I remember reading the same articles during the United States World Cup of 1994, and I wonder if some of the same articles may have been dusted off and re-filed yet again this year, during the ongoing Qatar World Cup of 2022. Later he took such extraordinary measures to attend matches featuring any team from the West that his activities attracted the attention of the secret police and he found himself being trailed around the football grounds of Eastern Europe by a personal Stasi agent. If you don't like football, read it' THE TIMES Throughout the world, football is a potent force in the lives of billions of people. His survey of the depth, extent and variety of that obsession begins with the Dutch defeat of West Germany in the semi-finals of the European championship in 1988. Nothing can be easier to grasp than people chasing a ball and shooting it into the net to win; or to provide such a space, even if there aren’t actual nets at both ends and only goalposts or even two sticks to mark the territory enclosing the goal.

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Through interviews and frank discussions with individuals across these countries, he realises the animosity Slovakia has for the Hungarians – with the President comparing the latter with ruffians at a European match between the clubs of two nations.In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War. did not surprise me – because, from living in Hungary back in 2011, I know what a scar the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of two thirds of its pre-World War I territory, left in Hungarian national life.

Book Review: Football Against The Enemy - Simon Kuper

This book was written in 1994, and reading it nearly 20 years later -- it is grossly outdated (even with the updates in 2006). It isn’t a reach to believe that impoverished clubs are highly dependent on emerging starlets to bankroll them by attracting the attention of Western teams.

That event – for Brazilians, a deep cultural wound and historic trauma, if not a national crisis – will certainly take its place within World Cup lore, along with many of the other historic events that Kuper chronicles and examines throughout his book. Football was an ignored topic by non-sport journalists, policy-makers, but after hearing that programme I thought ‘Wow, football can actually do things in a society. as an element of cultural life in societies around the globe; a subsidiary theme, and an increasingly important one in a world that seems daily to become less stable, is that “the less free a country is, the more soccer matters” (p. He publishes a well-read column in the weekend edition FT Magazine [2] and has twice been awarded the British Society of Magazine Editors' prize for Columnist of the Year.

Football Against The Enemy - Simon Kuper - Issuu Football Against The Enemy - Simon Kuper - Issuu

He visited 22 countries on a tiny budget, digging into the effects football can have on politics and culture and why different countries play the game so differently. Kuper has written several books, starting with the William Hill awarded Football Against the Enemy (1994), which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy.While for most of us, it is something to follow with bated breath as the daily lives and struggles become insignificant when the roar of millions reverberates around the stadium – cheering and mocking every pass, every tackle, every run, every goal. Financial struggles also plague the African nations – many of its players go unpaid as they prepare for the World Cup. SK: He held this tournament in Cameroon to promote the wellbeing of Cameroonian pygmies, who are very discriminated against. AT A moment when football is subjecting itself to a billion-dollar version of in vitro fertilisation, this book could hardly have been better timed.