The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer Author: David Goldblatt | Language: English | ISBN:
B0011UGMHI | Format: PDF
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer Description
The definitive book about soccer. With a new foreword for the American edition. There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final.
In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally,
The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.
- File Size: 2660 KB
- Print Length: 1012 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594482969
- Publisher: Riverhead (January 2, 2008)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0011UGMHI
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,431 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #33
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Soccer - #45
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports
- #33
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Soccer - #45
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Miscellaneous > History of Sports
I've read a lot of books about sports in my relatively short time on this planet and while I have really enjoyed many of them and reread a few multiple times, this was definitely the first sports-related book I have ever NOT wanted to finish. Based on my rating, you can tell I mean this in a completely positive way: this book was easily one of the most informative and engaging texts I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
The main point of this text is the history of soccer (or football, whichever you may prefer - I'm an American, so soccer it is), which is clear from the subtitle on the cover. Yet there is so, so, so much more contained within the roughly 900 pages that span the book's binding. You have a lot of politics, great human successes and failures, stories of survival and disaster, as well as small passages that set you in a certain time and space where Goldblatt takes you to a scene important to the chapter or section.
For a well-read fan of the game, the importance of this book lies in the first half of it, as Goldblatt starts from the very beginning, discussing ball games of the ancient world, moving to the late 19th century and the creation of the English FA and the FA Cup, the development of professionalism (both accepted and hidden) versus amateurism, and while he obviously takes the history all the way to the present, the first half of the book opens up a history of the sport that many know absolutely nothing about. Soccer in the first half of the 20th century is not a well-known history, one Goldblatt marvelously elucidates.
For those who like the sport but know little about it, the book shows you how much there was to soccer before the advent of the Premier League, corporate sponsorship, and 32 teams in the World Cup.
My title is not directed at other reviewers here, but at the many glowing reviews for this book featured on its cover and first pages. This is not a beautifully written book, the majority of it is extremely tedious, and at its worst the writing is virtually incoherent.
THE BALL IS ROUND is touted as a history of soccer, but it is ultimately a book about world history in the 20th Century, with soccer as the lens through which that history is viewed. This is an important distinction to make, because reading this book will give you little understanding of the tactical evolution of the game, the famous personalities, players, coaches, the legendary moments of triumph and failure, the great rivalries between teams. The book is much more interested in the politcal and historical aspects of the game's history, and much less so in the sporting ones.
Nevertheless, the book is extremely comprehensive in the outlook that it does take. Goldblatt examines the history of the game on practically (often literally) a nation by nation basis, covering the entire world. He divides the book both by historical era and geographical location, so that chapters generally alternate back and forth from one continent to the next while the book proceeds gradually forward through historical time. Unfortunately, much of this content ends up being tedious and scrapped together.
THE BALL IS ROUND starts off well, the sections about the early history of the game are excellent and I recommend them, but after the first one or two hundred pages, the quality of prose and content rapidly decline. Goldblatt approaches this history with a relentless determination both to editorialize it and to cast it in literary terms, leading to often tortured descriptions of situations and events.
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