Youssef Rakha is an author, journalist, literary critic, editor and photographer. He was born and still lives in Cairo, having studied English and Philosophy in the United Kingdom. His award-winning work is renowned, affording an opportunity for a bold linguistic renewal and reinvention of Arabic. Cairo is a city which discovers itself through his writing. In addition to fiction this author, who has many interests and engages in various activities, has written a great deal about the relationship between photography and literature. In the conversation which took place in Egypt, photographers and editors André Príncipe and João Pedro Cortes talk with Rakha about politics, religion, art, travel, life – the unhappiness we flee from and the hope that eludes us. With this piece, where words and images challenge each other, Príncipe and Cortes continue the series they began with Hisham Mayet in Tangier, published in Electra 7.

Football stirs up such passion in so many people that some have called the phenomenon ‘football fever’. This sport, which has taken over from all others and conquered the world, deserves to be regarded from an analytical and critical point of view, without any empty, unnecessary ‘fevers’. Football today is a very powerful, complex ‘system’ that goes far beyond stadiums and championships and has invaded our everyday lives, even if we are not actually fans. Football is so expansive and plays such an important role in daily routine that it has far overflowed stadiums. It attracts political power and has an extreme, exaggerated crystallising effect on manifestations of economic and media power. It is a world of heroes and cults that are mostly ephemeral and subject to money circulation laws. Glory generally runs fast here and stops for no-one. The anthropological significance of football as a show, a competition and a ritual is a challenge that requires intricate analysis.

Football has become a social reality of our time. You may never have set foot in a stadium or kept up to date with match results or league rankings. You may know the names of only a few players – those that you cannot ignore – and you may be underwhelmed by the spectacular brilliance of their universal presence. Even so, you cannot imagine a public space without football, because it is everywhere, all the time. There are even those who regard it as an infection that spreads throughout the body of society or believe it to be a new, equally alienating ‘opium of the people’.

Any political history of football is bound to be full of memorable events, geopolitical contingencies and ideological manifestations, and of names and personalities that have become cult figures, full of aspirations and world visions. This is the core of what the historian José Neves writes about.

Author of a PhD thesis, at the University of São Paulo, on the election of João Havelange as FIFA president, in 1974, Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui knows this institution well. In this article, he traces a brief history of the transformations the institution has seen throughout its history.

Marcos Cardão, historian and researcher of mass and popular culture phenomena, writes about the significance of the National Pantheon honours granted to Eusébio, one year after his death, which immortalised him in this temple of national memory.

Marc Perelman, professor at Paris-Nanterre University, is the author of an extensive bibliography about what he describes as a ‘barbaric sport’ and the way it extends beyond the stadiums. Le football, une peste émotionnelle (2006), written with the sociologist Jean-Marie Brohm, is one of his most famous books. In this article, he analyses and criticises football as an organised institution, as well as the benevolent blindness of intellectuals regarding this sport.

Written by a renowned sport sociologist and consultant to several institutions, such as the Football Museum, in São Paulo, this article examines the social-racial divide between various Brazilian football teams. Overviewing several aspects of the mythology of football in Brazil, José Paulo Florenzano focuses specifically on the case of Garrincha, the ‘bow-legged angel’.

In this article, the sociologist João Sedas Nunes, professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, focuses on a new category of football supporters, whom he calls ‘post-supporters’, who make use of the principles of irony and critical detachment. For this reason, they no longer fit into the old model, where passion, and even fanaticism, for a club ruled.

The ambassador and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira writes a testimony about his initiation into football, the pleasure of playing, and his adult passion as a spectator, remembering a world populated by heroes.