The game we call soccer has always had its share of American aficionados — the sort of obsessives who roll out of bed near dawn on a Saturday or Sunday morning to watch a satellite TV feed of game most others ignore.
These die-hards sip a latte or an indulgent pint at their local bar in a state of lingering bemusement. They wonder why their ranks stay so small and parochial and what keeps so many others away from this great joy of a game.
Is it the arrogance of the masses? Diffidence? Do they need to be enlightened to the emotion, power and simple beauty of a game that has, among other things, helped start and stop wars?
Alas, the connoisseurs may now find deliverance in the outstanding new soccer history “The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer.” There are no magical arguments in its confines. (Some folks will never learn.) But the comprehensive effort of English sports writer David Goldblatt is a masterful reminder of what makes the game so gripping for those who partake, and what a grip the game has taken on the world.
“The Ball Is Round” is not short on ambition, nor heft at some 900 pages. Both of these factors will make it intimidating to uninitiated fans, but if they dare to indulge, they will be as pleasantly surprised as a second division side that scores a cup upset.
Goldblatt, like a fine box-to-box English midfielder, succeeds with a characteristically direct, at times blunt, approach. His is a full-speed history of the game’s rise from modest beginnings to multimillion-dollar industry.
This is not to say that Goldblatt shirks from details or even minutiae at times. Nor is he overly sanguine about his beloved game. Quite the opposite. He just never manages to lose stride, or sight, of soccer’s place in the world.
In one example, Goldblatt recounts the election of a new president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. He offers up the contest between a Swede truck magnate, Lennart Johansson, and a Swiss lawyer, Sepp Blatter, in all its glorious (or inglorious) skullduggery.
Johansson the reformer, fights earnestly; Blatter, the good-old-boy, unscrupulously bribes and cajoles others to install him. In the end the briber and cajoler wins, and Goldblatt artfully links this back to a broader point about the troubling influence of money in the global game.
Such backroom dealings are an example of the game’s dark side, an aspect from which Goldblatt laudably does not shy away. Indeed, there is a sense of foreboding at times, wariness about what the game’s increasing financial stakes mean.
Yet some of Goldblatt’s finest moments come when the author luxuriates in the bright glow of soccer’s simple, radiant beauty. Scattered throughout “The Ball Is Round” are precious vignettes from key moments in the game’s history. These are a showcase of what the game is all about and a showcase for Goldblatt’s formidable crispness.
He describes a goal by French legend Zinedine Zidane in a Champion’s League final this way:
“And there is Zidane. He has already run half the length of the pitch. He has already stolen a meter on Michael Ballack, stepping into space no one else could see. He is already changing the weight and balance of his body, shaping his shoulders, gliding into position to take it on the volley. Ballack seems to know that he cannot stop Zidane. His body deflates as Zidane rises. The goalkeeper tries to make himself large, but he is already shrinking into nothing.”
Its most passionate supporters would tell you that there are many moments in soccer that lend themselves to such artful and suspenseful prose. It is to their benefit — if not yet the American masses — that Goldblatt has taken up the task.
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