I'm not a football (soccer) fan. Or I should say, I really didn't know very much about it. My best friend played when we were kids. Another close friend played it for several years. As an adult it's something I was vaguely aware of and had many stereotypical images of rough crowds, fast complicated footwork, and movie characters in European films mad for the game. World Cup fever has hit my social network and I became curious. When I'm curious, I read up. I picked up "How Soccer Explains the World" more because it was on a promotional table next to other books I was interested in, than because I sought it out. I was drawn particularly to the combination of football (I have too many international friends to be comfortable referring to it as soccer), history, politics, underworld shenanigans, economics, and personal memoir.

I started reading it and was immediately drawn in. Foer is articulate and clearly very passionate about the game. He writes clear, concise but almost conversational stories that made me feel like I was sitting in a pub drinking a beer and listening to him talk. I don't know that he completely sells me on his case that football can explain the world, but he certainly showed me a perspective and context for the game and world politics that I'd never have considered or understood beforehand. As I watch the next world cup game, I certainly see it with a new, engaged sense of interest.

I guess I got sucked into the World Cup via the library--in a series of essays, Foer uses the international media and labor market for soccer to explore such globalization issues as the Red Star club as training grounds for Serbian war criminals, Glasgow's Catholic-Protestant divide, 1920s Zionist soccer clubs in Vienna, the spate of soccer hooligan memoirs in British publishing, Pele, corruption and politics as usual in Brazil, African players in the Ukraine, Berlusconi and AC Milan as a cornerstone of Italian media manipulation, Catalan soccer and assimilation leverage in Spain, female soccer spectators in Tehran and the culture wars of soccer and anti-soccer Americans.

I love the intersection of soccer and culture/politics/history in different countries. This is a great book with some great stories about how culture informs soccer and vice versa. It's not all pretty, but interesting nonetheless. Must read for soccer fans.

An enticing title that I've noticed for a while but passed over as my interest in soccer really extends no further than the field itself. Despite my love for playing the game, I've never been a big 'fan' as it is, well, difficult to care when you live in a place that broadcasts probably a dozen games a year. . . and that's if there are World Cup qualifiers on!

Despite my lack of knowledge about the sport on a world stage, I greatly enjoyed Foer's account of futbol as a means for explaining a variety of globalization phenomenon. Through a heap of soccer based travel, Foer develops an admittedly 'unlikely' theory of globalization that tackles topics as broad as Africans in Eastern Europe to the infection of American hip-hop culture throughout the world, and even the future of Islamic states.

Written by an American for an American audience, this book is a great introduction to the sport on a world stage. Kind of like World Soccer: 101. From it's pages, anyone with the slightest interest in the sport can pick up a heap of valuable knowledge, especially when trying to find one's 'favorite' team to root for. Whoulda thunk that so many teams have fascist and racist underpinnings while others are almost all but owned by the State!?

An enjoyable read that is broken down into 10 coherent sections, each tackling their own unique topic through the lens of soccer as the ultimate, well, everything!

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization has been on my shelf for years and it was the mention of soccer that kept me from reading it. Despite being from Eastern Europe, I am completely ambivalent toward soccer.

And yet Franklin Foer uses soccer as a brilliant example to discuss hooliganism within soccer, nationalism and corruption. He writes about specific soccer teams (mostly in Europe but also Brazil) and how team rivalries show themselves to be much more complex than what they seem.

As soon as I started reading the first story, I was taken aback with how wonderful Foer is. It probably helps that I lived through the Yugoslavian war and know that soccer rivalries were used for nationalistic purposes - and in fact - the die-hard fans were organized under the Serbian party and are responsible for two thousand known deaths. Foer perfectly captured the obsession and quite frankly, the hatred that existed during those years.

Each chapter is set up to explain a certain aspect of globalization and uses two teams (usually rivals) to explain it. What made this book particularly interesting is that he went to these countries and talked to the hooligans that lived it, getting their accounts of things. It wasn’t a dry history, instead, it provided an insider’s view. Aside from the incidents with Red Star Belgrade in former Yugoslavia, it was interesting to see how soccer is tied in to so many corruption schemes, money-laundering operations and nationalist groups. It even mentioned this through soccer groups that I’ve heard of like Manchester, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Red Star Belgrade and players like Ronaldo.

You do not need to be a soccer buff to enjoy this book nor to understand it (though maybe the significance of the Ronaldo reference will be beyond you). Foer adequately explains any funny soccer terms that he uses (which isn’t many). I was worried, getting into this book, that it would focus on the technical aspects of soccer would overwhelm me, but I was wrong.

Franklin Foer, brother to Jonathan Safran Foer, is known for sports coverage and his work as the editor of the New Republic (a prominent politics and culture magazine). It only makes sense for him to use his knowledge of sports to help explain certain aspects of the world.

‘Franco, Mussolini, and a high percentage of all modern dictators have made the link between sport and populist politics countless times. To Berlusconi’s left-wing ctitics, the resemblance to these tyrants is not coincidental (page 186).’

Completely unrelated, but apparently everyone in the Foer family is a successful writer. Bastards.