David Faflik’s forthcoming book, Plus Minas: Brazil’s Beautiful Game in Crisis Times, is a deeply felt meditation on Brazilian futebol, completed during the author’s Fulbright residence in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from May to September 2022. Written with the aim of reconstituting our scholarly approaches to the purposeful discussion of play (including the “play” of language and literature that organizes most of Faflik’s research), this study adapts the written traditions of cultural studies, the Brazilian sports chronicle, and personal memoir to cast a reflexive light on the respective roles that “work” and “play” occupy in our interpretive labors as critics of culture. Set against the backdrop of the global fallout from COVID-19, Plus Minas is less a timely survey of Latin American affect than it is a microhistory of the emotions, notably the author’s own. Plus Minas will appear in the “Sporting” book series of Temple University Press in 2024.