How Soccer Explains the World: An [Unlikely] Theory of Globalization
By Franklin Foer
(Harper Perennial, 2004)
261 pages
As the title suggests, Franklin Foer's book is the ultimate sports analogy, a 261-page tome that looks at some of the most noteworthy trends in our increasingly global world through the lens of a soccer fanatic. Fortunately, Foer's pedigree in journalism (he is now the editor of The New Republic) enables him to weave his travelogue narratives with insights culled from a diverse and eclectic pool of sources ranging from the Serbian anthropologist Ivan Colovic to the American shock jock Jim Rome.
Foer opens his book by examining the role the Serbian clubs FC Red Star Belgrade and FC Obilic played in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, and he closes it by explaining how soccer has figured into America's (mostly peaceful) culture wars. In between, Spanish powerhouse Barcelona FC is held up as the vanguard of liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism, while operators of Brazil's domestic league (dubbed cartolas, or top hats) are chastised for their insularity, incompetence, and corruption. Scottish clubs Celtic FC and Rangers FC are taken to task for stoking the religious sectarianism that has plagued that region since the Reformation, whereas Iranian soccer is credited for giving Iranian citizens--particularly women--an excuse to occasionally shrug off the restrictions religious hardliners have wedged into Iranian public life. And on and on.
This is by far the best soccer book I've read (and re-read) to date. Each chapter stands alone, so you can hop from one chapter to another, depending on your appetite and mood. And the prose flows smoothly enough to allow you to plow through a chapter in a few nights of pre-bedtime reading.
- John C.L. Morgan
I read the book and thought it interesting, but don't agree with the authors comments on the US.
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