Nubank: Finding Brilliance in Brokenness
Huddled in the bowels of Gothenburg's Ullevi Arena, Vicente Feola stood in the dressing room and barked his instructions. As the coach of Brazil's international team, the squat manager with a neat side-part had been tasked with one of the most difficult jobs in sport: winning the World Cup for his country for the first time.
Despite a decade of sustained brilliance, somehow, the Seleção had failed to secure football's most illustrious prize. Four years earlier, in 1954, the team had stumbled at the quarter-finals. Four years before that, Brazil had endured the ignominy of losing the final to Uruguay. So scarring had that defeat been, it produced a word of its own: Maracanaço, or "the agony of the Maracanã stadium," the scene of that spiritual crime.
Like those other tournaments, the 1958 edition had gotten off to a decent start. Now, Feola's side would face its first real test: the USSR.
