The Age of Football

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What to expect

'Magnificent . . . Goldblatt is the doyen of sports historians and brings to this account his forensic and telling eye for detail' - Mail on Sunday

A Sunday Times Best Sports Book of the Year

The epic exploration of society, politics, and economics in the twenty-first century through the prism of football, by the critically acclaimed author of The Ball is Round.

In the twenty-first century football is first. First among sports themselves, but it now commands the allegiance, interest and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon. In the three most populous nations on the earth – China, India and the United States where just twenty years ago football existed on the periphery of society – it has now arrived for good. Nations, peoples and neighbourhoods across the globe imagine and invent themselves through playing and following the game.

In The Age of Football, David Goldblatt charts football’s global cultural ascent, its economic transformation and deep politicization, taking in prison football in Uganda and amputee football in Angola, the role of football fans in the Arab Spring, the footballing presidencies of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, China’s declared intention to both host and win the World Cup by 2050, and the FIFA corruption scandal.

Following the intersection of the game with money, power and identity, like no previous sports historian, Goldblatt’s sweeping story is remarkable in its scope, breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, and is a brilliantly original perspective of the twenty-first century. It is the account of how football has come to define every facet of our social, economic and cultural lives and at what cost, shaping who we think we are and who we want to be.

'David Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been.' – Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

Critics Review

  • Magnificent . . . Goldblatt is the doyen of sports historians and brings to this account his forensic and telling eye for detail

    Mail on Sunday

  • David Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been

    Sunday Times

  • Next time people tell you politics has no place in football, tell them to read David Goldblatt’s The Age of Football

    Cas Mudde, Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor

  • A globe-trotting magnum opus

    The Sunday Times

  • Reading David Goldblatt, you don’t just understand football better. You understand the world a bit better, too. The breadth of his research is unmatched, and the writing is always a pleasure

    Simon Kuper

  • There are football books. And then there are football books…a scintillating survey of the great 20th-century gold rush, from before the second world war to the boom times of the single European market…The age of football really is upon us. It has after all given us The Age of Football, a history that is, for all the familiarity of some of the detail, unlike anything else written on this subject.

    Barney Ronay, The Guardian

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