The Story Of Italia 90 – Pete Davies, 1990 Simon Kuperīuy The Brazilian Way of Life here from Amazon in paperback, hardback and on Kindle (opens in new tab) This is something of a relief after the many half-baked football-as-national-character arguments, but since Bellos knows so much, and seems so comfortable with Brazil’s history, language and music (like all good football books, Futebol is about much more than football), we want more of his insights.
Secondly, he is shorter on theory than on fact. At times it descends into a parade of cameo football obsessives. When Bellos wrote this, he was Brazil correspondent for The Guardian, and like many daily journalists he has trouble structuring a book. Futebol’s hundreds of interviews, facts, drawings, photographs and even maps will spare researchers trouble for generations to come. He appears in the Sao Paulo carnival for the samba school of Corinthians’ hardcore fans, wearing purple feathers.
He visits three Brazilians playing for a club in a village of 1,000 people in the Faroe Islands.
Not only does he speak to everyone – the man who designed Brazil’s yellow-blue-white strip, the man who scored the winner against Brazil in the 1950 final, beauty queens, priests – but he also goes everywhere and does everything. But Bellos travels around Brazil as if it were Luxembourg. In dangerous countries like Brazil, there are foreign correspondents who never leave town, and barely even their neighbourhood, except to go to the airport for the flight home. What makes Futebol special is its legwork – Alex Bellos is a Stakhanovite. Yet nobody had tackled the ultimate football country since the American sociologist Janet Lever wrote the obscure but wonderful Soccer Madness in 1983.
The format was familiar: by the time Futebol appeared, in 2002, we’d already enjoyed excellent books on football in one country by David Winner (Holland) and Phil Ball (Spain), with several others in the pipeline. The Brazilian Way of Life – Alex Bellos, 2002
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