Product Description

The classic winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80958 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Synopsis
Throughout the world, football is a potent force in the lives of billions of people. Focusing national, political and cultural identities, football is the medium through which the world's hopes and fears, passions and hatreds are expressed. Simon Kuper travelled to 22 countries from South Africa to Italy, from Russia to the USA, to examine the way football has shaped them. At the same time he tried to find out what lies behind each nation's distinctive style of play, from the carefree self-expression of the Brazilians to the anxious calculation of the Italians. During his journeys he met an extraordinary range of players, politicians and - of course - the fans themselves, all of whom revealed in their different ways the unique place football has in the life of the planet.

About the Author
Simon Kuper is the author of Football Against the Enemy and writes for the Observer and the Financial Times.

Customer Reviews

How football reflects, filters and shapes a culture's self-image
Football Against the Enemy deserves classic status, even if for no other reason than it was one of the first books to use football as a topic for 'serious' cultural study.

Often poorly written, far from scholarly in its arguments, and suffering from the fact that history has overtaken it, the book still convincingly demonstrates how cultures use football to reflect, filter and shape their self-image.

For example, Kuper argues that Dutch fans take their team's matches against the Germans so seriously because they think they should and not because of any historic sporting enmity between the two nations.

The generation that lived through Nazi occupation saw no significance in Holland-Germany games, but the 1988 European Championships heralded an invented tradition of Germanophobia - created in part to support a Dutch pose of heroic resistance against Teutonic plans for world domination.

Similarly, Kuper says that Argentinians see Maradona's `Hand of God' goal against England as part of a wider tradition of folk tales that tell of the downtrodden poor using wily, inventive and crafty tactics to defeat their rich, powerful landlords.

The English, on the other hand, have painted themselves as the perennial underdogs: a nation of hard-but-fair heroes who always go down fighting (but inevitably go down), and it is hard not to view multiple England penalty-shootout defeats and thrown-away half-time leads without considering how many World Cups the team would have won had the country chosen to see itself instead as Machiavellian over-achievers like the Italians did.

Such hinted insights dominate the book, which mainly consists of examples of how football teams can become a focus for cultural identity - an argument that was so common and obvious, even in 1994, that it has become a platitude. Kuper uses the example of how ethnic groups in the former USSR supported the football teams that (surprise, surprise) represented their local area; in the case of the Baltic states, the areas would become nations in their own right, leading to much happiness among local football fans - although one suspects that non-fans would have been equally or more delighted by their country's sudden independence.

Football Against the Enemy was written during the Yugoslav war, a conflict that is frequently said to have started with a riot at a football match between Red Star Belgrade (ie, Serbia) and Dinamo Zagreb (Croatia) in 1990.

This urban myth is complicated by subsequent animosity between Dinamo Zagreb and Hadjuk Split, bitter Croatian enemies with a pre-1990 'tradition' of uniting against Serbian teams, and rivalries between Red Star - the club supported by football thug-turned warlord Arkan - and their Belgrade rivals Partizan, a club that attracted many of the city's Bosnian fans.

Such complex rivalries, and the forces that shape them, are frequently described in the football magazine FourFourTwo in more detail and with more clarity than Kuper can manage. That said, he can justifiably claim (like Nick Hornby) to have helped create the environment where a mass-market sports magazine can devote a two-page spread to geopolitical history, as seen through the prism of football.

Football geography/politics lesson
This is a book about football politics around the globe. It was written in the 92-94 period. It starts with a look at the Dutch national team and their hatred of the Germans. I wasn't very impressed by the initial chapter but after that the stories are excellent. The stories include a look at corruption at clubs in the former states of Russia and how East Germans would try and watch West German teams when the two countries were divided. In fact corruption is a theme that reappears in different countries throughout the book, a subject that is of great interest to me.

There is an article on Cameroonian football and how President Biya puts himself in danger of being shot when he makes the obligatory trip to see the cup final.

There is an article about why the Italians play a defensive style of football.

Further travels include Argentina, Glasgow via Ireland, South Africa, Croatia, USA... All in all this book is about three things, politics, travel and most of all, FOOTBALL!

Well Rounded
This book's laudability stems from primarily:
1) It's sweeping through the globe with football as the prime theme.
2) Outlining the impact the greatest game in the universe has on different cultures.

Quite honestly, this is as much a social sciences text as it is a football book as it focuses tremendously on societal intruiges and deficiencies unknow to Western culture. I particularly found Kuper's account on the machinations at Dynamo Kiev and the contrasting styles of Carlos Bilardo and Cesar Menotti in Argentina fascinating. Putting it bluntly, this is a must read for any die hard fans who care about the game beyond the British Isles, and who desire a basic account football has on a global scale- which is suffice to say, gargantuan. KUDOS to FOOTBALL! KUDOS to Kuper!