How Football Explains the World

This 2004 book, by Franklin Foer, was recommended to me by someone I went to high school with. It's a good, not a great book, that outlines the backstories of a lot of great soccer rivalries. I learned a fair amount about not just soccer history but history in general, for example that a lot of Irish went to Scotland during the Great Potato Famine, forming a Catholic minority there, giving rise to a rivalry between the Catholic Celtic and the the protestant Rangers. Also the extent to which football gangs were involved in Serbian atrocities in Bosnia back in the 90s.

But the most interesting part of the book is the at times smarmy, self-satisfied tone of the elegant metropolitan intellectual, reflections informed by literary and cultural theory which rose to ever greater prominence from the 80s forward and arrogated to itself and to too many of its consumers a sense of having a deep and privileged understanding of the world. I myself drank deeply from the same cups. But ultimately much of Foer's analysis is a little shallow. I'm sure I can find pretty of analogous instances here on my own blog if I go back a decade or two, before I rose up to the lofty heights of great salty wisdom with which each line of my writing is imbued these days, the stuff that keeps so very many readers coming back for more and more, week after week. 

As an aside, and at the risk of violating my rule against discussing finance on Saturdays, I read a brief article somewhere how Ken Griffin of Citadel said that young people should be reading books about topics in their fields and, if they didn't like doing so, should think seriously about whether they are in the right field. It's an interesting point, by no means baseless. It doesn't make me think about violating my finance shabbos but it does make me think about whether I might go back to having a finance book I dip into on Sundays, alongside whatever fiction or other broadening book I am reading. But not today. For now I am going to try to make some progress in the 16th century Chinese foundational proto-novel The Journey to the West.