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 Brazil produces some of the finest football and footballers on the planet. But few people have any idea how the game first arrived there. The fact is that the history of football in Brazil is as much linked to the twilight and decline of the British Empire.
But, perhaps saddest to report, it can also be encompassed within the life story of one man in particular: Charles Miller.
Josh Lacey's first book, God is Brazilian, is a biography of this forgotten man. Born to a Scottish father and Brazilian-born English mother in 1874, Charles Miller spent the first ten years of his life living in the relatively sleepy town of São Paulo.
The British played a prominent role in São Paulo at the time, having built the railway connecting São Paulo to the port at Santos for the transport of coffee less than a decade earlier.
At the age of 10, Miller and his brother were sent to boarding school in Southampton. There he was introduced to organised sports, including cricket and football, in both of which he excelled.
As well as playing for his school he was also picked to play for St Mary's, better known today as the recently relegated Premiership side of Southampton FC. Increasingly he became involved in the administrative side of the game, attending meetings of the Hampshire FA with his headmaster.
Football at the time was predominantly an activity principally for amateurs and gentlemen. Lacey recounts how the most prominent team in this late Victorian period were the Corinthians, a team composed of players from Oxford, Cambridge and the great public schools and which supplied several international players to the England team.
In the early 1890s when they visited Southampton, Miller played a game with them, recounting it as one of the highlights of his playing career.
Miller identified strongly with the amateur ethos of football. But the game was undergoing transformation, with professionalism gaining adherents. By 1894, the Corinthians were losing their invincibility and Miller was at a crossroads: whether to stay in England or return to Brazil.
He stood for election to the Hampshire FA but lost. Several months later he was aboard a boat to Brazil, armed with a deflated football and a book of football rules. Soon afterwards he persuaded some Englishmen at the São Paulo Athletic Club to have a go at his new game and the rest, as they say, is history.
Lacey blends fact with literary imagination throughout his book. He uses the past tense when recounting the facts of Miller's life and those around him - at least those that can be substantiated - before seamlessly switching to the present tense to provide a personal touch.
Even if the final result is a more readable volume, the switches do have an initial jarring effect. At least it was for this reviewer, who is used to drier, more academic tomes. The explanation for Lacey's style may well be found in his day job, as a regular contributor to The Guardian and Times Literary Supplement in London.
Yet the approach is ultimately effective. Lacey invites us to imagine how Miller experienced those first weeks and months in the harsh coldness of an English winter at school, the character of a trans-Atlantic sea crossing and, most importantly, the first game of organised football in Brazil.
While Lacey's subject is Charles Miller, his book is more than that. It is as much as a biography of the British in Brazil and the British Empire in general as it is about the main who brought football to Brazil.
The author has peppered the tale of Miller's life with excerpts from Rudyard Kipling, Peter Fleming and Tom Brown's Schooldays along with a rather diversionary account of British-Brazilian tensions over a barren and uninhabited outcrop of land in the mid-Atlantic.
Occasionally the main subject of the book gets lost among these tales, raising questions about the availability of material on the man himself. Miller doesn't appear to have been the type to write long letters or diaries.
But the relative paucity of details fails to weaken the narrative; indeed, Lacey's account offers some revealing insights into the man and his family, including their willingness to play fast and loose with the truth.
John Miller, Charles's father, claimed to be the son of a Glaswegian ship owner. But the truth was far more mundane: he was a porter on the docks at Greenock. Miller too stretched facts to suit himself.
In a newspaper interview in the 1920s he claimed to have arrived at Santos from England with a football under each arm, being met by his father. But instead of showing him his graduation certificate Charles pointed to the footballs he was carrying and claimed to have "graduated in football".
While the story has become accepted as part of Brazilian football history, there is one small problem: his father was dead, having died several weeks before Charles's twelfth birthday and being buried in Scotland.
Lacey speculates why Miller might have lied on this point - this is the moment after all that Brazilians date football's arrival - and concludes that he probably did so to compensate for what must have perceived was a failed life.
Through Miller football gained a following, initially among the British with whom he mixed socially, and later the Brazilian elite. But despite his missionary zeal the game soon took on a life of its own, abandoning the ethos of amateurism and gentlemanly conduct of its prime advocate.
By the 1920s the same winds of change which had led towards football's professionalism in England was occurring in Brazil; the game was reaching out to the masses.
Corinthians, a team set up by São Paulo's working class and named in honour of the English team, was attracting growing support and would become a force in the country. A decade later, during the 1930s, the dictator Getúlio Vargas, would use football as a means to develop national identity.
Just as football was abandoning him, so too was Miller experiencing personal rejection; his musical and bohemian wife, Antonietta, had left him to start a public affair with the intellectual, poet and artist, Menotti Del Picchia.
On top of this came a kind of identity crisis. Neither fully Brazilian (and nor would he have considered himself to be) nor British, Miller was caught between two worlds.
São Paulo was changing around him, growing rapidly, both economically and demographically. Internal and foreign migrants flocked to the city, increasing the population from 20,000 at the time of Miller's birth to 20 million today.
Meanwhile the number of British residents remained constant. British influence in the city was in decline, the result of economic weakness and their replacement by the United States, especially in the years following the First World War.
The gentlemanly values and ideals by which Miller had lived were challenged; the late Victorian England he had grown up receding into the past.
Miller's own rise and fall mirrors that of the British Empire. His involvement in introducing football to Brazil occurred in the twilight of the Victorian period, the culmination of British influence in Latin America.
But the years that followed saw both his and the British role in Brazil decline. Nowhere does this analogy seem more apt than when reflecting on the year of his death, 1953. A new queen was awaiting her coronation in Britain, heralding a new post-war era for Britain.
But while Britain's imperial past continued to be portrayed on screen and literature, Miller's own sense of Englishness was forgotten, both in the country of his birth and where he was educated. Indeed, nothing can be more telling of his fate in this respect than the fact that God is Brazilian is the first English-language account of Miller's life.
Yet maybe there is a final ironic twist in Miller's tale. In his lifetime he would never have considered himself to be anything other than an English gentleman - an ideal which has been caricatured and mocked in recent years.
Yet today's more multicultural Britain may well be more open to another side of Miller which the man himself rejected: that of his hybrid existence as an Anglo-Brazilian. If so, then this book may not be the last account of Brazil's pioneering footballer.
God is Brazilian: Charles Miller - The Man who Brought Football to Brazil
By Josh Lacey
Tempus Publishing Ltd, 2005
224 pages, £20
Guy Burton is a postgraduate student at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London. He regularly writes for Brazzil (www.brazzil.com) and Liberator (www.liberator.org.uk) magazines and maintains a blog at http://guyburton.blogspot.com.
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