Brazil 82Syncopated Selection

When the Brazilian national football team (Seleção Brasileira) participated in the 1982 FIFA World Cup, they maintained their record of being the only team to have entered every World Cup Finals.

The finals, held in Spain, promised beautiful football, iconic stars, unforgettable matches and moments of high drama. The most gifted collection of footballers at the tournament, without doubt, were the Brazilians. They were the 'dream team' of 1982 and went into the finals in spectacular form,

With the whole of Brazil expecting them to return with the trophy, they were feted as being better than the legendary world champions of 1970. Featuring players of tremendous ability, with names that rolled off the tongue and fired the imagination - Zico, Socrates, Falcao, Junior, Eder – they were the heart and soul of the 1982 World Cup.

Tele Santana, as coach of the Seleção, wanted his team to play beautiful, engaging football, entrusting his creative players, which was essentially all of them, to play with real freedom and expression. He encouraged them to express themselves through their capacity for fluid, rhythmic, spectacular football. They scored goals of incredible beauty and finesse. They were artists with a football, mesmerising both the opposition and the viewing millions, producing moments of sheer joy and intense emotion.

However, on the 5th July, 1982, in the Estadi de Sarrià, Barcelona, the unthinkable happened. Santana's majestic Brazil World Cup side were beaten 3-2 by a considerably less flamboyant, but very well organised and defensive-minded Italian side, and were eliminated from the competition.

For many, the best national side that Brazil has ever produced did not actually make it to the World Cup final, or even the semi-final. In the modern era, Seleção 82 remain the ultimate standard-bearers for beautiful, expressive, football. A true reflection of the loose, 'free', soulful syncopated rhythms that characterised their music and approach to life, they were the perfect embodiment of the samba spirit… irrespective of whether they actually won that trophy or not.

“The Brazilians play football as if it were a dance…for [they] tend to reduce everything to dance, work and play alike.”
Gilberto Freyre 

“For all Brazilians, music and football is a mixture that's inside us.” 
Pele

Footnote

Definition: “Syncopation is music's red light district, Where Rhythm gets loose playful and mischievous It makes music more fun, less mechanical mathematical and machine like. It makes things sound human and quirky.” Howard Goodall