The first match of the FIFA World Cup 2018 kicks off on June 14, and in geographies worldwide for the next month, many of us will work our daily schedules to take in as much of the action live as we can. It is already a prompt to revisit some of the favourite books on football, and perhaps to give flight to theories on how the sport is our window to the world. For example, Franklin Foer’s How Football Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalisation . Or Simon Kuper’s much-quoted book, with perhaps the longest subtitle: Soccernomics: Why England Loses; Why Germany, Spain, and France Win; and Why One Day Japan, Iraq and the United States Will Become Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport. Or that classic: Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano. (An aside for the purists: give up debate on the football versus soccer nomenclature and use the two words interchangeably. In any case, the particular word used is often a reflection of whether you’re reading the American or British edition of the same book.)
Then there are the old reliables on how to understand a country’s footballing culture/style by its social and political backdrop, and vice-versa: David Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil Through Soccer , David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football , Jimmy Burns’s La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World , and taking in its sweep an entire continent Steve Bloomfield’s Africa United: Soccer, Passion, Politics, and the First World Cup in Africa.
But there’s one book I now go back to before a World Cup for a key on how to put together my unique reading list every time: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup , edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. Published in time for the 2006 edition of the tournament in Germany, Weiland and Wilsey assigned to 32 writers, and not necessarily sports writers, one participating country each, so that the reader knew about the country and not just its team. The essays in themselves are brilliant, but they also serve as a nudge to get the reader to draw up her own list for subsequent tournaments by reading an essay/book on or from for each country that’s qualified.
Draw up your lists of 32, there’s much reading to be done during half-time breaks over the next few weeks.
