
Podcast
The World Cup’s violent beginnings
Brazil may be the country “most associated with the World Cup”, say Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on The Rest Is History podcast, but it was the British who pioneered the sport in South America. In the 1890s, Charles Miller, the son of a Scottish-born businessman living in Brazil, returned home from studying at an English boarding school, proudly clutching a document. His father presumed it was his diploma – it was actually a list of the rules of football. Most Brazilians’ first reaction to watching football was one of “incredulity and horror”. “A group of Englishmen – a bunch of maniacs as they all are – get together to kick something that looks like a bull’s bladder,” read a report in a Rio newspaper. “It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with sorrow when it passes through a rectangle formed of wooden posts.”