ABSTRACT
Synonymous worldwide with the Dionysian spirit of football as stylish expression, Brazil can legitimately claim to have dominated the cultural imagination of global football since the mid-twentieth century. Brazil's slow transition to democracy through the first half of the 1980s coincided with a nadir in the nation's fortunes in international football that saw the country fail to progress beyond the quarter-final stages of the World Cup between 1982 and 1990. Gilberto Freyre outlines a distinctively Brazilian style of football, characterised by the manner in which the 'Apollonian British game' is converted into a 'Dionysian dance' as a result of 'the more delicate and graceful foot' that is expert in capoeira and samba. Freyre developed his ideas in relation to the contribution of Afro-Brazilian players to the game in the article 'Foot-ball mulato', published in the Diario de Pernambuco and subsequently reproduced in his 1945 Sociologia and elsewhere.
