Review of my The World through Soccer

BOOK REVIEW: THE WORLD THROUGH SOCCER: THE CULTURAL IMPACT OF A GLOBAL SPORT, BY TAMIR BAR ON

APPEARED IN RETOS INTERNACIONALES, 2014.

Mary Carmen Peloche Barrera

ITESM Campus Puebla

Master’s degree in Public Management by the Tecnológico de Monterrey (2012).

Bachelor’s degree in International Relations by the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Puebla (2010). Full time professor in the department of International Relations and Political Sciences, which belongs to the School of Law and Diplomacy at the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Puebla. “Citizenship and Democracy” professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Virtual University. Faculty Advisor for Harvard’s Model United Nations.

 

Key words: Football, Soccer, Politics, History, Sports, Identity and Ideology.

 

Imagine being able to analyse XIX^th, XX^th, and XXI^st century History through football. Military dictatorships in Latin America, the British Imperial Age, Spanish and Italian Fascism, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, among others; are all historical moments embodied by Tamir Bar-On in his most recent work: “The World Through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport”.

Tamir Bar-On was born in Beersheba, Israel but migrated with his family to Toronto, Canada at a very young age. He has a PhD in Political Science by McGill University and is currently working as a professor in the Department of International Relations at the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Querétaro. Bar-On also wrote “Where Have All Fascist Gone?” and “Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity”, published in 2007 and 2013, respectively.

Through eleven chapters, Tamir Bar-On shows us how Football Soccer works as an originator of national identities; as a tool for ideological and political control; as a catalyser for social transformation; as an inherent part of our faith and beliefs and as a leadership promoter. Besides the aforementioned, Bar-On explains the intrinsic relations football soccer maintains with ethics, the arts, marketing and politics. Each chapter represents a “lesson to learn” based on what the sports chronicler, Luis Omar Tapia, defines as the world’s most beautiful sport. For each lesson, Bar-On has carefully chosen different football players who help exemplify them, such as the contemporary Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), Xavi (Spain), and Neymar Jr. (Brazil), the former stars like Hugo Sánchez (Mexico), Franz Beckenbauer (Germany) and Elias Figeroa (Chile) or the already deceased like José Leandro Andrade (Uruguay) and Igor Netto (USSR).

The bibliography used by the author for his research encompasses books, articles (both printed and online), web pages, videos, interviews, blogs and news, among others. The total amount of consulted sources is 480! All of them transformed into an adequately referenced work. In this way, Bar-On leans on well-known authors such as Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Albert Camus and Juan Villoro in order to introduce wondrous interpretations of the different meanings of Football. Other authors such as Joseph Nye, George Orwell and Martin Heidegger figure in the analysis of the world the author performs with regard to soccer. Finally, he makes use of interviews and personal experiences of football players like Clint Dempsey (USA), Pelé (Brazil) and Jorge Valdano (Argentina).

The way in which the actor develops each of the eleven lessons is completely fascinating, since he manages to create a perfect relation between the topic, the chosen football player and the arguments provided. For all football lovers, “The World Through Soccer” offers a bunch of stories that intertwine with this sport, be it directly (players, clubs and national teams) or indirectly (political, social, economic, cultural, national and international contexts). For those who don’t love this sport, this book represents an interesting opportunity for seeing the world through a different lens. This is how, in every different chapter, we fill ourselves with new knowledge.

Even if books linking football and politics had been written before, none of them offers as many approaches or analysis as Bar-on’s last work does. “The World Through Soccer” has the potential for becoming an obliged reference in football bibliography. An exquisite, entertaining and fantastic book!

 

Bar-On, T. (2014). The World Through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport. (1^ST Edition). Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.