The Making of a Global FIFA

"Result of a dense, original, and recognized thesis defended in Brazil, this book gains with this translated version a necessary breadth and a well-deserved international reach. The book shows the other side of Pelé, great international icon engineered by Brazilian football during the 20th century, by analyzing the meaning and role of sports leader and decade-long FIFA president, João Havelange. The contrast, so to speak, between Pelé, a Black man, and Havelange, white and blond-haired, illustrates a dear idea to the national imaginary-that of the so-called Brazilian racial democracy, which had in football one of its most powerful means of diffusion, affirmation and embodiment, especially in the decanted figure of "king" Pelé.
But by following the meanderings of a trajectory and by unveiling the intricate strategies to garner national and international power at the head of a series of sports institutions, whose apex would be the election-win of FIFA in 1974, this book examines another, much less visible and much more insidious, controversial and hidden, persona: João Havelange.
The young and talented historian Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui goes far beyond dissecting a biography or investigating an event. Based on state-of-the-art debates about the political history of International Relations during the Cold War and equipped with primary sources from archives of several countries in South America and Europe, Burlamaqui retraces the vicissitudes of a plot that allowed a former Olympian to climb successive positions within this network and reach the top of the sports power scale, enlarging this same structure since the 1970s and transforming football into a planetary phenomenon, full of contradictory senses and power struggles dear to the political economy.
As one of the most important works produced by the Brazilian Academy in football studies, its English version will undoubtedly constitute, from now on, an unavoidable international reference for researchers who want to understand, in light of the best historiography and solid social theory, the construction of football's global power and, consequently, the singularity of FIFA's institutional history during the 20th century." - Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, Associate Professor, Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV-CPDOC).