Simon Kuper

A non-fiction book looking at the Amsterdam football club, Ajax, and how it and the people around the club were affected by the second World War. In fact that's a very reductive description - many other European football clubs and cultures are touched on, and the Kuper also ranges over decades around the war. But at its heart the book is focussed on Ajax, and through that it examines the Dutch - their character, politics and history.

The book is packed with detail and is excoriating in an show more understated way. It effectively manages to tell of the horrors of World War II in Europe, and warns of the tenacious attitudes that formented it still being with us today. Some of the detail can be overwhelming - the statistics are horrifying, but can be slippery to recall. I'm not sure if that's due to the slightly scattershot structure of the book, or just that many of the events are so unimagineable.

Certainly some of the sense of being overwhelmed comes from trying to wrap your head around the slightly contradictory ideas that are at the heart of the book. Kuper contends that Holland, and particularly Ajax Football Club was both better and worse during the war than pop culture history would have them. Holland gave up its Jews much more easily than most other European countries, though not, it is asserted, because Holland had a large Nazi Party (they did) but because the Dutch just wanted a peaceful, orderly life. And the continuance of sport, and football in particular, were part of that (as it was in many other countries). That said, many Jews associated with Ajax actually were protected and survived through their association with the club, and were later instrumental in the club's success. But peculiarly that's not celebrated by the club, or even really acknowledged, and that despite Ajax being perceived as a Jewish club. The Dutch as a whole, it asserts, understand that they were not particularly virtuous in WWII, but - or perhaps because of that - would also like to avoid any serious engagement with the casual anti-semitism that the author identifies in Holland since the war years.

There is lots of other interesting stuff, about English football, and football under the Nazis, and perhaps the book's greatest value is in correcting the accepted version of history (the England team's Nazi salute, for example). While occasionally a touch ranty, it is unflinching and keen. show less

Simon Kuper immersed himself in the Barcelona FC culture for decades and the long view shows here. He details the club’s operations from the Johan Cruyff days as a player (1973-78) and coach (1988-96), to the recent downturn. He displays a deep understanding of the tactics, personalities and politics of the club.

Cruyff was the catalyst for Kuper’s interest in the club. “Cruyff created the great Barca. In the words of his chief disciple, Pep Guardiola, he built the cathedral” which show more was “later updated by Guardiola and perfected by Lionel Messi, before it fell into decay.”

The club developed from “a bastion of local pride” to one of the world’s best clubs, propelled by Cruyff and his philosophy. Guardiola for one, considers Cruyff “the most important person in the history of football.” Although the club has fallen on hard times (but at this writing are in first place in La Liga, albeit early into the season), Kuper isn’t writing them off. He finishes with a warm thought: “What Barca created, in the world’s most beloved sport, is one of the most cheering of human achievements.”

This is probably the best book I’ve read for understanding the dynamics of a top-level football team. show less

This book is labeled “World Cup Edition”, so you think you’re getting a book about the World Cup. Wrong! This book is about English soccer with a couple chapters about Spain, South Africa, and the like thrown in at the end.

It’s obvious that this book was repackaged with minimal changes (from the first Soccernomics book) to coincide with 2014 World Cup. As a book that has practically nothing about the World Cup in it, that is some blatant false advertising. I can forgive a lot of show more things in a book, but not such an obvious disregard for the truth.

To make it worse, they contradict themselves rather a lot (for example saying that having more money doesn’t make you happier, then flipping by saying it does). Soccernomics was a very frustrating book to read. It was well written, but the authors have no regard for consistency or the truth. It had so much potential, but they just screwed it up. show less

Kuper somehow arranges trips to many football-organised countries in western & eastern Europe, Africa, and the Americas; interviews a raft of players, coaches, owners & organisers (both current and legendary); pointedly leavens their narratives with those from football-minded culture critics (anthropologists & sociologists as well as journalists); and weaves the results into a travelogue which somehow manages to be about the spirit of football more than anything else. Fabulous read, and show more includes many vignettes and set pieces on the strategy, style, and history of the game. One of Kuper's primary questions was both how and why football was played differently in Spain than in England, in South Africa than in Jamaica, and so on. He doesn't bring the book to any sweeping conclusions or generalised theory of the game, but wisely opts to focus on specific instances of difference and similarity.

To his credit, Kuper also is as critical of the game (socioeconomically, but also vis-a-vis the power relations it engenders) as he is supportive. He's a fan, clearly, but a clear-headed one. And perhaps unintended is the book's role as time-capsule: the world is not as isolated and insular as it was in 1992-93, at least in those aspects susceptible to media influence, and the game of football reflects it. Celtic and Rangers, the Red Army of either Man U or of Torpedo Moscow, these have merged into an international brand. Kuper wrote before that was quite so much the case.

Can't imagine a better context in which to follow football at present: in the US, the sport has a high-enough profile to allow a fan to follow most leagues as well as international fixtures, and the domestic league probably has the highest level of professional skill and ability as ever ... yet it's still eclipsed by NFL, NBA, MLB. This means, I think, the focus such as it is remains on the game, and less on the extraneous stuff: marketing, cultural dominance whether hooliganism or machismo or rivalries. (Perhaps I kid myself.) Don't think I'd appreciate the same teams, matches, rivalries were I neck-deep in it all. In Britain or Europe, I suspect I'd probably follow a second league club.

//

Levon Abramian's theory of social revolution via FCs, the only organic communities in the Soviet bloc. Abramian anticipated Moscow would see the first revolutions, its multiple FCs aligned with social classes (military, working class); in fact, the nationalist clubs in the republics were more involved in revolt. [53ff]

Dynamo Kiev's manager Valeri "Loba" Lobanovski and his Billy Ball sabermetrician Anatoly Zelentsov, pre-PC and VHS, mapping out plays like American football: "Our aim was to invent the science of soccer." [63-64] The club's stars did not succeed on Western clubs, they excelled within the Dynamo system.

"As I see it, there are four approaches to soccer which dominate today." [91]
● Long-ball game (Britain), aka counter-attacking football
● Total football, aka possession football (Netherlands, Barcelona's tiki-taka, AC Milan, Sao Paolo, Dynamo Kiev, and now Bayern Muenchen)
● Happy-go-lucky style of o jogo bonito (Brazil) or "piano and shoeshine" (South Africa)
● Catenaccio ("padlock") or defensive football, identified with Helenio Herrera (Inter Milan, and the Azzurri)

U.S. edition, "Soccer Against the Enemy" with a new preface. Yes, in places the editors just swapped out "football" for "soccer" with absurd results: when football referred to the object, not the game, for example. show less