The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, two hundred thousand people—a tenth of the population of Rio de Janeiro—streamed into the newly completed Maracanã Stadium to watch their beloved national team, the Seleção, compete for the title against Uruguay. A monumental concrete bowl, intended to rival the Christ statue atop Corcovado, the Maracanã resembled a spaceship and was meant to embody, as the British journalist Alex Bellos writes in “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life,” not only Brazil’s athletic ambition but also “the country’s place in the modern world.” Its capacity was greater by several magnitudes than any other Brazilian stadium. Some ten thousand men had contributed to its construction, practicing goal celebrations while they worked. They’d even, somehow, finished ahead of schedule.

Then Brazil lost, 2–1. Back home, while listening on the radio, three Uruguayans reportedly died of excitement. In the Maracanã, there was stunned, eerie silence, so unfathomable and disconcerting that it left a formative wound in the national psyche. The novelist Nelson Rodrigues identified the moment as the source of his country’s “stray-dog complex”—“the inferiority with which the Brazilian positions himself, voluntarily, in front of the rest of the world.” In spite of the five World Cups that Brazil has won since—more than any other country—the Maracanã humiliation remains the most intellectualized aspect of its sporting legacy, if not of its modern history altogether. “When the players needed the Maracanã most, the Maracanã was silent,” the singer, songwriter, and poet Chico Buarque once declared. “You can’t entrust yourself to a football stadium—that’s the lesson that sunk in after 1950.”

The lesson may have been forgotten. The economic boom that recently brought Brazil, with its burgeoning middle class, to the brink of First World respect has been dizzying. This June, the opening game—Brazil vs. Croatia—of what the New Statesman suggests may be the last World Cup that ever matters will be played at the Itaquerão, a new stadium going up in São Paulo for the storied Corinthians, a professional team known both for its historical ties to the proletariat and for its thuggish fans. The stadium, a monument to gentrification, will feature the largest digital screen on earth and lighting twice as bright as that used in Munich’s Allianz Arena, said to be visible, on a clear night, from nearly fifty miles away. “The idea was to build the best, biggest shopping mall in the world, with a soccer field in the middle,” Andrés Sánchez, the former Corinthians president, who is supervising the construction, told me, sounding more like Donald Trump than like a steward of the jogo bonito, or beautiful game. Every square metre on the premises has been plotted as a “money-making scheme.” No stray dog, Sánchez likes to say that Corinthians has “changed the way Brazilian football thinks,” and, between cigarettes, which he tossed on the floor, half smoked, he argued with the conviction that history was now on his side. Europe was in decline, and it was only a matter of time—economic determinism, really—before its fabled clubs would cede their monopoly on the best players. True, the Brazilian professional league still had some kinks to work out, but even so, he said, “we’re easily going to surpass the European teams, and we will be the best championship in the world.”

This boast was of no small importance. The New Statesman argument, perhaps overstated, that this might be the last significant World Cup reflects an increasing reality of globalization. The top professional leagues have achieved such international reach, both in filling out their rosters and in the fan bases from which they draw their support, that the allure of ostensibly amateur spectacles like the World Cup and the Olympics (which Brazil will host, too, in 2016) is diminished by comparison. We associate Lionel Messi, by consensus the best player in the world, as much, if not more, with Barcelona, for whom he plays most of the year, as with his native Argentina. Last spring, Neymar, Brazil’s next great hope, decamped for Barcelona to join him. Diego Costa, a Brazilian forward who plays professionally in Madrid, stunned fans of the Seleção when he announced, a few months ago, that he’d be playing next summer for the national team of his host country, which had granted him dual citizenship.

A truism of Brazilian politics holds that a victory for the Seleção confers instant job approval on the incumbent regime. But this World Cup belongs in many respects to the legacy of Brazil’s ex-President Lula da Silva, a populist and a rabid Corinthians fan, who within months of taking office, in 2003, signed legislation for a soccer fans’ bill of rights. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s more technocratic successor (and Brazil’s first woman President), saw her popularity plummet last June, as a wave of protests—an echo of the Occupy movement—sent more than a million students and young professionals into the streets of Brazil’s cities. (Lately, in the wake of the Edward Snowden affair, Rousseff’s standoffishness toward the Obama Administration has helped her in the polls.) The protests were spurred, notionally, by a twenty-cent increase in bus fares, but it was no accident that they coincided with the Confederation Cup—a kind of World Cup dress rehearsal—and the disturbance was seen in some ways as an indication that the country was outgrowing its long romance with the sport. Among the protesters’ chief grievances was the huge public expenditure on showy stadiums instead of on grownup concerns, like improving public transportation, schools, and hospitals.

At least the Itaquerão will have a major team to play in it after the World Cup. But what will become of the newly refurbished seventy-thousand-seat Estadio Nacional, in Brasília, a city whose biggest club plays in the D league, to crowds regularly numbering in the hundreds? (One worker has died on the project.) Or consider the Arena Amazonia, in Manaus, a city in the northwest surrounded by two million acres of rain forest. Its opera house, completed in 1896, served as the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” about the folly of grandiose jungle construction. The stadium builders had first to drain a river tributary that flowed through the proposed site, in the state of Amazonas, and then to install seats with a special kind of paint that doesn’t melt under the equatorial sun. No club from Amazonas has competed in top-level play in Brazil in thirty years. Two workers died while building the stadium. “We always think in Brazil there will be a miracle,” Paulo Vinicius Coelho, the Brazilian Bob Costas, told me. “This time, there is not going to be a miracle.”

Tellingly, the hero of the 1994 Seleção, Romario, whose feet are sometimes credited with electing President Fernando Cardoso, has reëmerged as a leading voice of the World Cup opposition. “Brazil is hosting it, but it’s not for the Brazilian people,” Romario told me. “The lower classes won’t be able to buy tickets.” Once known as a playboy, he is now a socialist congressman representing Rio de Janeiro—a Derek Jeter figure who recast himself as Muhammad Ali to seize the political moment.

A considerable amount of the traditional Brazilian fixation with soccer, and with intellectuals’ embrace of Brazilian soccer as a global ideal, is bound up in the notion that Brazilians play not just better than everyone else but somehow differently—that they’d improved on a colonial import and made it their own. Whimsy and creativity exemplified by talents like Pelé and Mané Garrincha, the so-called Angel with Bent Legs, are, according to this mythology, part of the national DNA, a product of the country’s unique history of miscegenation. (Or a result, some argue, of black players having learned how to dance out of the way of onrushing whites in the days when even accidental body contact might have been interpreted as intolerable aggression.) This soccer-as-samba idealization, too, is largely a casualty of globalization. “Brazilians learned how to be technocrats, and Europeans learned how to be artists,” Tostão, an integral member of perhaps the finest of all World Cup champions, the 1970 Seleção, said, and suggested that if I wanted to see the beautiful game now I might as well head to Barcelona or Manchester. Romario and his contemporaries may have had genius in their feet, as the saying goes, but the World Cups they won for Brazil, in 1994 and 2002, came after a long spell of elegant failure, and were triumphs of defensive tactics, not wizardry—a cynical concession, you might say. Sports fans, at heart, are not intellectuals but crass capitalists, who prefer winning at all costs. “Playing beautifully and losing is horrible,” Luiz Felipe Scolari, the coach of the Seleção, told the Times recently. “Whoever says the opposite is an idiot.”