The Ball is Round

I'm currently reading David Goldblatt's thus far excellent The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football.* In the section about the game's spread to South America there is this report from a Brazilian journalist watching one of the first organized games in Rio de Janeiro:

"In Bom Retiro, a group of Englishmen, a bunch of maniacs as they all are, get together, from time to time, to kick around something that looks like a bull's bladder. It gives them great satisfaction or fills them with sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts."

Not really too far off, was he?


*In North America it's published as The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer. That said, the publishers did not change the text to read soccer in lieu of football each time.