Even the Pandemic Couldn’t Stop Button Soccer

While the pandemic has hit the sports world hard globally, one Brazilian sport, which has been played in the country since at least the 1920s, has found a way to survive by streaming itself and connecting players on the internet.

Called “button soccer,” the premise of the game is very similar to that of regular soccer—11 players on each side competing to score goals with a ball—except it’s played on a table with buttons. After more than a hundred years, button soccer remains extremely popular. There are around 6,000 players who actively participate in competitions and over 100,000 non-affiliated players in Brazil alone, and thousands more all over the world, according to the Brazilian Confederation of Table Football. Tournaments are attended by hundreds of people at a time, and countless unofficial competitions are held all over the world.

Because of the pandemic, the 2020 Rio de Janeiro championship was streamed entirely online. “In order to maintain some activity among our community members during the social isolation period, we ran a league with the Soccer Stars app,” says Table Football Federation of Rio de Janeiro communications director José Carlos Cavalheiro. “Initially, it was only for federated athletes from Rio de Janeiro, but later we expanded it to people who were somehow connected to table football. We used Facebook to stream a few preselected games on Wednesdays and Sundays.”

Available for iOS and Android, Soccer Stars is a popular free-to-play soccer app downloaded over 2.3 million times for Android alone, and it is the one used to stream matches on Facebook. According to Cavalheiro, the app and the table soccer game are very different in terms of rules and game configuration, and it was used exclusively as a “temporary alternative during the pandemic.”

But the situation is still far from ideal; the pandemic is not over, and in-person events are still severely restricted. Humberto Scavinsky, journalist and director of the São Paulo State Table Football Federation, explains that the last in-person championship in São Paulo was played in March 2020, and “we have no idea when we will officially start playing again.” And the situation is not unique to Brazil. István Martónfi, vice president of the International Table Football Confederation, explains that “globally, during the pandemic only a few local championships were organized, only in small communities. It is a very bad and unfortunate situation. We have to survive. We lost some friends, leaders, managers, fathers, players. But we can’t stop; we need to build the future. Because of Covid, we are working nowadays more on future plans and paperwork.”

The face-to-face, “analog” version of button soccer is not just child's play. Competitions draw large crowds and gather players from different parts of the country and even other parts of the world. As an amateur sport, prizes are usually just trophies and medals; there’s rarely money involved. In general, the championships are played on weekends, and in the case of national or international competitions, on holidays, making life easier for those who need to travel and cannot miss work or have families.