BackEveryone’s beautiful game: Return to Brazil
The football world cup returns to its 'spiritual home' after 64 years, igniting passion, conflict, love and excitement in equal measure
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The football world cup—it gets under your skin.
For a month, something wondrously different takes over, and your days are shaped by matches being played halfway across the world. You don’t have to be a football fan to come under its spell. It will embrace you anyway.
Why? Because football is so much more than a game. It’s human instinct. It’s deeply woven into culture and politics. It shapes history. It changes people, communities, nations. It can be sublime, excessive, heroic, or ugly—often all of these at the same time.
Or it could be the pure simplicity of receiving a ball on the instep, and curling it up with three little toes.
How best to explore the beauty of the beautiful game but to gather, as we have done in this issue, some of the most evocative writers on the sport?
Alex Bellos, whose book Futebol: The Brazilian Way Of Life is this decade’s benchmark for sports literature, explores how the self-image of a nation (not just any nation, but the world’s fifth largest and fifth most populous one) could depend on a single goal.
Rohit Brijnath muses on how memory, nostalgia and beauty shape the football fan.
Supriya Nair tracks one of the most incendiary and interesting players at this world cup—Italy’s Mario Balotelli—through the lens of his struggles against racism.
Jayaditya Gupta looks at the hard edge of Brazil’s romance with the game, Indrajit Hazra switches loyalties effortlessly, and Abhijit Gupta tries to score past Albert Camus at the goal. There is the beauty of numbers as well, in the sheer statistical dazzle of the kind of things top players in the world can pull off game after game in a season.
It’s time then to put on your boots, wear your colours with pride, and get on the field. The whistle has been blown, the ball is at your feet.
Rudraneil Sengupta
Issue editor
Also read
World Cup 2014: The radiant road to Maracanã
World Cup 2014: Shift the goalpost
World Cup 2014: The world at its feet
World Cup 2014: Alone the poet stood at the goal
World Cup 2014: Who do you love?
World Cup 2014: The homecoming
How do you solve a riddle like Mario Balotelli?
World Cup 2014: Tired legs, fading glory
World Cup 2014: A kickabout, on your phone
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