Football Against The Enemy

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The themes of this book are also addressed through the perspective of individual accounts and literary selections. It is Kuper’s next stop and subject of analysis, and Roger Milla becomes an excellent lens to view the challenges inherent in the continent – as racism and political manoeuvring stifles the game. At the same time he tried to find out what lies behind each nation's distinctive style of play from the carefree self-expression of the Brazilians to the anxious calculation of the Italians.

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He visited 22 countries on a tiny budget, digging into the effects football can have on politics and culture and why different countries play the game so differently. Visual representations of sport have previously been little examined and under-exploited by historians, with little focused and rigorous scrutiny of these vital historical documents. This comprehensive, novel and exciting interdisciplinary collection brings together leading international authorities from the history of sport, social history, art history, film history, design history, cultural studies and related fields to explore the ways in which visual culture has shaped, and continues to impact upon, our understanding of sport as an integral element within popular culture.He is named for his paternal grandfather, Simon Meyer Kuper, who was a South African Supreme Court judge assassinated in 1963. But however diverse they or their environments, football people are bound together by a mutual fascination with a game which, at its best, can rise above all its circumstances and make the heart sing. Born in Uganda to South African parents, Kuper spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands and lives in Paris. Leaving the tension of early-1990’s Northern Ireland to attend a Rangers-Celtic match in Glasgow, Kuper listens as Celtic fans cheer IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands and Rangers fans chant “No Surrender” and “Nooooo Pope of Rome” slogans, and asks himself, “Had I really left Ulster that morning? London is seen as the height of progressive power, which is at odds with the inferiority complex felt by the English themselves.

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Money changing hands is also important for cash-strapped nations in more ways than one – transfers are used as economic tools of progression. Picking up this book, you will understand the depth of the game and how it can be futile to explain away in a simple way why it rouses such complicated passionate sensibilities in people.

I couldn’t help but think back to Germany’s 7-1 defeat of Brazil in the 2014 World Cup semifinals in Brazil. Finding this book during the 2014 World Cup was a memorable experience, and I found that some of Kuper’s insights were downright prophetic. Particularly interesting, and disheartening, was Chapter 18, which examines the “Old Firm” – the longstanding Glasgow-based rivalry between Celtic, whose fans are predominantly Catholic, and Rangers, whose supporters are mostly Protestant. Football was an ignored topic by non-sport journalists, policy-makers, but after hearing that programme I thought ‘Wow, football can actually do things in a society. as an element of cultural life in societies around the globe; a subsidiary theme, and an increasingly important one in a world that seems daily to become less stable, is that “the less free a country is, the more soccer matters” (p.