I propose classes at the school where I teach months in advance, to facilitate their scheduling and promotion. I already know my tentative schedule for late Spring and Summer: A youth class in August; an adult class evenings in July, and a class for advanced beginners in late April through May. Nothing in June. The school will be open with many classes, but I won’t be there. I’ll be parked in front on a TV, watching the World Cup.
Even Americans now recognize that the quadrennial football world championship is by far the globe’s greatest sporting spectacle. If they don’t, they will soon, as the tournament is in this country this year, and huge crowds will be everywhere- bars, downtowns, airports, sports streams. Trump and his MAGA minions will undoubtedly try to ruin the tournament, or at least co-opt it for their racist agenda, but I doubt they’ll succeed. Fascists and corrupt oligarchs have tried to pervert the game toward venal purposes for decades and haven’t succeeded.
Not that the game is pure. Corruption and venality are woven into its fabric, not to even mention sectarianism and racism. But the game, in its simple beauty and transcendent moments, has proven resistant to the machinations of countless tinpots, fat cats and orange tinted thugs, and remains, by overwhelming popular choice, the world’s game.
Those who do not understand football- soccer, as it has long been nicknamed to avoid confusion with other games that are often derivatives and sometimes do not even involve using the foot, usually do not fully understand the world. Bias against the beautiful game is one of the purest expressionss of American exceptionalism. One NFL shill once called Soccer a ‘commie pansy’ sport. That sort of overt xenophobia is slowly ending, but predictably, some ultra conservative, or well fatted sports pundit will be heard spouting vile stereotypes sometime this Summer. The targets of these willfully ignorant pronouncements will be familiar in the Trump era: Women, Africans, Muslims. Cape Verdians don’t care. The country’s first World Cup goal (should it happen) will be shown around the world, and will foment unbounded joy rivaling the country’s independence.
Most Americans are at the very least, intrigued. If not fully onboard with the game’s subtleties and sublime flow, they get that it is captivating to billions, and would like to know why, at least until the United States National Team is eliminated ( spoiler alert: should be well before the final).
Catching up with 175 years of organizational, tactical, cultural league and tournament history won’t be easy. I’ve been catching up since I started following the game in the 70s, and there is a lot to know. Here is a very doable course of three or four books that can be read in the weeks before kick off in early June.
The Ball is Round, David Goldblatt: The title, a quote from an early coach, sums it up: if you think you know what’s going to happen in a given match, even a nil-nil, you are headed for a humbling. The simplicity of the game keeps minnows in reach of Goliaths, turns howlers (ridiculous goals) into legends, and punctures egos regularly (see: England v. USA, 1950). Goldblatt gives us one reason why: the game absorbs cultural styles, and rewards individual creativity. Yet its appeal is universal. It becomes a litany: In nation after nation, as the world industrialized, the story repeats- people get railroads (the game was propagated by English construction engineers and bankers), people get weekends, football clubs are formed.
Some will find this to be too much detail, but Goldblatt redeems the long slow travelogue by weaving his narrative with the cultural and political forces at play in various regions, as well the momentous games and players that launched footballing nations to glory, and to cups.
How Soccer Explains the World, 2004, Franklin Foer: Foer, a writer on world affairs, became a fan, and here delves into the cultural specifics of hooliganism, racist gangs, corrupt oligarchs, and yes, American exceptionalism.
The game tends to take on the concerns of the people who love it, sometimes in very negative way. The stereotype of the violent football fan is of course rooted in actual cultural tensions, such as Thatcherism’s repressions in England, Eastern European racism, and the botched remapping of the Balkans after World War I.
For this post, I reread the essay on antisemitism in football, which is discussed in relation to the legendary Hakoah club in Vienna, Austria. For a brief time in the 20s, this was one of the greatest clubs in the world, and grew out of a philosophy of Zionist self improvement, before the Anschluss destroyed a rich Jewish Culture. Ironically, the final blow to the Wonder Team came in the US, then in its first flowering of soccer prosperity. Many players left to emigrate to a land where antisemitism seemed to be non existent.
Inverting the Pyramid, 2008, Jonathon Wilson: In football, formations change, with the years, with fads, and even within a game. The numerology 3-4-3, 4-2-3-1, 5-4-1, etc, confuses, and the camera can’t show the whole field, at once, making it difficult to parse what the tactics are. Wilson gives an overview of the evolution of tactics, from the 2-3-5 that Wrexham trotted out in the Welsh Cup final in 1878, and which dominated tactical thinking for decades, to England’s pragmatic 4-4-2, he explains how the tactics changed with the teams, coaches and players on the pitch.
But the book is about far more than formations and their applications in leagues and tournaments. One of the most interesting thing about football is the way it reflects individual cultures around the world. It is after all, the most extensive cultural practice in the world, larger than any religion, language or political system, and the game as played in England, where it began, can be far different than South America, or even Europe. “Tell me how you play, and I will tell you who you are”, as Eduardo Galeano, Argentine author, said in Futbol in Sun and Shadow, about South American football. As Wilson outlines, the English, once certain of their inherent supremacy, have time and again been humbled by the game they invented. They were simply too hidebound to change, favoring a physical game that the abstract tactics of others, beginning with their Home Country rivals Scotland, ran rings around. Slowly, the English ‘kick-and-rush’ gave way to the Brazilian Samba, and and the German Gegenpress.
“Tell me how you play, and I will tell you who you are”, as Eduardo Galeano, Argentine author, said in Futbol in Sun and Shadow
Wilson explores these cultural differences in the context of cultural histories, and the book becomes a sort of a shorthand version of Goldblatt’s magisterial chronology. Comparing and contrasting England’s conservative physicality with the (mainly Jewish) intellectual innovations of Europe, and the individuality and creative flair of South America, he then moves into the rise of fascism and militarism in the game.
All three of these books include discussion of Hakoah, a seminal episode in the tactical development of the game, and its culture. So though rascist and antisemitic violence is common, the game also owes much to its diverse ethnic and cultural groups.
Extra credit:
The Age of Football, David Goldblatt: The book is difficult to read, and I did put it down for a while as I ticked other books off my large reading list. As a history of football in the 21st Century, it is unlikely to appeal to all but the most obsessed (and progressive ) of fans. Goldblatt is an exhaustive chronicler, rarely leaving out names or detail, even when the overall narrative from each country is depressingly similar.
This book is mostly about money and corruption in football, and came out just after Sepp Blatter’s crash and burn as the FIFA investigations broke, and the Russian and Qatar World Cups were purchased with oligarch billions. It’s clearly on message as fans decry football’s venality, but a spoonful of sugar, in the form of inspirational tales from the pitch, which leavened his definitive history, The Ball Is Round, is often missing here.
Football, though, clearly needs a muckraker. The 2010, 2018 and ’22 Cups were all tainted with obvious oligarchic corruption, and the ’26 will be ‘cleaner’ only in the sense of handing over the reins to the corporate side of things, to many, just another, slicker form of corruption.
This is the book I needed, and I’m better and more clear headed for it, but it didn’t tempt me to join the scattered calls for a boycott of the Qatar Cup. Just as corrupt Trump’s cooptation of the fawning FIFA leadership will taint the U.S. World Cup this year. But with an expanded field of 48 teams, there will be plenty of intrigue and inspirational subplots. Uzbekistan is very like Cape Verde in one way- they’re happy to be here.
The ’22 World Cup turned out to be one of the best ever, not because billionaire oil ghouls built lavish stadia with abused laborers, but because the players and the fans refused to let corruption taint their passion, which is, as Danny Blanchflower said, the oxygen the game breathes. It’s difficult to make a cause of the games we escape to when the other causes wear us down. Football’s simplicity and elegance tend to transcend the venality of its money people, and the sometimes cynicism of its tactical practitioners.
So Age of Football goes on the shelf next to Ball and Pyramid, books so exhaustive and necessary that it’s certain I’ll turn to them again, but so exhausting that the reading experience can be the opposite of the absorbing escape of the beautiful game they seek to redeem. Still, the game always transcends the humble efforts of billions to understand its appeal.
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