Editorial: EMILIO MIRA, SPORTS PSYCHOLOGIST

Abstract

The recent Football World Cup (2022), held in the Emirate of Qatar in Asia, has given extraordinary visibility to the passion of our contemporaries for the sport of soccer, which has become the premier sporting spectacle of our time. It is a sport that moves huge amounts of money, and that politicians use to benefit their own plans and to consolidate their social influence. Although it depends on multiple factors, a central one is the quality and efficiency of the teams, and by logical extension, the quality and efficiency of the players that make them up. The pressures exerted on these individuals by the media, power groups and even political leaders are enormous. It is logical that, for some time now, team managers have resorted to psychology, and its various personnel selection techniques, when it comes to recruiting and retaining those who prove to be the most effective and gifted pawns on the field of play: the players.
One of the countries that is a recognized leader in this sport is Brazil. Its national team has won the world games five times, although this year it failed to reach the semifinals. It is, in any case, one of the top teams in the world. And it has been one of those that have counted since the early days with the technical assistance of specialized psychologists. Perhaps the first was the Spaniard Emilio Mira y López (1896-1964), who, as is well known, after being exiled from Spain at the end of the civil war in 1939, ended up establishing his new home in Brazil, invited to work at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro in 1946. He remained there until his death in 1964.
Mira is the author of a small book, Futebol e psicologia , published the same year of his death, written in collaboration with a young specialist in sports psychology, who was part of the group of his collaborators in the mentioned Foundation: Athayde Ribeiro da Silva (Mira and Ribeiro da Silva, 1964). That work, despite its originality and early appearance, has generally gone unnoticed in studies on its Spanish author. We only have a good work, very interesting although partial, by A. Kaulino, (Kaulino, 2014), where great attention is paid to the relationship of the world of soccer with Brazilian society, but the contribution of the collaborator, A. Ribeiro da Silva, is not analyzed at all. We aspire, therefore, to give here a more finished information of the work.