The Ball Is Round

"This book was published in 2006 in the UK and was sent to me. It’s about 1,000 pages long and the copy I got was a hardback and I remember the impact it made as it hit my doorstep. I think for a book on sport that’s unique, a book of that length. But, setting sport aside, I think it’s one of the best English-language narrative histories that I’ve read on any subject, certainly from the first decade of the 21st century. Goldblatt is an amazing, very gifted storyteller. He’s a football reporter for the BBC, and his work is a treasure, I think. Oh, no. It’s extraordinarily well-crafted. It’s a chronological re-telling. He starts out in pre-history, and there’s any number of pre-historical football-like ball games from an array of cultures, from Asian cultures, from Mesoamerican cultures. He looks at those and does a very good job of not linking those directly to modern-day football, as that would not be right historically. But he sees those games as expressions of the truth, these societies who value sport and have this very early intuition about sport as a possible place of transcendence. In Mesoamerican cultures the ball game is a place where you can encounter the gods; it’s almost a mythological setting. He starts from there and quickly gets to the modern game, association football, and goes through its development on every continent. And, like Kuper and Galeano, he’s interested in the social mechanisms that work outside the sporting complex. He has that same awareness of context, that football never exists on its own, but that it shapes culture and is shaped by cultural forces. It’s more a work of history and sociology: the game, the matches that are played, are just a way of illustrating the social forces at work. He does talk a lot about the violent aspects and the sublimated violence of soccer. He writes about hooliganism in England in the 1980s, in the context of Thatcherite Britain. The hooliganism that was seen at that time, and that was seen as so appalling in US and in various places around the world, was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of the policies of that time. Thatcher had made enemies of the underclass and those on the dole. He puts it in that frame. The violence that you see at football stadiums isn’t just because it’s football: there’s violence for a reason, and there are many deeper reasons that one finds. I should add that another important contribution of his is that, early in the book, he notes that religion and food and rites of passage vary from one place to another. But soccer is played in more or less the same circumstances, by the same rules, around the globe. This is an aspect of soccer as language. It really requires no translation to be able to play it; it is its own language. It’s intuitively understood, you don’t need to say anything to be able to play it."

"This book is incredible. I want to show you exactly how big it is. It’s enormous. It’s 1,000 pages, give or take. Huge. Heavy as a brick. It’s a global history of football and it really is as in-depth as that. The thing I love about it is the scale. He could have done a 300-page book on this that gave you a flavour of it and his publishers would probably have been happier about it. Easier to sell. But instead he has written the definitive history. Not just the games and the goals but what it means all over the world. God knows how long it took him or if he planned for it to be quite this all-encompassing when he started. It really is an incredible achievement. He takes you from how it was played as a working-class sport in Britain in the late 1800s and how the colonialists from Britain, France and Portugal took it with them to the rest of the world, obviously to Africa, but to other parts of the world as well. He takes you through the birth of the World Cup in 1930, something the Brits were very unhappy about. Well. It was their game. Other people can play it, but the idea of there being a World Cup that they didn’t organise… Well, yes. When England did finally enter the World Cup in 1950 they then lost to America. Yes, we don’t like to talk about it, but I’m sure it will get talked about this week because England’s first game is against the US, 60 years on from when they first met. So it’s an epic book. Absolutely epic and deeply, deeply impressive. It’s one of those books it’s always nice to go back and have a little look at every now and then. It’s got so many fantastic stories. And the guy can write."