I've mentioned on here a few times before that I really fell in love with football watching Pelé's Brazil in the 1970 World Cup.
Almost continuously now for the past 70 or more years, Brazil has been something extra-special, the one country that almost always looks likely to be a World Cup contender - and often the favourites! - in each successive tournament, the one country universally admired and beloved around the world, the one country other than your own that almost any football fan from anywhere in the world will root for.
They tend to play a free-flowing, inventive style of game that is irresistibly entertaining. And they have skill to spare: even their defenders often look as if they could dribble past four or five opponents. While most countries count themselves lucky if they turn up one or two exceptional talents like Yamal or Musiala or Palmer every decade. Brazil regularly seems to have so many that a lot of them may get overlooked by the national squad; not just one or two, but ten or twenty breathtakingly skillful players at any given time (and dozens or hundreds more seemingly always waiting in the wings). I said a while ago that Cristiano Ronaldo would not get into my 'Top 50' of greatest players of all time - even if I limited the rest of the field to Brazilians; and I wasn't joking. The depth of talent in Brazil's player pool is just ridiculous: they are just so absurdly bloody good.
But why are the Brazilians so good at football?? Well, the answers collected in this short film I recently discovered from Youtuber Arneeb Ahmed aren't particularly surprising, but this is nevertheless a neat summation - and celebration - of the phenomenon. And I find it a nice bit of spiritual uplift during this long, bleak suspension of Premier League action.
