In an interview on Soccer as a Second Language

Let’s go on to your next book, Goldblatt’s The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.

This book was published in 2006 in the UK and was sent to me. It’s about 1,000 pages long and the copy I got was a hardback and I remember the impact it made as it hit my doorstep. I think for a book on sport that’s unique, a book of that length. But, setting sport aside, I think it’s one of the best English-language narrative histories that I’ve read on any subject, certainly from the first decade of the 21st century. Goldblatt is an amazing, very gifted storyteller. He’s a football reporter for the BBC, and his work is a treasure, I think.

You had no trouble getting through the 1,000 pages?

Oh, no. It’s extraordinarily well-crafted.

What is it exactly?

It’s a chronological re-telling. He starts out in pre-history, and there’s any number of pre-historical football-like ball games from an array of cultures, from Asian cultures, from Mesoamerican cultures. He looks at those and does a very good job of not linking those directly to modern-day football, as that would not be right historically.

But he sees those games as expressions of the truth, these societies who value sport and have this very early intuition about sport as a possible place of transcendence. In Mesoamerican cultures the ball game is a place where you can encounter the gods; it’s almost a mythological setting. He starts from there and quickly gets to the modern game, association football, and goes through its development on every continent. And, like Kuper and Galeano, he’s interested in the social mechanisms that work outside the sporting complex. He has that same awareness of context, that football never exists on its own, but that it shapes culture and is shaped by cultural forces. It’s more a work of history and sociology: the game, the matches that are played, are just a way of illustrating the social forces at work.

Oh dear, that doesn’t say great things about British and Dutch culture, if you think about the hooliganism.

He does talk a lot about the violent aspects and the sublimated violence of soccer. He writes about hooliganism in England in the 1980s, in the context of Thatcherite Britain. The hooliganism that was seen at that time, and that was seen as so appalling in US and in various places around the world, was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of the policies of that time. Thatcher had made enemies of the underclass and those on the dole.

He argues this?

He puts it in that frame. The violence that you see at football stadiums isn’t just because it’s football: there’s violence for a reason, and there are many deeper reasons that one finds. I should add that another important contribution of his is that, early in the book, he notes that religion and food and rites of passage vary from one place to another. But soccer is played in more or less the same circumstances, by the same rules, around the globe. This is an aspect of soccer as language. It really requires no translation to be able to play it; it is its own language. It’s intuitively understood, you don’t need to say anything to be able to play it.