Illustration by Red Star Liverpool. Find more of his great work here Modern football has created a purgatory. A place where players that fail to live up to their initial hype are consigned…
Tag: brazil
We all marvel at the skill determination and single-minded focus of individuals that achieve greatness across the sports, from Muhammed Ali to Tiger Woods and Roger Federer to Usain Bolt. Commentators and pundits today…
Every footballer dreams of lifting the World Cup. Some achieve this goal, and others sit in the rarefied air of winning it on multiple occasions. Mário Zagallo is in a league of his…
This feature is part of The Fleeting Fraternity What is tragedy? In modern-day usage, it is defined by an event of monumental human suffering, shrouded by pathos and disaster. In dramatic arts’…
This feature is part of The Fleeting Fraternity A SINGLE SNAPSHOT of a player often reveals much more than the football they play. The way they carry themselves off the ball, how they…
“There was complete silence,” said Alcides Ghiggia of the moment he caused nearly 200,000 spectators at Rio’s Maracanã to fall into a deathly hush. “The crowd was frozen still. It was like they…
THE SIGHT OF A BRAZIL TEAM in full samba flow invokes something in football supporters that can’t be replicated by any other team. People marvel over Spain’s fluid passing and Germany’s ruthless dynamism…
Whether embellished, exaggerated or entirely fabricated, the tale of Carlos Raposo, much like a misheard Chinese whisper, is simply too grand not to pass on
BRAZIL CAME TO SWEDEN IN 1958 with a great deal of expectation behind them. It was the sixth incarnation of the World Cup; the Seleção had played in every previous tournament, but…
Like so many other nations around the world, Brazilian football was pioneered by the British, namely Thomas Donohoe and Charles William Miller
The year was 1966; the month, November. American singer-songwriter Little Richard had just performed a brief but energetic gig at L’Olympia in Paris. In the surroundings of one of the French capital’s most…
The famous author and journalist Eduardo Galeano once said of Garrincha: “In the entire history of football, no one made more people happy.” That summed up the man who many Brazilians consider as good as Pelé.
It’s a moment most dream of but few ever come close to attaining. For a sport with the global pull of football, only a select number are deemed good enough to play it…
High farce in the midst of the projected hosting of a major international football tournament wasn’t an entirely new concept for the Colombian FA in late June 2001. Just over a decade and…
This feature is part of The Academy Way WHEN THE TITANIC HIT AN ICEBERG AND BEGAN ITS DESCENT into the punishingly icy waters off Newfoundland on 14 April, 1912, the world’s most…
This feature is a part of A Tale of One City THE PALMEIRAS PLAYERS had had enough, and they snapped. Like blood trickling down the water in front of a ravenous shark, they…
Applause ringing around the cauldron that is the Santiago Bernabéu; all you could hear was a generous din of applause from the grateful home fans, littered with adoring whistles. The date was 19 November…
This feature is part of A Tale of One City “When did Fla-Flu begin? I dare to say: Fla-Flu has no beginning. Fla-Flu has no end. Fla-Flu came into existence 40 minutes before…