How Football Explains the World [antikvár]

Prologue I suck at soccer. When I was a boy, my parents would turn their backs to the field to avoid watching me play. I don't blame them. The game's fundamental principles only dawned on me slowly, after I had spent many seasons running in the opposite direction of the ball. Despite these traumas, or perhaps because of them, my love for soccer later developed into something quite mad. I desperately wanted to master the game that had been the source of so much childhood shame. Because I would never achieve competence in the game itself, I could do the next best thing, to try and acquire a maven's understanding. For an American, this wasn't easy. During my childhood, public television would irregularly rebroadcast matches from Germany and Italy at televangelist hours on Sunday mornings. Those measly offerings would have to carry you through the four years between World Cups. That was it. But slowly, technology filled in the gaps. First, praise God, came the Internet, where you could read the British sports pages and closely follow the players that you had encountered at the World Cup. Then Rupert Murdoch,