Soccer Against the Enemy

Author: Simon Kuper

Release: April 7, 2006

Tagline: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power

Publisher: Nation Books

Genre: Soccer, Sports, Politics

ISBN-10: 1560258780
ISBN-13: 978-1560258780

Synopsis: “Soccer is much more than just the most popular game in the world. It is a matter of life and death for millions around the world, an international lingua franca.”

Declassified by Agent Palmer: Simon Kuper Makes the Case for Soccer’s Importance

Quotes and Lines

When a game matters to billions of people it ceases to be just a game. Soccer is never just soccer: it helps make wars and revolutions, and it fascinates mafias and dictators.

A columnist on the LA Times, in his coverage of the 1984 Olympics, said that the Southern Californians’ penchant for leaving an event early reached its high point when a significant number of people left with two seconds to go in Carl Lewis’ ten-second hundred-meter dash.

“Soccer fanatics, religious fanatics, political fanatics–fanatics are always dangerous.”

A greater truth about soccer and politics: the game is a good way of studying what is going on in repressed societies, but it rarely changes these societies.