2 Grand Clios for Area 23 and Brazil's 1st Indigenous Soccer Club

One slur was all it took

They say timing is everything. For Gavião Kyikatejê F.C.—Brazil’s first indigenous football club—those words resonate more than ever in 2025.  One slur was all it took to creatively instigate change: “Football isn’t for Indians.” 

What ensued was more than an uprising. It’s transformational change, not just for Brazil’s indigenous peoples, but for the greater sporting landscape. 

For its part, Area 23 seized two Grands at the Clio Sports Awards last night in New York with work that shines a spotlight on prejudice in sports and society.

The campaign is heralded as Brazil’s most successful team sponsorship effort. It reached 5 million views in a 24-hour timeframe, while earning wall space at Latin America’s premier Museu do Futebol. 

Gaining first time branding support, Gavião F.C. raised over R$500,000 (roughly US$92,000), providing the team with enough funds to see it through the next seven seasons. 

After learning of the verbal slight, Area 23 spent time delving into the complicated, hundreds-of-years-long-story behind it, and its effect on the indigenous community.

“That xenophobic comment did not just offend a team, it exposed something bigger that was already boiling in Brazil: the tension around Indigenous visibility, identity, and respect,” says Victor Toyofuku, the agency’s creative director. “When I found Gavião Kyikatejê during my research, I realized this was not just another story worth telling. It was the right story at the right time.”

Gavião F.C. has been in existence since 2009, with both the men’s and women’s teams winning awards and titles throughout its 16-year history.

As the agency began to work closely with the club, it became abundantly clear that a traditional campaign wouldn’t capture the weightiness of its story. Instead, a short documentary could provide the scope to show “both the reality and the spirit of the community without simplifying anything”—one worthy of Gavião F.C.—and the community at large. 

A highly stylized short shot on 16mm film emerged, inter-splicing the narrative with hand-painted animation inspired by the community’s own art and visual symbols. AREA 23 timed its release to coincide with Brazil’s Indigenous Resistance Day as a means to address the greater societal concerns in sports and in life.

“It was not an aesthetic choice,” says Toyofuku. “It was a cultural one. Mixing the two created a rhythm that felt ancient and contemporary at once. A visual identity that did not follow trends or templates. Something that belonged to them.”

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Toyofuku emphasizes how far-reaching the campaign was as brands and the public were finally beginning to pay attention to Indigenous issues in a meaningful way. Editors, illustrators, influencers, sound designers, and more offered their talent without asking anything in return.

And brands, he says, responded not because it was good PR but because of the authenticity driving it. The team was now perceived with holding real potential, with a story that shined a light on a human rights issue.

The campaign’s goal was to mirror the culture of the community creating something “timeless, raw, spiritual and modern” all at once. 

Each person featured in the film are Indigenous non-actors, which is a point of pride for AREA 23. 

“Most campaigns about minorities are built from the outside in,” says  Toyofuku. “They were not participants. They were co-authors. And when a community takes control of its own story, everything changes: the tone, the truth, the power. That is what makes this campaign different. It does not speak for them. It gives them the microphone and amplifies what was already there.”