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While football is part of Western culture, and not just of it, this sport develops with particularities according to each historical and social context. Part of this phenomenon are the interpretations formulated not only about it, but based on it, about the society in which it takes root. In the case of Brazil, this arises, among other aspects, in disputes over which features demarcate a certain national authenticity. Football-art coexists with interpretations that see in the game some minimalism in a technical moment, not without aesthetic expressiveness. This eventually turns into intellectual delight. This essay defends a cultural critique that considers the football dialectic as a modernizing movement of a peripheral country, while observing its expressive possibilities, but with some detachment that authorizes a comment which is not just laudatory. Football can have aesthetic expression and be material for art: literature, cinema, painting, theater etc. On the other hand, social criticism cannot despise the materiality of what happens inside the field, nor can it ignore what makes it up in its social roots: class, ethnicity, gender, generation and other devices which make up the work-of-sports in its expressiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]