Party time: The World Cup is returning to the nation where football is religion
A hundred years after Brazil's national team played their first match, against Exeter City- yes, Exeter City - the World Cup lands in the home of artistic football for the first time since 1950 as Croatia confront the hosts in Sao Paulo. Feel free to say so on a postcard if you can think of a bigger happening in international football history.
Africa’s first World Cup, four years ago, maybe? This one feels more heavily freighted because there is a sense of the world’s favourite game heading home, preceded by riots, resentment, construction deaths, corruption scandals and strikes across Brazil, which we in the west tend to imagine as a nation of ball-jugglers forever in carnival mode.
Brazil’s leadership of world football is easily expressed. Most participations (19), most goals (210), most consecutive wins (11, from 2002‑2006), most consecutive matches with goals scored (18) and, crucially, most victories in the tournament. Their five triumphs in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002 have just about erased the trauma of 1950, when the Selecao lost 2-1 to Uruguay at the Maracana and Brazilians spent the days and weeks that followed “drenched in pain”.
Or here is another way to make the point: Djalma Santos, Pele, Garrincha, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Tostao, Zico, Socrates, Romario, Bebeto, Cafu, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and possibly Neymar, if he can bear the crushing burden of being Brazil’s national artiste in a side marshalled by Scolari, aka
Big Phil, or Felipao, who lost a nephew in a car crash this week, days after Pele’s son was imprisoned for 33 years for laundering money from drug trafficking.