The Ball is Round!

Today, I finally finished reading David Goldblatt's excellent book The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football. At 907 pages, no small feat. Though not my favourite football book, that honour is shared amongst Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow and Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, this book is, as I said, excellent. Massive in scope, it is exactly what the title says, a history of the game on a world scale. But more than covering the spread and development of football, it gives the social and historical context in which football was and is played. The strongest chapters are the later ones, I'm guessing because there are more records available. These chapters detail the corruption and commercialization endemic in the world game. However, he ends with this:

Living with profound risk and uncertainty is now the destiny of humanity. We are lucky then that the game we have chosen as our collective metaphor, the avatar of our social dilemmas, should so closely parallel our predicament. To place the world under the sign of play is to expose ourselves to the caprice of the ball. We must be bold enough to think that we have the guile, the heart and the wit to bring it under control.

An over-intellectualisation perhaps, something I may have been guilty of once or twice, but apt nonetheless. All in all, an excellent, thoroughly researched work, and a worthwhile read.*


*When the hell did I become a book reviewer?