David Goldblatt, Visiting Professor, Pitzer College and author of the best-selling The Ball Is Round: a Global History of Soccer and the forthcoming Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer.
The World Cup provides a rare and genuinely cosmopolitan cultural moment that reaches a global public like no other spectacle. As well as being the most successful nation in World Cup history, Brazil’s style of play and the manner of its victories and its disasters have been seared more deeply into global soccer culture than any other. As importantly, long before the rest of the world came to consider Futebol the exemplar of Brazilian national identity, Brazil had done so itself.