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Football is the main sport and one of the most important cultural symbols of Brazil, the winner of five FIFA World Cup titles and one of the most populous and richest countries in the world. Even so, however, Brazilian football clubs struggle to develop commercially, attract fans to stadiums and control their expenditure, continuously increasing debt levels and often delaying salary payments. This thesis focuses on understanding the reasons that lead football clubs from such a strong football nation to this situation and exploring the options to improve it. To do so, the research makes extensive use of literature combined with various interviews with key individuals from the Brazilian football industry to analyse the growth and the globalization of the European football industry, explore the Brazilian business environment and investigate the Brazilian football governance, finances and sources of revenue, as well as the strong involvement that football has with Brazilian society and politics. The study suggests that there are four main factors that hold back the commercial development of Brazilian football: a) the misuse of European football as a benchmark; b) the social and political role played by football in Brazilian society; c) the Brazilian business environment; and d) the management of clubs and governing bodies. In the current scenario, there is only limited space for growth, even though there are many positive characteristics of the local football industry that can contribute for some development in the near future, especially at match day level, which may be helped by the 2014 FIFA World Cup.