“Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil” by David Goldblatt
Brazil is the 5th largest country in the world by size, 7th largest by population, and it is among the top 20 largest economies in the world. But yet their presence in the world is often subtle. Their cuisines are top notch but are not as well known as the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or even Mexican. One of their main exports, coffee, is also superb but also lose in competition compared with Ethiopia or Italian coffee. Their academic research are excellent and their movies are exceptional, but none of them has won any international awards, except for the movie City of God.
But there’s one area that Brazil is undeniably very famous for: Football. Brazil is the only nation that have participated in all of the World Cup finals, winning 5 of them and lost 2 finals. Apart from its successes, what makes Brazil stand out from the rest is their style of play, which Pelé refer as the Jogo Bonito, the beautiful game. As the joke goes, the English invented football and the Brazilians perfected it.
This book is about that passion for football and how it helped to shape the nation’s identity.
Published just before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the book is a story about how football was first introduced into the country and how they grew to become the absolute craze of the nation and its most famous image of the country. It is a wonderfully written piece of history, alongside the bosa nova, the samba, the capoeira, and the carnival. It also tells the story about the founding of the football clubs, the many important matches, the match brawls and stadium deaths, and of course the story about the insanely long list of footballing legends from Pele, to Socrates, to Romario and Ronaldo.
But perhaps more intriguingly, the book also gives us the big picture of a nation with brutal political environment that have endured so many coups and corruptions, harsh economic reality where poverty and crimes are common sights, not to mention terror under brutal dictatorial regimes that tried to whitewash their crimes through football. It also paints the bleak condition of their domestic league, with the minimim wage reality and so many late payments of salary, which prompted the exodus of talented players to constantly go abroad whenever they can or even change nationalities.
Indeed, it is after we understand the big picture of the country, that we would begin to understand why they play football the way they play. As the author, David Goldblatt, remarks, “the real price of making football the avatar of the nation is that the game’s deep connections to Brazil’s social structures, economic institutions and political processes are also laid bare.”
This, in the end of the day, is the overall feel of the book. The passion, the brilliance, the magic, mixed with the tragedies and miseries, the poverty and violence, the class war and political injustices, and the one thing that can unite the entire nation into one big harmony: the love of futebol.
THE CHAOS THEORY 