Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A question I'm often asked from friends and acquaintances, specially with my other interests, is why I like football that much. One side is because it's involved with many things around us; in addition to strategies, chess-like tactics, and drama, it involves economy, specially nowadays, and more interestingly, politics; which is what the book discusses. The writer takes us for a journey from Eastern Europe to USA, from Latin America to Africa, to witness the interaction between football and politics, and how the love of football is used by governments and how it can affect, to a certain extent, political decisions and therefore, people's lives. This topic in particular is of great fascination to me, and something I always felt I could write about; witnessing a great-deal of it in Egypt myself, I have to say that at first I was slightly disappointed that I was beaten to it!
I really enjoyed some chapters of this book; the one about Helenio Herrera, and the African and Latin American stories, and to a lesser extent the Russian, Ukranian, and Scottish stories. The main obvious drawback of this book, however, is that it's fairly outdated. Written in the early 90's, the world, and the world of football in particular, is not the same now, except in Africa maybe. This affected some chapters and almost ruined them; like the chapters about Gazzamania and Barcelona.
Another source of nuisance for me was some incisive judgements made by the writer about the future, taking into consideration that most of them proved to be wrong such as the one regarding the future of the Dutch national team after the retirement of Gullit, Rijkaard, and Van Basten and the other one about the soon-to-be folding of FC Berlin, the club that belonged to the East-German Berlin before the unity, among others. Also, the book could have done, in my opinion, without a lot of the writer's unnecessary journey details, and condescending comments. I often found the humour not that funny actually.
One last remark, is about what he mentioned of the fascination of English people with football and how every man, at least, is a fan of a team. Probably it's the outdatedness, but from my personal experience in England, this is not true, at least in the places where I live and work! This makes me wonder if the Old Firm derby, for example, is the same now; its passion might have got diluted as well. Sadly I can't know for sure as Glasgow Rangers now, at the time of this writing, is in the third division for bankruptcy reasons.
All in all it's worth reading if you like football and have some interest in politics. It's essential at least to realise the connection between the two specially in the developing countries. I hope I can write one day, following the same line, on Egypt and middle-east football/politics connection.
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* Note: There was a mistake in P.100, when the writer says that Egypt was the first African country to play in the World Cup by simply showing up without any qualifications. This is not true, as Egypt qualified by beating Palestine/Israel 7-1 and 4-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_FIFA_World_Cup_qualification). This mistake, which could've been easily avoided, casted doubts for me on the other facts mentioned elsewhere in the book, now all the dates and names have to be double-checked. This was quite disappointing and really unexpected at this level to be frank.
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