Customer Reviews

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've read a lot of books about sports in my relatively short time on this planet and while I have really enjoyed many of them and reread a few multiple times, this was definitely the first sports-related book I have ever NOT wanted to finish. Based on my rating, you can tell I mean this in a completely positive way: this book was easily one of the most informative and engaging texts I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

The main point of this text is the history of soccer (or football, whichever you may prefer - I'm an American, so soccer it is), which is clear from the subtitle on the cover. Yet there is so, so, so much more contained within the roughly 900 pages that span the book's binding. You have a lot of politics, great human successes and failures, stories of survival and disaster, as well as small passages that set you in a certain time and space where Goldblatt takes you to a scene important to the chapter or section.

For a well-read fan of the game, the importance of this book lies in the first half of it, as Goldblatt starts from the very beginning, discussing ball games of the ancient world, moving to the late 19th century and the creation of the English FA and the FA Cup, the development of professionalism (both accepted and hidden) versus amateurism, and while he obviously takes the history all the way to the present, the first half of the book opens up a history of the sport that many know absolutely nothing about. Soccer in the first half of the 20th century is not a well-known history, one Goldblatt marvelously elucidates.

For those who like the sport but know little about it, the book shows you how much there was to soccer before the advent of the Premier League, corporate sponsorship, and 32 teams in the World Cup. Goldblatt does a tremendous job of really digging into the social and political implications and uses of the sport in various countries, from the first world to the third.

Perhaps the most impressive part is that this text is all-inclusive. You don't just get a history of European soccer with a decent bit about South America and occasional mentions or anecdotes from Africa, North America, Australia, or Asia. Goldblatt delves into every continent's history and relationship to the game, truly showing how soccer really is the global game. All in all, this is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it to anyone.

I found this book to be phenomenal. I must admit that I am a rather new prosylyte to "futbol" or soccer as we call it here in the States. I really new nothing about the history of the sport and very little about modern rules or teams or leagues. That having been said, I found the book to be very informative. Goldblatt begins with the "pre-history" of soccer, exposing many nationalist myths about soccer's origins and placing it firmly into the realm of a Celtic game taken up by elite public school boys in Victorian England.

The chapters dealt with specific subjects and I actually found the book to be extremely well organized. Time periods are gone through and after World War I, Goldblatt begins seperating chapters by region (Latin America from 1934-1954, Europe from 1934-1954, Africa from 1900-1974, Latin America from 1955-1974, etc.).

Having said all of that, what made this book especially interesting to me was the placing of soccer within a much larger context. He takes the narrative of soccer and places it within the meta-narrative of world history, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Soccer serves as the thread through which modern history is successfully traced. The writing is brilliant, at times incredibly deep, but always readable and always urging the reader to continue. Each chapter contains a reflection on a notable match of that time period. These are written in a completely different style than the rest of the book and are absolutely incredible. The writing is brilliant and the imagery is transportive.

All in all, more than deserving of five stars. This soccer "newbie" has become a seasoned vet in a span of less than one thousand pages.

This is amazing, wide ranging work that tells the story of football (soccer) and places it in the social context of the times. It is a dense and scholarly work which covers a lot of world history and social class because football does not stand on it's own as simply a game but it is much more important than life and death(to paraphrase Bill Shankly's famous quote).
Goldblatt is a very good writer who had me reaching for the Dictionary, who is able to synthesize the rich history of world football into a readable account. I appreciate the match accounts from great matches.
I see this book as an companion to the excellent History of Football BBC series. The only drawback with this book is that it should have more photos

My title is not directed at other reviewers here, but at the many glowing reviews for this book featured on its cover and first pages. This is not a beautifully written book, the majority of it is extremely tedious, and at its worst the writing is virtually incoherent.

THE BALL IS ROUND is touted as a history of soccer, but it is ultimately a book about world history in the 20th Century, with soccer as the lens through which that history is viewed. This is an important distinction to make, because reading this book will give you little understanding of the tactical evolution of the game, the famous personalities, players, coaches, the legendary moments of triumph and failure, the great rivalries between teams. The book is much more interested in the politcal and historical aspects of the game's history, and much less so in the sporting ones.

Nevertheless, the book is extremely comprehensive in the outlook that it does take. Goldblatt examines the history of the game on practically (often literally) a nation by nation basis, covering the entire world. He divides the book both by historical era and geographical location, so that chapters generally alternate back and forth from one continent to the next while the book proceeds gradually forward through historical time. Unfortunately, much of this content ends up being tedious and scrapped together.

THE BALL IS ROUND starts off well, the sections about the early history of the game are excellent and I recommend them, but after the first one or two hundred pages, the quality of prose and content rapidly decline. Goldblatt approaches this history with a relentless determination both to editorialize it and to cast it in literary terms, leading to often tortured descriptions of situations and events. It becomes a long, slow, uphill slog. There is a lot of information here, but you will really have to work for it. The book's prose and structural coherence gradually disintegrate into an awkward litany of facts and propositions, even to the point of virtual incoherence. For example, "If the Premiereship has come to signal the renascent successes and costs of England's new commercially minded private sector and the tastes of its comfortable middle classes, the fate of the national team has offered more complex readings." Really slow down and try to parse that sentence.

With a lot more editing, and perhaps another year or three of work, I think this book could have realized its high ambitions and been a classic. As it is, it is neither a good historical survey nor an engaging read for the football/soccer enthusiast. There is much to learn about world history and the history of soccer within the pages of THE BALL IS ROUND, and the sections on the early history of the sport are really very good, but the middle sections of the book lack structure and are poorly written. It gets a bit better again towards the end.

One interesting thing this book revealed was how rife with corruption the entire history of the sport of soccer has been. Goldblatt does not shy away from these ugly moments, which are often swept under the rug by other books and commentators.

I wish I could give this book a more positive review, but I have to be honest. I know of few readers who would push past the two or three hundred page mark on this one, and perhaps that is why there are only a handful of reviews here in spite of the sport's surging popularity in the US. Being stubborn and reading the whole thing like I did is unlikely to be a satisfying use of your time.

I have had a dabbling interest in soccer for a few years now, mostly watching EPL games, and whatever MLS games I can find locally. I really started to get more into the game globally since the 2010 World Cup. I thought this book might help me 'catch up' on the culture surrounding The Beautiful Game, and boy, was I right!

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer is a great read for long time fans, or people just new to the sport. As an American, it is hard to comprehend how the rest of the world has been shaped by this game. Just as baseball is interwoven into the fabric of American modern history, so too is football (or soccer) for the rest of the world. From rebuilding the proud heritage of Germany and Eastern Europe after World War II, to helping England move from an empirical power to a member of a global community, to sparking social, political, and criminal revolutions in South America, and bringing both European and South American culture to the African continent, football has helped shape most of the modern civilizations currently thriving on our planet, and there is no better way to experience these effects than through this incredibly comprehensive text.

I should include a disclaimer, if you do not really, REALLY like the sport, this probably isn't the book for you. While there is much modern world history interspersed with the minutiae of football's past, there are probably better options from a strictly historical perspective. If, however, you are interested in seeing how cultures across the globe have evolved through sport, there is no better text.

So the next time you insult a linesman, post a harsh comment on a soccer blog, or lambaste your team for not adding a new striker, take heart that you are a member of a world community. If you want to know more, David Goldblatt will be happy to educate you.

The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football is an enjoyable book even for those who, like me, don't know skillful dribbling from poor, which teams are strong at the moment or have been strong, or how traps work. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is more a history of the last 180 or so years viewed through a football/soccer follwer's eyes and sketched by how the wider world shaped soccer. Though I am an American raised on and enamoured of baseball and do not follow football/soccer, I can unhesitatingly recommend Goldblatt's book.
The author assumes a knowledge of football rules, so those looking for a history of how the rules have developed should look elsewhere; likewise, those hoping to learn of, say, histories of particular leagues would do well to look elsewhere in addition to _The Ball is Round._
Given the breadth of the book, Goldblatt will likely leave many readers, if not disappointed, at least hoping the book were more fleshed: I, for one, would have liked to see more space devoted to the Far East. (This last quibble should be taken to imply that the book reads much more quickly than one would expect of a 900-page book.)

Good lord is this book amazing. It's possibly the best work on sport, not just football, that I've ever read, right up there with Paper Lion and the first FreeDarko book. I cannot recommend its purchase enough. For regular readers of typically facile football websites this book is like trading up to Lush Noubar from whatever z-grade soap convicts have to use.

Goldblatt's book has certainly established itself as the standard reference for the history of soccer. It would be an understatement to say that the book is comprehensive. In 974 pages, it covers five continents, as well as the history of the sport from its prehistory and founding rules in mid 19th century England, all the way through 2006. The book progresses chronologically, and discusses each geographic region for a particular period. This lends itself naturally to comparisons between various regions for any specific time period, but I also felt compelled to refer back to previous chapters to compare soccer's progress in, say, Europe from 1900-1934 vs. 1934-1974.

One of the benefits of the book's breadth is that it shows the scope of soccer's development within a broader social context. Goldblatt ably constructs narratives which lay out how the greater political and social movements of the time (e.g. whether national leagues continued or halted play depending on a country's involvement in World War II, or the problems created by ties between African clubs and authoritarian leaders in the mid 20th century) altered soccer's standing within a nation or region. His ability to glide between world history and soccer's history gives you a sense of soccer's place in society, as well as the game's own progress.

A key feature of Goldblatt's writing style is to use single or multi-page vignettes of particular matches to immerse you deeply in the moment, as evidence of the match's deeper social significance. Here he provides the reader with a brief description of the match's key moments, whether they occurred on the field or off. It's the off-the-field context that often provides greater insight into the meaning of these games. You'll recognize this method immediately if you have listened to some BBC World Service podcasts he did over the past few years about a few particularly intriguing inter-city rivalries, like Inter - Milan and Al-Ahly - Zamalek.

As a someone with a strong interest in soccer, my only critique is that I found the book slightly challenging, in that it is simply so detailed that I occasionally needed a break from it to fully absorb Goldblatt's contributions. But those fans new to soccer or those simply eager to learn more about the beautiful game, particularly those with an interest in world history, should find reading the book particularly worthwhile. I'd also suggest that this book and Jonathan Wilson's book Inverting the Pyramid are great companion books. Goldblatt's book presents soccer as sport and social phenomenon, and Wilson's book focuses on soccer's evolution from within the game (rules, tactics, and players).

A truly fantastic history of the global game, placed within historical and cultural contexts. I can't recommend it highly enough. The writing is fluent and the sections are largely self-contained, so you can very easily (and profitably) dip into various sections as interest and time allows. This has pride of place on my shelves of literate football/soccer books -- if it is available on Amazon in the U.S. and has even a semi-decent review, I most likely own it, and this is one of my favorites (for what it's worth, I actually own this book both in paperback and for the Kindle, although it was only $9.99 when I bought the e-book). There are other good football books on the development of the game in various countries available on Amazon (e.g. Brilliant Orange, Calcio, Tor, Morbo), plus some that span countries (e.g. those from Simon Kuper) but none can match the global perspective of this one. (I actually think this is the best book I have found in English on the development of the game in Latin America and Asia.) Five stars.

Well researched and presented in depth by a storyteller that keeps you interested throughout. This is a good read for any avid soccer fan, fanatic, or simply someone interested in the story of the sport.