A review by timhoiland
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer

4.0

In conjunction with the beginning of the 2013/14 season of the English Premier League, I’ve just re-read How Soccer Explains The World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer. In it he takes us on a fascinating journey around the world, exploring the ways in which soccer constitutes not just a sport, but a way of life in different corners of the world. In places as disparate as Iran and England, or Brazil and Serbia, Foer reveals soccer’s deep-seated political, economic, and even religious underpinnings. In some places, team owners load up their teams with foreign superstars during campaigns for the country’s presidency as a way of garnering public support. Elsewhere, centuries-old ethnic and religious divides are reenacted every weekend on the pitch. Totalitarian regimes use the sport as a tool of propaganda, only to be outsmarted and out-spirited by the citizenry who gather by the tens of thousands in stadiums where they chant what they’d never dare whispering on the street. Clearly, soccer has a way of bringing out both the best and the worst in people.

- See more at: http://tjhoiland.com/wordpress/2013/08/soccer