It seems to have been Brazil’s left-back Marcelo who came up with the idea. When the national anthem was played before a match, he told his teammates, they should keep singing after the music stopped. It would be a display of patriotism for the fans. It has become a ritual. At Brazil’s matches here, crowd and players belt out the words together a cappella. For a minute, the nation is made flesh.

In many countries, the national football team – with all its virtues and faults – is felt to incarnate the nation. But that’s particularly true in Brazil, football’s superpower. And it’s even truer during a World Cup in Brazil. A vast disparate country is now doing its best to unite around a team of multimillionaire expat footballers.

Looking around the S?o Paulo stadium during Brazil’s opening match against Croatia, you saw how tricky it is to call Brazil a nation. In this country of endless skin hues, almost all the spectators were white. They were the people who could afford the tickets. S?o Paulo’s educated classes were also the Brazilians most angry about wasteful spending on the World Cup. A survey carried out by Datafolha just before the tournament found that whereas 51 per cent of all Brazilians favoured hosting the tournament, only 41 per cent of Paulistas did. The crowd in the stadium roared the anthem with defiance, a Brazilian businessman told me. Their message: they loved Brazil despite the government.