O Football, the most popular sport in Brazil, is an inexhaustible source of controversy. Discussions about which club is the oldest in activity or which team has the biggest fans in the country are frequent in fan circles. Although they are far from being overcome, these divergences assume less importance given the new thesis formulated by historian José Moraes dos Santos Neto. Graduated from Unicamp and currently part of the teaching staff at Colégio Pio XII, in Campinas, he is the author of the book Visão do Jogo - Primórdios do Futebol no Brasil, which has just been released by Cosac & Naify. In 118 pages, filled with historical images and unpublished data, the writer presents evidence that undermines a myth. According to Neto, as he likes to be called, Charles Miller would not be the one who introduced football to these shores, as official history records. The sport would have reached the Brazilian clay fields through Jesuits. If the version is true, it would have been a goal from the priests at the end of the 19th century.

The conclusions contained in Neto's work are based on several years of research into football, in documents obtained from the collections of Colégio São Luís, Mosteiro de Itaici and São Paulo State Archives and in interviews with direct descendants of the pioneers of the sport in the Brazil. According to the writer, the information he collected leaves no doubt: the sport had been practiced here since the first half of the 1880s. Charles Miller, who was born in São Paulo and raised and educated in England, only returned to the country in 1894, when he brought in his luggage an association football rule book, a Banister School shirt and a St. Mary's shirt, two balls, a pump to inflate them and a pair of cleats.

When rescuing the beginnings of football, Visão do Jogo makes curious revelations to say the least. According to the book, the person indirectly responsible for introducing the sport that would become the most popular in the country was the jurist, journalist, diplomat and politician Rui Barbosa. In 1882, the then deputy for the Liberal Party presented to the Chamber of the Empire, at the request of D. Pedro II, an opinion on the Reform of Primary Education and Complementary Institutions of Public Instruction. The objective was to build a solid educational system, capable of reversing dramatic indicators, such as the one that showed that only 16% of the Brazilian population was literate. "In the chapter referring to physical education in schools, Rui Barbosa defended the introduction of outdoor exercises, rationally varied, so that the muscles function harmoniously", explains Neto.

Concerned about adapting to the new reality, the best educational institutions decided to send delegations to several European schools. "There, for the first time, football became an option for Brazil", says the historian. In São Paulo, one of the schools that stood out in introducing new sporting practices was Colégio São Luís de Itu, where some of the children of São Paulo's elite studied. Returning from their tour of France, Germany and England, the first homeland of football, the Jesuit priests of São Luís, which currently operates on Avenida Paulista, in the Capital, brought some news. Among them was the later called Breton sport, a modality that became part of the sporting practices of school students between 1880 and 1890. In other words, one of the first kicks at a football in Brazil would have been given in a city located less than 70 kilometers from Campinas, the hometown of Neto, a passionate Ponte Preta fan.

On that occasion, one of the members of the mission that toured Europe, Father José Durante, who would later become rector of Colégio São Luís, had brought two balls from abroad. These consisted of air chambers under a leather covering, called a bonnet. "However, as the imported chambers wore out, the Jesuits replaced them, with satisfactory results, with ox bladders", reports Neto in his book. Until 1887, according to the writer, priests and students played together, but did not practice so-called association football, which presupposes the formation of two teams and the existence of a set of rules. Instead, they fought against the wall. "This was part of a gradual strategy of introducing the sport to students", explains the historian.

Shortly afterwards, football began to take the form we know it today, with very few changes. Neto narrates in his book: "Then, the priests introduced two small marks on opposite walls of the courtyard and divided the group into two teams, green shirts on one side and red shirts on the other. The game started to have a concrete objective, that is, That is, taking the ball to the opposing team's wall and scoring a goal by hitting it in the space delimited by the marks". The teams made up of 11 players and the goals came in sequence, coinciding with the period in which the sport became more organized and frequent. Upon leaving São Luís, already graduated, the students took football to other cities and states, causing it to spread throughout Brazil. This task was reinforced by the arrival of immigrants and the expansion of railways, since the sport was practiced in parallel by both the elite and the working class.

But, after all, didn't Charles Miller have any merit in introducing and spreading football in Brazil? According to historian Neto, the son of English immigrants was, indeed, important in this aspect. It was he who took the sport into the clubs frequented by São Paulo's elite, which would later form a league, a kind of embryo of what is today the São Paulo Football Federation. Despite the segregationist position of the "aristocratic footballers", who did not allow popular teams to participate in tournaments, the sport gained strength within these organizations. The writer warns, however, that his book does not intend to exhaust the subject surrounding the origins of Brazilian football. "He just puts the topic up for discussion. There is no absolute truth. I believe the matter deserves more research, so that we can better understand this genesis", he ponders.

In addition to providing new data on the origins of Brazilian football, Visão do Jogo provides the reader with other tasty information about the sport. The author reveals, for example, the origin of the expression "varzeano football", explains the primordial duel between "dribble football" and "pass football" and reproduces with incredible precision, based on newspaper reports of the time, the moves of the Brazilian Football Team's first international competition, the Copa Roca. The match, which took place in Argentina, against the home team, on September 27, 1914, ended 1-0 for Brazil, scored by Rubens Salles.

The curious detail is that the Argentines even tied with a hand goal from Leonardi, in a gesture that would be repeated by Diego Maradona, the greatest Buenos player of all time, in the 1986 World Cup. In an attitude that would provoke astonishment and even a certain indignation among some of the current fans, one of Argentina's players, Galup, went to the referee and admitted that the goal had been scored irregularly. Given the confession, the judge went back and disallowed the goal. The Argentine athlete's initiative earned applause from players from both teams. As you can see, fair play today is not the same as it was in the past.