The Invention of the Beautiful Game ― Football and the Making of Modern Brazil

“Beautifully researched and engagingly told, this book captures the bitter conflicts and surprising continuities that marked the emergence of a national style in Brazil as it tells the story of the men and women who, despite their many differences, together created ‘the beautiful game.’”—Roger Kittleson, author of The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil
 
“Compellingly shows how each segment of Brazilian society—players, club owners, and spectators, especially the usually neglected female fans—was touched by the sport that it eventually came to proudly embrace as its own. ”—Amy Chazkel, coeditor ofThe Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics
 
In this cross-cutting cultural history, Gregg Bocketti traces the origins of soccer in Brazil from its elitist, Eurocentric identity as “foot-ball” at the end of the nineteenth century to its subsequent mythologization as the specifically Brazilian “futebol,”o jogo bonito (the beautiful game). Bocketti examines the sport and its narratives, which usually depict soccer as having evolved from a white elite pastime to an integral part of Brazil’s national identity known for its passion and creativity, and explains the ways that the popular history of the game has obscured many of the complexities and the continuities of the history of soccer and of Brazil.

Mining a rich trove of sources, including contemporary sports journalism, archives of Brazilian soccer clubs, and British ministry records, and looking in detail at soccer’s effect on all parts of Brazilian society, Bocketti shows how important the sport is to an understanding of Brazilian nationalism and nation building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 

Gregg Bocketti is associate professor of history at Transylvania University.