynamics of certain practice locations and the conditions under which the practice is integrated in these regions. With this, we seek to investigate how the different forms of practice correlate to the different actors of the field in which this sport is inserted. This study aimed to map the volleyball practice points in the main locations of the modality’s development in Brazil and to identify the conditions under which the sport is practiced in these regions. In this sense, the intention is to offer information that contributes to advancing the knowledge pertaining to sports management in beach volleyball, stimulating reflections on the subject and, consequently, the presentation of proposals for the modality’s evolution based on the knowledge shared in this chapter.