Read It In Books:Futebol - The Brazilian Way Of Life.

Pele, Jairzinho, Socrates, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Neymar, Garrincha. The names just roll effortlessly off the tongue. Anyone who's a fan of football will know that Brazil, the world's most successful international side ever, seem to have an endless supply of absolutely incredible football players. But what could I get by reading about them that I couldn't get by watching them play?

I've had Alex Bellos Futebol - The Brazilian Way Of Life winking at me from my bookshelves for quite a few years now so it was finally time to get it off the shelf, dust it down, and give it a bloody good read and find out. I'm glad I did because it's an absolutely brilliant book. You don't have to be a football fan to enjoy it but if you are you will enjoy it even more. It's passionately written, full of little feints and jinks, and carries with it the weight of history. In that it's not unlike the Brazilian football team itself.

Written in the two year run up to Brazil winning the World Cup in 2002 (beating Germany 2-0 in Yokohama, both goals scored by Ronaldo) for the fifth time (still more than any other nation) it tells the story of football in Brazil since the arrival of the 'violent British sport' in the port of Santos in 1894. It doesn't just stay in Brazil. The story of Brazilian football is told all around the world and Bellos takes us from the small village of Toftir on the Faroe Islands to Manaus in the Amazon and Helsinki and, inevitably, to Copacabana beach, the Sugar Loaf Mountain and the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro.

It follows football from its arrival in Brazil with Charles Miller, when it was a "nice little game" played by expat railway and gas employees ("it gives them great satisfaction or fills them with great sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts" wrote a 19c journalist) and on to World Cup victories  in 1958, 1962, and 1970 via twenty-a-side games, people kicking oranges - or bundles of socks - or coconuts - and on to the founding of Fluminense (Rio's first club) and Brazil's eventual emergence as the world's dominant footballing nation.

There's a whole chapter, The Fateful Final, given over to Brazil losing out to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup (a cup whose final stages were played out in a group stage!). The defeat, watched by over two hundred thousand spectators, was seen as a disaster and was even compared to Hiroshima! It was their Waterloo, their Gotterdammerung, the goalkeeper Barbosa was sidelined and (often racially) abused for the rest of his life (despite being voted best goalkeeper of the tournament). In Brazil, it's pored over far more than any of the World Cup finals they actually won. There's even a word just for it - "maracanazo". Argentinians, as much as Uruguyuans, love to use it.

It even inspired the Brazilians to ditch their white strip and launch a competition to design a new jersey that made use of the colours of their flag. A nineteen year old illustrator, Aldyr Garcia Schlee, entered the contest for a bit of a laugh - and won it - and now everyone in the world knows exactly what the Brazilian football kit looks like. It's "possibly the world's most recognisable sporting uniform". Even if its designer supports Uruguay.

That's just one of many interesting stories that I'd not heard before. There's a whole chapter devoted to Manuel Francisco dos Santos. Better known as Garrincha. It talks of his incredible skill (Brazil only ever lost once with Garrincha in the side - the last game he played for them), bent knees, and his (rumoured) big dick (his 'pau grande' was apparently just shy of ten inches) which would go on to produce at least thirteen children. One of the mothers, Elza Soares, was a celebrated salsa singer making them the Posh and Becks of their era. But, unlike David Beckham, Garrincha was a troubled man. His awful driving resulted in the death of Soares' mother and that led to periods of depression, suicide attempts, and an alcoholism that would lead him to physically assault Elza and, ultimately, finish him off at the age of forty-nine.

Garrincha had been the equal of Pele and together they were formidable but as Garrincha's career petered out, Pele's was astronomically turbocharged. There was a time, in the 1970s, when Pele (who had registered his name as a trademark) was second only in brand recognition to Coca-Cola in Europe (Pele never once played club football for a European team). In 1999, two armed men held up his Mercedes but when they realised it was Pele inside they apologised. Some years later the same thing happened to Romario. Romario lost his car and phone and walked home alone.

The list of players doesn't start with Pele and Garrincha. It begins with ones I'd never heard of before stretching out into those world famous names. There's Friedenreich who scored the winning goal of the 1919 South American Championship, Leonidas - top scorer at the 1938 World Cup in France, and Zizinho - who played in that fateful 1950 defeat to Uruguay among many others.

There are some quite incredible statistics. As early as 1999 there were over 5,000 Brazilian footballers plying their trade outside of Brazil (everywhere from Vietnam to Senegal, Armenia to Haiti), there's Milene Domingues who played keepy-uppy for over nine hours (55,187 kicks) without the ball touching the ground once - she ended up marrying Ronaldo - though a footnote tells me that this record has since been beaten by one Ricardo Neves (roughly 210,000 kicks over 27 hours!),

Not just football ones. Some depressing ones too. Brazil imported more slaves than any other country (3,500,000, six times that of the USA) and was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery (1888). Even bonkers ones. Sao Paulo club Corinthians ultras Hawks of the Faithful wave a banner at matches that is one hundred metres long and forty metres deep - it takes three hundred people to carry it! There are referees in the Amazonas region who spend weeks on boats travelling to officiate matches - as well as refs who stop the game in the middle of play so they can go for a shit, and football pitches in Manaus that are covered in stones, glass, and even bones.

Brazilians like to mix football up with other sports. It's been combined with volleyball, auto racing, and even, quite bizarrely, rodeo where during a game of football a bull is released on to the pitch. The bull doesn't chase the ball, it chases the players - and sometimes the referee. While there's nothing weird or abnormal about having a transvestite football club it does seem odd, as well as impractical, that the players play while wearing knee high boots, sequinned hotpant catsuits, and red plastic dresses.

But more than just facts, figures, and funnies, Bellos drills down into what it's like to grow up in Brazil, to live in Brazil, to be Brazilian. When he writes about the abject poverty many Brazilians live in he doesn't do it haughtily and he doesn't hector. He simply paints a picture of what life is like for many in poorer states of Brazil like Paraiba or Copacabana and how that compares to the obscenely wealthy Brazilians who live in places like Leblon in Rio.

He doesn't shy away from the racism of the times either. Black players were, initially, not allowed to join football clubs, a visiting chairman of Exeter City - M. J. McGahey - commented on how the players in Rio were as "black as your hat" and even dropped an n-bomb, black players like Carlos Alberto whitened their faces with rice powder to look more 'acceptable' and Bellos even goes on to explain how the native Americans were treated among the Brazilian football community. Many of them were simply given the name Indio

It all makes for a fascinating read, not least with the excitement of a major football tournament on the horizon, and despite some minor caveats (not least when Bellos claims that Brazilian drivers have won more F1 world championships than any other nationality - which isn;t true now and nor was it when the book was written about twenty years ago) the book is full of little gems that include a foreword from Socrates (the Brazilian footballer, not the Greek philosopher), a quote from the MPB singer-songwriter Chico Buarque as well as some lyrics from Caetano Veloso, and a section on the frankly ludicrous sport of Autoball:- football - but played by people driving cars).

There's a radio presenter who once interviewed the ball instead of the players, a female footballer who plays under the name of Michael Jackson, a children's story about a ball that falls in love with (and marries) a talentless goalkeeper, another about the composer Ary Barroso doubling up as a football commentator who blew into a mouth organ when his team scored, and a child by the name of Shampoozinho.

Obviously Brazil won't be able to entertain us during Euro 2024 but come the next World Cup - and the one after that - and the one after that (Brazil have never failed to qualify for a World Cup) - it seems likely these rich stories will only be added to. Gooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllll!