How does sport reflect broad social and cultural dynamics? Can the history of sports help us understand the historical evolution of societies? This innovative work by Gregg Bocketti on the early history of Brazilian football (soccer) provides affirmative and multidimensional answers to both questions.

Structured on a narrative that is thematic rather than chronological, this book examines the much-celebrated proposition that football came to personify the Brazilian character of a multiracial democracy. It does through by reviewing the early history of the game, from its arrival in the last decade of the nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. Both the sport and the timing of its introduction constituted a challenge for the celebratory nationalists of the corporatist Vargas regime, who in the 1930s and 1940s encouraged governmental action in what was recognized by then as the most important game in the country, Bocketti uncovers both the changes implemented by the state in professional football and the continuing restrictions that had effects on the sport, helping us to critically reflect not only on the game but much more broadly on long-lasting social exclusions in Brazilian society.

To buttress his main argument, Bocketti opens up abundant evidence from a vast range of historical sources (from archival documents written by turn-of-the-century soccer clubs to press records and intellectual publications). He uses the evidence to show us that both the early pro-European aristocratic Brazilians (especially Paulistanos), who were first to play football, and the nationalist reformers of Estado Novo perceived the practice of football as a useful way to help them promote their own vision of nation-building and the bring about the social amelioration of a vast, uneducated, and underdeveloped society. Likewise, the author shows that despite the professionalization and encouragement of nonwhite, working-class players to participate in the game that took place over the sport's first 50 years in the country, and the emergence of the appealing and recurrent image of the jogo bonito (said to be inherently Brazilian), nothing minimizes the underlying and enduring control that the economic, cultural, and political elites exercised in determining both how football was to be practiced and the discourse about its practice and significance.

The book is organized into five chapters, plus a useful introduction and an insightful epilogue. Chapter 1 deals with the image and proposed uses of the sport advanced in the media and by policymakers at the turn of the century and during the Estado Novo. Chapter 2 explores the practices of the game in its early years and the regulations that supported them, with special attention to restrictions on participation pertaining race, class, and gender in major urban centers. Chapter 3 steps out of this framework to show how the participation of Brazilian teams in international tournaments helped shape the discourse about the game internally, and in turn its organization and practices over time. Chapter 4 shows us how the evolution of football practices encourage both inclusion, particularly of previously barred nonwhites, and exclusion, particularly on the basis of gender (women). Chapter 5 looks at coaching and sports commentators’ views and normative discourses about the game and its reflection of a so-called national character.

Bocketti advances the compelling notion that a close look at the history of Brazil's most celebrated, popular, and influential sport can teach us much about the country's complicated history. To be sure, though this is not a guaranteed outcome, as Bocketti demonstrates in his critical examination of Brazil's first celebratory historical narratives of the game in the 1930s and 1940s. His work certainly stands as a positive indication of the direction that a more critical and better-grounded sports study might provide.