Brazil: Where God Is on the Pitch
“Everyone knows that football is a religion in Brazil,” Rosie Dawson of the BBC writes. But recently, the “irresistible rise of neo-Pentecostalist religion” has yielded a change in the sport’s reputation and play. Professor Carmen Rial of the Federal University at Santa Catarina interviewed 60 footballers, nearly all of whom are religious. “The Brazilian players used to have a bad-boy image,” she says. Now she finds they are “obedient to the law of God, but they also obey the law of the coach and the club.”