01

Context

After years of travelling through music—with Boiler Room, Worldwide FM, the British Council and other projects—I wanted something different.

There were no interviews to arrange. No radio broadcast. No production schedule. No cultural expedition disguised as a holiday.

We were going to Brazil because we wanted to be there together.

Brazil had occupied a mythical place in my imagination through music: João Donato and Jorge Ben, the evolution of samba and MPB, baile funk, carnival, street sound and the country’s extraordinary queer culture. Music was a large part of the attraction, but there was no particular mission.

At the same time, the FIFA Women’s World Cup was taking place in Australia and New Zealand. We would wake up at difficult hours to watch games and then pass out again afterwards.

I remember being surprised by the apparent lack of visible support on the streets. But the matches were taking place on the other side of the world, often at awkward times in Brazil. The tournament existed inside hotel rooms and apartments rather than spilling visibly onto the streets.

Football was already present in the journey.

I just did not yet understand how present it was.

02

The Currency of São Paulo

Before travelling, I had been watching the Brasileirão through Fanatiz.

Every weekend there were aerial television shots of Brazilian stadiums at sunset: enormous concrete structures, floodlights switching on, the city stretching endlessly into the distance.

I remember looking at one of those images and saying to my partner:

“I want to go to Brazil.”

Football was not the reason for the trip, but it was somewhere inside the initial impulse.

Soon after arriving in São Paulo, I went out on a morning mission for coffee.

One of the first things I saw was a large piece of Ronaldo graffiti.

R9 was not being presented as sporting nostalgia or advertising. He was simply there, embedded in the city’s visual language.

It became rapidly clear that football was a form of currency in São Paulo.

It lived on walls, in shops, in conversations and in the way people described themselves.

But my first proper encounter with that culture came somewhere I did not yet have the context to fully understand.

03

The Football Museum

Very early in the trip, before Morumbi, we visited the football museum in São Paulo.

The museum sits inside an old stadium, which made the entire experience feel less like entering a conventional institution and more like entering football’s physical memory.

Outside, a beach soccer tournament was taking place.

That contrast stayed with me: the formal history of Brazilian football being preserved inside, while another version of the game was alive outside—informal, social and happening in real time.

Inside, there was an overwhelming amount to absorb.

At the time, I did not yet have a framework for what I was looking at. I enjoyed it, but I was overwhelmed by the scale of the story.

In hindsight, I should have taken more photographs.

I should have spent longer looking through the shop.

I should have bought more shirts.

I should have searched for stickers and smaller objects that might have helped preserve the memory of what we were seeing.

Even the restaurant became part of the coordinate. The burger we ate there was the best burger we had during the entire trip.

That detail sounds incidental, but it is part of how places remain with you. Football culture is rarely experienced in isolation. It is the museum, the building, the tournament outside, the shop, the meal and the journey there.

Because we visited so early, however, the museum arrived before the rest of Brazil had taught me how to understand it.

Later, after Morumbi, Bahia and Rio, I kept thinking:

“I need to go back to that museum.”

I wanted to see it again with everything I had learned.

The first visit had given me the information.

The rest of the journey gave me the context.

04

Morumbi

I knew I wanted to experience Morumbi.

Buying tickets proved more complicated than expected. The online system required a Brazilian CPF, making it difficult for a visitor to complete the purchase.

So we went to the stadium the day before the match.

The ticket office was not the kind of polished, visitor-facing operation I expected. It was closer to a concrete shack hidden behind a wall.

With almost no Portuguese and plenty of determination, I somehow managed to buy two tickets.

That was it.

The journey had started.

The following day we returned for São Paulo against Santos.

Morumbi was magnificent.

But what struck me was not simply the scale of the stadium or the football on the pitch.

It was the social atmosphere.

It felt less like people had gathered exclusively to watch a match and more like a party was taking place with football at its centre.

It was basically a party with football on.

On the taxi journey back, the driver told me he supported Palmeiras.

At that point, I had not fully grasped how many football identities existed inside São Paulo.

Different histories, communities and ways of belonging occupied the same wider city.

I wanted to see Corinthians too, but there was not enough time.

Already, one stadium had created the desire for another.

05

Bahia

From São Paulo we travelled to Salvador.

The original plan was to stay long enough to attend a match there, but complications with the Airbnb meant we had to leave for Rio earlier than intended.

Football was not the centre of our time in Bahia, but belonging remained visible everywhere.

We visited the place where Michael Jackson filmed They Don’t Care About Us.

We ate some of the best food of the entire trip—the best food in Brazil, in my memory.

We encountered street music and drumming that transformed public space into performance.

Before leaving, we bought a Bahia shirt and a Vitória shirt.

The man who sold us the Vitória shirt told us they were the proper team, even though they were playing in a lower division.

It was another small lesson.

He was not offering an objective football analysis.

He was telling us where he belonged.

League position was irrelevant.

The shirt carried identity.

06

Rio

I badly wanted to see Flamengo.

Our flight was already booked, and we only landed in Rio around an hour before kick-off, still carrying our luggage.

By the time we reached the Airbnb, the city was already alive.

It felt as though Rio’s queer scene was having a party around the swimming pool of our apartment block. Music, people and incredible energy surrounded us as soon as we arrived. The market nearby was still open, adding to the sense of movement and hustle.

I managed to find the Flamengo game on television.

Then Flamengo scored.

The whole city exploded.

Noise rose from apartments, streets, cars and buildings.

For a moment, Rio itself became the stadium.

We had missed the match, but we had still experienced its impact.

It felt like a movie.

Flamengo were in a title race, and the result seemed to pass through the entire city at once.

That was when I understood that attending a stadium was only one way of experiencing football.

Sometimes the most powerful evidence of a club’s place in a city can be heard from outside.

07

Learning Rio Through Clubs

I still wanted to visit the Maracanã.

Fluminense were playing there the following weekend, which meant we decided to stay in Rio longer.

I did not know much about Fluminense, so I started researching.

That research opened the city.

Their neighbourhoods, social identities, colonial histories and rivalries.

We passed Botafogo’s training ground and visited the nearby shopping centre a few times. Through repetition and proximity, I started to feel strangely Botafogan.

This was not rational support. It was geographical intimacy.

Then I bought a Fluminense shirt without the Betano sponsor. Anna bought one too, possibly a training top. We never saw anyone else wearing the same version.

The shirts became part of the process of entering the coordinate.

Buying tickets brought another confrontation with the local football system. A man on the street became aggressive when I refused to buy his ticket.

Eventually I reached the official ticket office.

I needed identification and had to navigate another unfamiliar process, but I got the tickets.

Another small victory.

Another part of the initiation.

08

Maracanã

The Maracanã was everything I hoped it would be.

But by then it meant more than visiting a famous stadium.

It was the culmination of a journey through the football identities of Brazil.

We had begun in the football museum without understanding the depth of what we were seeing.

Then came the R9 graffiti.

Morumbi.

The Palmeiras-supporting taxi driver.

The Bahia and Vitória shirts.

Flamengo’s goal shaking Rio.

Botafogo’s training ground.

The research into Vasco and Fluminense.

By the time we entered the Maracanã, the stadium was no longer detached from the city around it.

It had context.

The opponent was Santos—the same visiting club we had watched at Morumbi.

Without planning it, Santos connected the two major stadium experiences of the trip.

The same club appeared in two different cities, revealing two completely different football cultures.

At Morumbi, football felt like a party built around a club.

At the Maracanã, it felt as though the entire history of Brazilian football was somehow present in the structure itself.

It was an incredible experience.

More importantly, it moved something internally.

My coordinates were changing.

09

The Return That Did Not Happen

For the rest of the trip, I kept thinking about the football museum.

I wanted to return to São Paulo and experience it again.

This time I would take more photographs.

Look more carefully.

Buy the shirts.

Search for stickers.

Spend longer with the objects.

I also kept thinking about a velour Palmeiras jacket I had seen in a shopping mall but decided not to buy.

At the time, it felt like just another piece of clothing.

Later, it became part of the story.

The objects you leave behind can acquire almost as much meaning as the objects you bring home.

In the end, we never returned to São Paulo city.

We spent several days in Ubatuba instead, stepping away from the scale and intensity of the cities. From there, we took a taxi directly to the airport.

While waiting for the flight, I managed to buy a black Brazil training top with a leopard pattern.

It became the final object of the journey.

Not the velour Palmeiras jacket.

Not the museum shirts.

Not the stickers I had failed to look for.

But something found at the last possible moment, while waiting to leave.

The training top became both a souvenir and a reminder of an unfinished journey.