The Brazilian national soccer team is coming to America later this year. "Brazil will play an exhibition game against the United States on May 30 or 31 at Landover, Md., or Foxborough, Mass," the Associated Press reports. "The game was announced Thursday by Brazilian soccer's governing body. It will be part of a three-game U.S. trip for Brazil, which also will play Mexico on June 3 at Arlington, Texas, and Argentina on June 9 at East Rutherford, N.J."

That's excuse enough for re-reading some fantastic features on the world's sport. Pete Axthelm's classic profile is from 1966, when the most famous athlete in the world was a soccer player. "Almost unknown in the U.S., Edson Arantes do Nascimento—nicknamed Pele—is the idol of soccer-playing nations and a demigod in Brazil where he earns half a million dollars a year," he wrote.

David Hirshey remembers when the sport first got big in America due to interest in Pele. "Thirty years before Real Madrid and Chelsea bestrode the world with their collection of celestial talent, the Cosmos conquered the last outpost of soccer indifference, the United States, and changed the nature of sport forever," he writes. "It was an extraordinary moment in time, when 'I'm with the Cosmos' carried as much weight as 'I'm with the Rolling Stones' — perhaps more, since even Mick Jagger wanted to be sprinkled with the stardust of New York's soccer demigods and its one Supreme Being."

Michael Sokolove reports on how soccer players are made. "The Dutch live in a cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of redirecting water," he writes. "The construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion."

Tom Friend profiles a backup player on the 1990 U.S. World Cup team. "They usually don't grow goalkeepers this big -- literally and figuratively," he writes. "Dave Vanole was always a goalie in a linebacker's body, and if anyone says they saw a World Cup in his future, they're lying." As it turned out, however, his biggest contributions to soccer would come off the field.

Dave Eggers starts his primer on the 2010 World Cup by musing on soccer in the United States. "In the 1970s, AYSO was formed to popularize soccer among the youth of America, and they did this with startling efficiency. Within a few years, soccer was the sport of choice for parents everywhere, particularly those who harbored suspicions that their children had no athletic ability whatsoever," he writes. "But at about age 10, something happens to the children of the United States. Soccer is dropped, quickly and unceremoniously, by approximately 88 percent of all young people."

And finally, Matt Taibbi offers a dissenting voice. "Hating soccer used to be our thing, a distinctly American trait," he writes. "But every four years, more and more of us get suckered into treating it like a real sport. Here’s why I’m holding out."