The eve of the opening ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics is a good time to reflect not only on Brazil’s role as the organizer the games, but whether the experience of the host country tells us anything about the status of the BRICS--one of the most important economic groupings in the world, and one which you may never have heard of. As nations much showcased since 2001 as big, dynamic, rising countries, much of their global projection has focused as much on spectacle as on substantive achievements.
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The eve of the opening ceremonies of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics is a good time to reflect not only on Brazil’s role as the organizer the games, but whether the experience of the host country tells us anything about the status of the BRICS--one of the most important economic groupings in the world, and one which you may never have heard of. As nations much showcased since 2001 as big, dynamic, rising countries, much of their global projection has focused as much on spectacle as on substantive achievements.
The post Rio 2016: evidence of greatness or a bid for recognition? appeared first on OUPblog.
The 2014 Men’s World Cup finals pitted Germany against Argentina. Bets were made and various observations were cited about the teams. Who had the better defense? Would Germany and Argentina’s star players step up to meet the challenge? And, surprisingly, why did Argentina lack black players? Across the globe blogs and articles found it ironic that Germany fielded a more diverse team while Argentina with a history of slavery did not have a solitary black player.
The post An African tree produces white flowers: The disappearance of the black population in Argentina 110 years later appeared first on OUPblog.
Who will win the 2014 World Cup?I am completely obsessed with the 2014 World Cup tournament in Brazil. There are so many amazing teams playing that I don’t want to miss a single game! While you might not actually see both of these competitors in Brazil, what do you think of today’s match-up? Team Kitten vs. Arjen Robben from Team Holland!
Are you loving the
World Cup this year, or do you love kittens more? Which team do you support, and who will be the 2014 champions? Leave your World Cup predictions in the Comments!
Sonja, STACKS Staffer
World Cup 2014 Brazil!!Attention, all you footballers (or soccer fans if you’re American)! Last week we posted some World Cup Trivia in honor of all the awesome World Cup soccer action we’ve been seeing. A few teams have already been eliminated.
How did you score?
Check out the answers below!
1. Which country is the reigning World Cup champion? ANSWER: Spain. It won the World Cup in 2010. Sadly for them, they have already been eliminated from the 2014 tournament.
2. Which country has won the most World Cups? ANSWER: Brazil with 5 titles. (#2 Italy with 4 titles, #3 Germany with 3 titles. The U.S. has never won one yet!)
3. In every country in the world except for the United States, what is the sport of “soccer” called? ANSWER: Football . . . which is funny because around the world, they call American football . . . “American football.”
4. Name the Brazilian player who was named World Player of the Century and is considered to be the greatest player of all time. He won 3 World Cups in 1958, 1962, and 1970. ANSWER: Pele. His full name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento. He came from humble beginnings in Brazil, and couldn’t afford a soccer ball as a child, so he used to play with a sock stuffed with newspaper tied with a string. He began playing for the Brazil national team at age 16 (!) and went on to score 1,281 goals in 1,363 games. He’s totally a legend!
5. TRUE or FALSE. If you win the World Cup, you have to give it back at the end of your country’s reign. ANSWER: FALSE. Well, kind of false. There is ALL sorts of drama surrounding the history of the World Cup trophy. It was stolen twice, and in 1983 a new one had to be created because the original was believed to have been melted into gold pieces and sold by thieves! So now Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, keeps the official trophy. The winners are awarded a gold plated replica to keep.
6. TRUE or FALSE. Most American soccer players stay in the U.S.A. instead of going abroad to play pro soccer. ANSWER: FALSE. While many other U.S. sports attract foreign players (like baseball, basketball, and hockey), there is actually a REVERSE migration of American professional soccer players. Many American players leave the U.S. to play soccer in other countries. Only 3% of World Cup players from any country play for a U.S. Major League Soccer team.
7. Lionel Messi is currently considered to be the best soccer player in the world, challenging even the great Pele. What country is he from? ANSWER: Argentina. He currently plays for the professional team FC Barcelona (in Spain) but was born in Argentina and plays for them in the World Cup. Although pro soccer players can play for any country, they usually play for the country where they were born, or where they hold citizenship, for the World Cup.
8. Where will the next World Cup be held in 2018? ANSWER: Russia. This will be the first time ever in Russia!
Are you a soccer fan? Or do you just love the 5 Seconds of Summer song “Hearts Upon Our Sleeve?” And more importantly, which team do you support in the World Cup? Yes, 5SOS totally counts. Let us know in the Comments below!
Ratha, STACKS Writer
FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014!What’s the most popular sport in the world? Coming in as the most-watched, most-played in over 200 countries by over 3 billion people . . . soccer! In the streets, in backyards, schools and stadiums, all you need is a ball to get this game going.
As you may know, the World Cup is taking place now through July 13. Out of 209 countries with national teams, the top 32 teams qualified to compete for the title of World Cup champion. All month long, these 32 teams will play matches against each other until there is only 1 victorious team left. Who will it be in 2014?
The first World Cup was in 1930, and is held every 4 years. Like the Olympics, it alternates host countries and this year it is in Brazil. How much do you know about soccer and the World Cup? Compete in our Tuesday Trivia Quiz below:
- Which country is the reigning World Cup champion from 2010?Which country has won the most World Cups?In every country in the world except for the United States, what is the sport of “soccer” called?Name the Brazilian player who was named World Player of the Century and is considered to be the greatest player of all time. He won 3 World Cups in 1958, 1962, and 1970.TRUE or FALSE. If you win the World Cup, you have to give it back at the end of your country’s reign.TRUE or FALSE. Most American soccer players stay in the U.S.A. instead of going abroad to play pro soccer.Lionel Messi is currently considered to be the best soccer player in the world, challenging even the great Pele. What country is he from?Where will the next World Cup be held in 2018?
By Matthew Brown
Charles Miller claimed to have brought the first footballs to Brazil, stepping off the boat in the port of Santos with a serious expression, his boots, balls and a copy of the FA regulations, ready to change the course of Brazilian history. There are no documents to record the event, only Miller’s own account of a conversation, in which historians have picked numerous holes. There are no images either, which is why to mark the impending Miller-mania surrounding English participation in the World Cup in Brazil, I recreated the scene on the docks at Santos, today South America’s biggest and busiest port. (Thanks to my colleague Gloria Lanci for capturing the solemnity of the occasion).
Opposite the passenger terminal, where the photo was taken, an old building is being converted into the Museu do Pelé, to house the history of Santos Futebol Clube’s most famous player, heralded by many as the greatest footballer of the twentieth century – though it will not be ready to open in time for the World Cup. The stories of Miller and Pelé are often linked to illustrate the development of football in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian sociologist and historian, was one of the first:
‘[It was] Englishmen who introduced into Brazil the principal sporting and recreational replacements for our colonial jousting tournaments: horse-racing, tennis, cycling and football itself, which here became fully naturalised as a game not for fair-haired European expatriates in the tropics but for local people: […] people increasingly of varying shades of brown; with de-Anglicisation culminating in the admirable Pelé, after shining with Leônidas.
[Football] has become a veritable Afro-Brazilian dance, with footwork never imagined by its inventors. Has it stopped being British? Not in the slightest. Association football cannot be separated from its British origins to be considered a Brazilian or Afro-Brazilian invention. What it is, in its current, triumphant expression, is an Anglo-Afro-Brazilian game’. (Gilberto Freyre, The British in Brazil, London, 2011, first published in Portuguese in 1954, p.13.)
Charles Miller was born in São Paulo to a Scottish father and a Brazilian mother whose surname, Fox, reveals her English origins. During his lifetime the population of São Paulo ballooned from around 100,000 in 1874 to well over 2 million in 1953. Most of those new citizens were migrants and their children. São Paulo and Brazil were remaking themselves. Football and music became central ways for Brazilians to express a new inclusive identity after the abolition of slavery (1888) and the establishment of a new republic to replace monarchy (1889).
The sense of Brazilian football leaving its British origins behind as it headed for global domination on and off the pitch, as suggested by Freyre, is why there is no statue or plaque to Miller in the city, not even in the Praça Charles Miller, the square at the front of the Pacembu stadium which houses the Museu do Futebol. Though he was born and died in Brazil, and lived almost his entire life in Brazil (the exception was his schooling in Hampshire, England) Miller’s legend is that of an immigrant, stepping off the ship in Santos to begin a new life. His ambiguous identity, floating between Scottish, British and Brazilian might explain why his simple grave in the Cemeterio de Protestantes in São Paulo is so modest (a cross marked C.W.M, which the director of the cemetery asked me not to photograph, “out of respect”). The Museu Charles Miller, housed in the exclusive Clube Athletico Sao Paulo, and available to visit on appointment, contains old photographs, trophies and a letter from Pelé.
In Brazilian football historiography, “Charles Miller” has become a cipher for the elite, foreign origins of a game which was were subsequently embraced by the Brazilian povo (the people). Something similar is true of Alexander Watson Hutton for Argentina, a more conventional immigrant figure, a Scot who arrived in Buenos Aires as an adult and set about institutionalising and regulating the game of football through schools, teams and leagues. At the II Simpósio Internacional de Estudos Sobre Futebol that I attended in São Paulo last week, Miller was referenced by many of the researchers as a scene-setter to establish their credentials, his name alone enough to conjure images of moustachioed elite white men in blazers tapping a ball around.
At the Simposio, discussing museums and football with Richard McBrearty, director of the Scottish Football Museum, and Daniela Alfonsi, Diretora de Conteudo do Museu de Futebol, Kevin Moore, director of the [English] National Football Museum, noted that Miller’s story is ‘the very epitome of the multinational, global nature of the origins of football’. But they also pointed out that the origins of football were anything but a one man show. Hundreds of people played football in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, and historian José Moraes dos Santos Neto has argued pretty convincingly that football was being played in several places in Brazil before Miller’s much-heralded return from England. The ways in which Brazilians took on the game and made it their own is the subject of many wonderful books, including Alex Bellos’ Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life and David Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil. The importance of Charles Miller lies not in any individual greatness but in the way that his story has captured something of the essence of being Brazilian, and of the ways in which football was adopted, regulated, internationalised and embraced around the world.
Dr Matthew Brown is a reader in Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol, and specialises in the history of sports in South America. In particular, the history of the very first football teams to be established. He contributed the biographies of Charles Miller and Alexander Hutton to Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s May update.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,800 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 190 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
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Image credits: (1) Matthew Brown arriving in Brazil, impersonating Charles Miller, © Gloria Lanci. (2) Site of the forthcoming Museu do Pelé, © Matthew Brown.
The post Football arrives in Brazil appeared first on OUPblog.
Tim Vyner, “a reportage artist who travels the world recording sporting events as he sees them (World Cup football, Olympic Games, street soccer)” is one of the artists featured in our The Art of Play e-gallery, which is part of PaperTigers’ current focus on How Children Play Around the World. His mixed-media illustration (image#8) is from the book World Team, where he takes readers on a journey around the globe and through the world’s time zones via the world’s most popular game: soccer.
The book was published by Random House-UK and Roaring Brook Press-US in 2002, just before the beginning of that year’s World Cup. Its opening sentence “One big round world, one small round ball. Right now, more children than you can possibly imagine are playing soccer” sets the tone for the glorious slice-of-life text and illustrations of children playing soccer on fields, beaches and streets across the globe.
On the occasion of the book’s release, Random House put together a mini-website for it. In the section “The Making of the Book” we find a picture of Tim’s journal, where as a six-year-old he wrote and illustrated a story about an England vs Brazil game that took place during the 1970 FIFA World Cup. In the section “Paintings”, Tim comments on all the images, by country, and says of South Africa (remember: he wrote this in 2002):
South Africa is one of the emerging African football nations. They have won the rugby world cup and the cricket world cup. Will they be the first African nation to win the Soccer World Cup? Soccer in South Africa is played as much by black Africans as white Africans and is really important in the development of the new South Africa.
Will South Africa win the 2010 World Cup? I guess we’ll find out the answer to that in a few weeks…
Tim Vyner is currently “recording the changing skyline of London”, in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games.
