WCXX

Havelange brought a new level of professionalism to Brazilian football. The squad underwent medical checks at Rio's leading hospitals that revealed a catalogue of disease and long-term malnutrition. Almost the entire squad had intestinal parasites, some had syphilis, others were anaemic. More than 300 teeth were extracted from the players' mouths. Epidemiologically, Brazil '58 were a team of the people.

Planning for the World Cup in Sweden was meticulous, with 25 locations tested before they settled on a base. Even then, the Brazilians went as far as to insist that the Swedish hotel replace female staff with male ones.

In the final, they faced the hosts, Sweden, and though Brazil went 1-nil down early in the game, they gave an untroubled, commanding performance of inventive football that saw them win 5-2. The Times declared: "They showed football as a different conception; they killed the white skidding ball as if it were a lump of cotton wool."

Pelé, who scored the best – and final – goal in the dying minutes of the match, passed out, was revived and broke down in tears. The Swedish king actually came down to the pitch to join the celebratory mêlée. The Swedes, who had cheered Brazil's performance as they played, now cheered their lap of honour. The Seleção – the nickname for the Brazilian national football team – reciprocated by carrying a giant Swedish flag.

The bulk of this side went to Chile for the World Cup four years later. Pelé's injury in an early game gave the spotlight to Garrincha, who seemed to soar. In the final, Brazil went 1-0 down to the Czechs, but they never looked worried. Three goals later, they were champions again. Garrincha could be seen repeatedly standing with his foot poised atop the ball, daring the Czechs to take it off him.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of these two footballing triumphs. Of course there were phenomenal celebrations in the streets, gigantic crowds gathered in the cities to see the team and cup parades. Both victories were followed by presidential receptions and speeches, and a torrent of memorabilia.

But these moments left a deeper legacy. The Brazilian anthropologist José Leite Lopes recalled of the 1958 final: "It was so intense. I don't think I was ever more moved by a few minutes of football in all my life. It was football's turning point."

Football columnist Nelson Rodrigues thought Brazil could kick its "mongrel-dog complex" forever. Brazil had won not once but twice; and they didn't just win, they won in their own style. Brazil was the football nation.

The success of the Seleção and the brilliance of players such as Pelé and Garrincha grew out of a rich domestic football culture that combined thriving clubs, spectacular fans, popular music, poetry and prose.

The clubs thrived because professional football was just one element of club life in the Fifties and Sixties. The social and recreational activities that centred on the clubs was at its strongest in this era – clubs really were clubs, providing facilities and parties, and a tangible sense of community and identity, with fees that were within the reach of the lower-middle classes, if not the poor.

At the same time, the fans had created a popular spectacle second to none in world football. The French journalist Jacques de Resnwyck, visiting in 1954, saw Brazil's last qualification game for the World Cup in Switzerland later that year. "As soon as the Brazilian team had won its ticket to Switzerland, a single, formidable cry rang out from the masses: 'Vamos Suica, Vamos Suica'. Thousands of shirts were torn off, set alight and waved about like triumphal torches. For me, the game here had always been accessory to the spectacle… I had the impression that it was no more than a pretext, an excuse for the extraordinary striving of the people: a sort of safety valve invented to allow the superabundant life of the people, their exuberance and need to escape."

The fans were now known as Torcidas – "Twisted ones" – a play on both the whirring of handkerchiefs by celebrating crowds and the turning of their guts at moments of tension. They filled the stands with home-made flags, banners and icons. Charangas – the supporters' own bands – helped direct the singing, chanting and whistling.

The arrival of the players on the pitch was accompanied by fusillades of flares, firecrackers, fireworks and smoke bombs. From the upper levels, a great storm of streamers and newspaper confetti rained down. A newspaper could be rolled into a tight cone and lit, as a statement of victory or a curse on defeat.

Football was fully immersed into Brazilian culture. The great poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote a column during every World Cup between 1958 and 1986. Informed and playful, he slyly suggested that the 1962 World Cup-winning squad would make a better and more unified ministerial team than President João Goulart's turbulent executive. In dry, sparse lines, he cast football's place in Brazilian culture as an informal ludic cult, a zone of playful fantasy and joy:

Football is played in the stadium?

Football is played on the beach,

Football is played in the street,

Football is played in the soul.

The ball is the same: a religious order

for aces and stilt-walkers.

But it was the musicians who reached the biggest audiences. The 1958 and 1962 World Cups alone saw more than 35 football-related tunes released on to the market. The range of performers, composers and genres drew on the rich brew of contemporary Brazilian music, and they expressed a confidence hitherto rare in Brazilian culture.

This Brazil was coming to a close sooner than many imagined. The three years of Goulart's rule in the early Sixties proved increasingly turbulent. The massive spending programmes of the Kubitschek years, and the government's tendency to print money, saw annual inflation climbing past 100 per cent in 1964.

As the economy spun out of control, political opinion polarised. The Left in Brazil called for radical measures of redistribution and public control of the economy. On the Right, the military looked askance at the economic chaos that Brazil's democracy had helped produce.

Brazil's football clubs, like every other institution, were desperate for foreign currency that held its value, and so they sent their teams on foreign tours. Santos, Pelé's club, were the biggest attractions, playing on every continent, but even a tiny team from Rio's lower divisions, Madureira, could make a living from a trip to the Caribbean.

They played in Cuba, and were pictured in the Brazilian press with a smiling Che Guevara; a photograph that must have raised a few eyebrows in the officers' commons rooms of the Brazilian military, where a paranoid anti-communism was already at fever pitch.

Goulart, who had tried to hold a centrist position, opted for the Left, and announced a series of nationalisations and land reforms backed by large public demonstrations. The Right rallied with their own counter marches.

Then, in spring 1964, the military staged a coup. Key government offices in Rio and Brasilia were occupied. Major figures on the Left were rounded up and imprisoned. Goulart fled the country. The vice-president called for the people to fill the streets, but they remained empty.

In March, Santos and Pelé had left Brazil, still a democratic state, for a short tour of South America. They returned to a Brazil in which the generals were beginning their two decades in power.

As if nothing had changed, Santos went out and won the São Paulo state championships again. But it would only become apparent in retrospect that everything was about to change. Brazilian football and society would not merely be transformed by military rule, it would also be cruelly deformed.

The military even sought to shape the game in its own image. In 1974, Admiral Heleno Nunes took charge of the Brazilian Football Federation. Each national game was accompanied by the presentation of politicians from the regime's ersatz party, ARENA.

The government pressurised the football authorities to establish a fully fledged national championship. Extraordinarily, leagues in Brazil were still played at the level of individual states. The military's vision of their new Brazil required a big league. Like many military schemes, driven by grandiose ambition, the project ballooned out of control. The Brasileiro league started with 20 teams in 1971. There were 50 teams in the competition two years later, and by 1979, an unmanageable 94. It became a commonplace that: "When things are bad for ARENA, another team gets in the Brasileiro."

The regime also took control of the Seleção. A soldier, Capt Coutinho, was made coach. He spoke of his players as light armour and infantry and their skills as weapons, and insisted on military discipline among the squad. He argued: "The dribble, our speciality, is a waste of time and proof of our weakness." The 1978 World Cup campaign that followed was so uninspiring that travelling Brazilian fans burnt an effigy of Coutinho in Argentina.

On the pitch, too, the character of the game was changing. The dream of Brazilian football as art, music and dance clung on, but many clubs, like Grêmio and Internacional from Porto Alegre were self-consciously rougher, more pragmatic and disciplined. They won five national titles between them.

By the early Eighties, Brazil's economic miracle was over. The benefits of the junta's boom had been spread very unevenly. In the north east, more than 40 per cent of the population officially remained hungry. The crime rate rose sharply. In the cities, every block acquired bars, gates and security guards. The Jules Rimet World Cup trophy, then in the possession of the Brazilian Football Federation, went missing from its bullet-proof cabinet. It was never recovered. It seems likely that, in an era of hyper-inflation, it was melted down for its value as a precious metal.

Gold might keep its value, but the golden age was over.

'Futebol Nation', by David Goldblatt (Penguin), is available from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + £1.10 p&p. To order, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk