Matthew Bizer’s Reviews > The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup > Status Update

“Ever since, there has been a sense of soccer trying to recapture the spirit of 1970 […] The 1970 World Cup looks different from every subsequent World Cup because not every surface is covered in advertising. The marketing was not slick, the presentation was imperfect, and in that ramshackle aspect there was perhaps a charm: The soccer, by and large, came first.”

“Here, overtly, was the imperial lion transformed into something cheeky and welcoming—but it was also a commercial ploy, a mascot whose image could transform anything from T-shirts to tea towels into a salable souvenir: imperialism first defanged by an increasingly classless irreverence and then repackaged as commercial junk.”

“Brazil is a land of myth, a place where objective fact struggles for traction, and few have been so mythologized as Pelé.”

“Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France. That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.“