Sentimental Soccer
English + Español
Between Wednesday, June 22, and Sunday, June 26, 2011, River Plate, the team I’ve been a fan of my entire life, was relegated to the second division of Argentina’s soccer league. The depth of…
Category: Soccer Nations
Soccer Clubs
English + Español
On June 25, 1978, Argentina and Holland were playing the World Cup final. General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship had spent millions to organize the Cup; the Montanera guerrilla had…
Women’s Soccer in Brazil
“No one knows, no one saw,” reads the headline in an important Brazilian newspaper announcing the conclusion of the main women’s soccer championship on the continent—the Taça…
Soccer and Literature
The woman in the bookstore in Rosario, Argentina, could tell I wasn’t a native. She asked me what I was doing in the city. I told her I was trying my luck as a freelance writer. Writing about what?…
Greater Players, Bad Business
Just as my final undergraduate exams finished in June 1970, the World Cup finals started in Mexico, and I settled down to three weeks of watching soccer. Across the world, fans of my age…
The Cradle of Brazilian Soccer
Thousands of fans drive to a soccer stadium, a very common scene every Sunday in soccer-mad São Paulo. Brazilians are proud to be five-time World Champions, to be the home of Pelé…
The Ball and the Blackboard
As an undergraduate, I had a Classics professor who sometimes spoke of the humanities’ task as the search for the strange in the familiar, and the familiar in the strange. The idea stuck with me…
¡Gooooal!
There are many ways to be introduced to soccer. You can play when you’re young (or not so young), you can listen or watch the media, or you can be a…
