The age of football Soccer and the 21st century

David Goldblatt, 1965-

Book - 2020

"A monumental exploration of soccer and society in our time-by its preeminent historian. In the twenty-first century, soccer commands the allegiance, interest, and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon in the world. David Goldblatt-author of the acclaimed, best-selling The Ball Is Round-charts the sport's global cultural ascent, economic transformation, and deep politicization. With breathtaking scope and unparalleled knowledge of the game, The Age of Football explores soccer's vital role in our social, political, and economic lives: its connections to social discord in the Middle East and political division in Europe; the reasons behind its surprising surge in popularity in China, India, and the ...United States; and its use (and misuse) in the global advance of equality and human rights. Goldblatt proves that whether you call it football or soccer, you can't make sense of the modern world without understanding its most popular sport"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

796.334/Goldblatt
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 796.334/Goldblatt Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company 2020.
Language
English
Main Author
David Goldblatt, 1965- (author)
Edition
First American edition
Item Description
"First published in the UK by Macmillan Publishers International Limited under the title The age of football : the global game in the twenty-first century."
Physical Description
551 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [469]-521) and index.
ISBN
9780393635119
  • Introduction: Football Is First
  • 1. The Living and the Dead: Afro Football Fever
  • 2. Regime vs Street vs Mosque: Three-sided Football in the Middle East
  • 3. From the Left Wing: South American Fútbol and the Pink Tide
  • 4. This Storm is What We Call Progress: Football and the European Project
  • 5. Continental Drift: The Fragmented Worlds of Asian Football
  • 6. Trouble in Paradise: Football in the Americas
  • 7. The Game beyond the Game: The Fall of the House of Blatter
  • 8. Back in the USSR? Football in Putin's Russia
  • Conclusion: The Global Potemkin Village: World Cup 2018
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Index
  • Picture Credits
Review by Booklist Review

Goldblatt, author of the best-selling The Ball Is Round (2006), delivers a satisfying overview of the state of soccer in the twenty-first century that explores the sport's dramatic rise in popularity over the last 50 years. Telling details make the case for soccer's international prominence. English football is amazingly popular in Africa. President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi, for example, has declared his allegiance to Chelsea in England's Premier League. People all around the world alter their sleep schedules to rise in the middle of the night to watch their favorite clubs. A mining operation in Chile readjusted its shifts so miners could watch the national team. Goldblatt also examines some of the issues pervasive in the sport, from gender equality (virtually all women's professional teams are still coached by men) to the sometimes ugly business side and the game's scandal-ridden ruling bodies. Effectively linking all the detail into a macro view of the sport, both on the pitch and as a cultural phenomenon, Goldblatt shows exactly why soccer enthralls billions worldwide. A must for any sports collection.--Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2020 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sportswriter Goldblatt (The Ball Is Round) presents a titanic, often dense volume on "the beautiful game" and its cultural transcendency and relevance in the 21st century. The sport's global popularity, Goldblatt argues, has resulted in soccer's increased attention from politicians, not for "merely symbolic" reasons but also as "an object of state policy and intervention." Goldblatt begins in Africa, where he explores the roots of colonialism and the ways that soccer proliferated across the continent, focusing on the cultural significance of South Africa hosting the 2010 World Cup. He then observes soccer's rise to prominence in the Middle East and highlights the controversy surrounding the bribery scandal and backroom negotiations behind the decision for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, while also noting the subsequent charges of human rights violations regarding the migrant labor force building the stadiums. He closes with chapters on FIFA, soccer's international governing body, and corruption, particularly about former FIFA president Sepp Blatter's outsize power and his 2015 resignation amid a sprawling corruption scandal, and on the growing importance of soccer in Putin's Russia, exemplified by the leader's growing desire to spread the country's "sphere of influence" in global sports outside of the Olympic sports. Goldblatt's work is invaluable for a wide swath of readers, from soccer fans to those with interests in politics, cultural studies, and social justice. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A learned, wide-ranging study of footballsoccer, that isas something that's much more than just a game.The French philosopher Guy Debord devoted much attention to the spectacle, which is meant, writes Goldblatt (The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, 2016), to "not just distract but commodify, blind and stupefy too." That's one function of sportsnamely, to keep us from recognizing what's going on around us. The author, who may know as much about soccer as any person on the planet, takes the story far beyond that, into realms that particularly embrace politics, those systems that make things happen to people. One instance among dozens is the place of soccer in Hungary, a nation headed by a neofascist who once played the game himself and who has built an outsized stadium in his home village, "held up by huge, breathtaking trusses of laminated mahogany set in the great fan patterns of a Gothic cathedral." Other intellectuals come and go in Goldblatt's pages, including the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who commented, "football is popular because stupidity is popular." The sneer is unnecessary, but the fact is that soccer is the world's single most popular spotand is even gaining ground in the U.S. and China, which had previously ignored it. Goldblatt does a lot of on-the-ground footwork to track the game's fortunes, observing that Asia is emerging as a soccer power; Africa has superb players hampered by lack of money; and the game is growing by leaps even as the corruption surrounding it is breathtaking and even if it often seems an expression of warfare by other means, as when, in a match between South Korea and China, "Chinese authorities surrounded the Korean squad and the stadium with thousands of troops." There's no corner of the globe that Goldblatt doesn't explore, and his book updates and overshadows Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World (2004).Superb: Essential reading not just for fans of the sport, but also for students of geopolitics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.