Roger Kittleson's book on the long, intertwined history between association football, Brazilian national identity, social processes and globalisation was the pick of the glut of books published to coincide with the 2014 FIFA World Cup held in Brazil. Building on the author's knowledge of the intricacies of Brazilian history, The Country of Football avoids the potential pitfalls of generalising about such a diverse subject over time. Each chapter focuses on particular periods, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of ‘a national game: futebol made popular, professional and Afro-Brazilian’, through to ‘the business of winning: Brand Brazil and the New Globalism, 1990–2010’ and an insightful epilogue on ‘Mega-Brazil’. The chapters weave social, political and economic history around the stories of selected key players and football figures, from Arthur Friedenreich, the pioneering black centre-forward of the 1910s, via insightful re-readings of the careers of the iconic Garincha and Pelé through to Ronaldinho Gaúcho. Brazilian star footballers of the early twenty-first century, Kittleson demonstrates, achieve fame in many ways and in part because of how they ‘reminded commentators of past greats, and in particular, greats who had exhibited invention and foresight on the field’ (p. 204). The book illustrates very clearly how the weight of history lies upon Brazilian football at every juncture, whether this be the commercial or self-imposed pressures to repeat historical successes, or the memories of the feel of stadia or the sensation of civic and national communion that footballing experiences can create.

Like most serious works nowadays Kittleson debunks the myth of British ‘fathers of football’ in Brazil, instead arguing that the ‘energetic pioneering figures’, like Charles Miller in São Paulo and Oscar Cox in Rio de Janeiro in the 1890s, ‘represented a set of values – particularly fair play and amateur spirit – that many in the local elite found appealing’ (p. 17). Assumptions about ‘race’ that lay behind this thinking have proved remarkably resilient. For black pioneering footballers, ‘race … was an increasingly tricky issue’. Friedenreich, for example, directed his off-field efforts ‘to look and act like the white elites around him’ (p. 29). Mário Filho, writer, editor, campaigner and administrator, reflected on Friedenreich in O negro no futebol brasileiro (1947), which Kittleson uses to show how football ‘became Brazilan by virtue of its domination by Afro-Brazilian players’ (p. 48). Filho and Gilberto Freyre were just two of the Brazilian writers who used football, and particularly the feats and characteristics of Afro-Brazilian footballers, to propose a bright future for Brazilian society based on drawing lessons from the football pitch. From the inclusive vision of society which flourished in futebol, a field of ‘comparatively “soft” race relations’, came the Brazilian World Cup winning teams of 1958, 1962 and 1970, which were stacked with Afro-Brazilians like Pelé and Didi and mestiços such as Garincha, and who ‘seemed to perform the country's racial democracy’ (p. 55). Football's social role, and the responsibility of footballers, came to be to make Brazilians feel better about themselves on every possible level. This situation was clearly unsustainable.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the conflict between futebol arte and futebol força became ever more visible in Brazil, an ideological contest between managers and journalists made political by the interventions into sport of the military dictatorship. Through insightful analysis of key footballing protagonists, in particular Caju and Reinaldo, Kittleson teases out the multiple meanings of football against an overtly militarised backdrop. His sharp synthesis of the early 1980s Corinthian Democracy project, most closely linked with the midfielder-activist Socrates, demonstrates the political spaces that the sport opened up, and the contradictions and conflicts that closed them down.

The book ends with an insightful discussion of the branding of Brazilian football through the 1990s and the incestuous political and commercial relationships that underpinned it. The extraordinary ‘grip’ that Ricardo Teixeira held over Brazilian football is explained ‘in part because of his extraordinary “articulation” of political and business alliances’ (p. 199). The furore over Nike and the circumstances surrounding Ronaldo's appearance and performance in the 1998 World Cup Final are dissected with aplomb though it is passed over rather too quickly for this reader's liking. The combination of broad longue durée analysis with in-depth case studies is very effective, but often I felt that major events like this deserved more thorough interrogation. There is lots of discussion of identity, performance and racial stereotyping here, though nothing explicitly on gender, and no mention of women watching let alone playing football. This seems an open goal that has been missed, given that Marta, for example, became such a global icon and brand at just the same time as the latter male footballers discussed here.

The Country of Football has clearly emerged from the author's immersion in the Brazilian historiography as well as English-language sources, and the bibliography alone will be a vital guide to scholars of the subject. Kittleson's concluding remarks on ‘Mega-Brasilidade’ and ‘Tropicália for Sale’ are rather more cautious than those of Dave Zirin in Brazil's Dance with the Devil and David Goldblatt in Futebol Nation. This seems appropriate, as the book conveys a sense of the deep meanings that have been ascribed to the individual footballers and the long-term evolutions in football's relationship to urban and national identities in Brazil over the last hundred years, football's century. The new start and new faces presented to the world in 2014 are a fresh manifestation of the way football has been shaped by global and national political and economic forces, themselves marked by many continuities. Arthur Friedenreich and Neymar would have lots to talk about.