The Invention Of The Beautiful Game: Football And The Making Of Modern Brazil [Hardcover]

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 societyplayers, club owners, and spectators, especially the usually neglected female fanswas touched by the sport that it eventually came to proudly embrace as its own.Amy Chazkel, coeditor of The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics
?
Highlights the narrative power of soccer, showing how Braziliansfrom elite sportsmen and nationalist intellectuals to common men and womeninfused the sport with both personal and national importance.Joshua Nadel, author of F?tbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America
?
Although the popular history of Brazilian football narrates a story of progress toward democracy and inclusion, it does not match the actual historical record. Instead, football can be understood as an invention of early twentieth century middle-class and wealthy Brazilians who called themselves sportsmen and nationalists, and used the sport as part of their larger campaigns to shape and reshape the nation.?

In this cross-cutting cultural history, Gregg Bocketti traces the origins of football 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 popular depictions of the sport as having evolved from a white elite pastime to an integral part of Brazils national identity known for its passion and creativity, and concludes that these mythologized narratives have obscured many of the l£%