ABSTRACT
Football is characterised by magical movement, which, in critical realist terms, a European phenomenological 'miracle' requiring extensive translation in exogenous cultural domains. Magic' is, a discourse on appearances, perceptions and collective or individual destinies, the chapter present study explores the themes under the rubric of the 'cosmography of riches' in the context of the Brazilian 2014 World Cup, sketches Brazilian perceptions of the cosmography of riches in pop and elite frameworks leads us to deeper understandings of the country's post-colonial desire for recognition in global domains. In Brazil's post-colonial spaces and multiple lifeworlds, the game of semblance served, as it still serves, a double function that corresponds to Geertz's 'doubleness' of human performance between nature and culture. The 2014 World Cup provided an opportunity to recycle Brazilian cosmologies of desire for recognition, which always preserved their memory vault with the help of gendered, classed and racialised self-characterisations.
