At five o'clock on Thursday June 12th, if all goes to plan, a whistle will blow in São Paulo and the 20th World Cup will begin. It will be hard to hear, because no fans in the world are as passionately noisy as Brazil's. They see it almost as a right that their team, the seleção in their famous canary-yellow shirts, will emerge a month later as the winners. For them, this is not just a football tournament, but an opportunity to exorcise a ghost from the national psyche.
-The Economist
