Critique of “Travels With the Curse of Maracanã” by Christoph Niemann

Mike Nathan
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

“My Travels With the Curse of Maracanã” by Christoph Niemann is a magazine piece on the New York Times website that takes the form of an interactive book. It tells the story of soccer in Brazil, the excitement of the world cup in Brazil and the historical World Cup game that took place in the Maracanã stadium in Rio in 1950. Brazil lost 2–1 to Uruguay. The goalkeeper, Moacir Barbosa was blamed for the loss and the spirit of Maracanãco (Maracanã blow) was born. The spirit still lingers in Brazil, especially nearing the world cup.

The piece initially caught my attention because I love soccer. I chose to stay and critique the piece because I really liked the way it was formatted. The background music was fun and catchy, the story was interesting, the photographs were visually pleasing, the animations/drawings were different and funny and it was visually pleasing. All of the different forms of media that were used in this piece worked well together. They kept me flipping the pages of the book and wanting to learn more about the spirit of soccer in Brazil. Flipping the pages of the book kept me engaged and made it interactive which was fun.

Some of the book’s pages were formatted differently than others, meaning that there were some pages that were just animation and text, some just photos and drawings, and some were just video. The one thing that I didn’t like about having all these different formats was that sometimes I expected the drawings on the photograph to move because I assumed that they were animated and after waiting a little bit I realized they weren’t and I would then continue with the story. Some slides did not have any text on them and the same thing would happen, I would wait for the text to load but it never showed because the page didn’t have any. The inconsistency of page formatting was at times confusing, but made each page unique. I overall really enjoyed the piece and the story it had to share.

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