Imagine the club not as a theatre of dreams but as a workplace. What is office life like day to day? Who are the people who run the club? How much power do they actually have over the players? What should the players eat, and how can you persuade them to eat it? From the author of bestselling Soccernomics comes a book that will reshape our understanding of football and the world's most talked-about club: FC Barcelona. After 30 years of unprecedented access, this book takes the reader behind closed doors into the changing room, the training ground and the boardroom to reveal the real stories behind Barca's rise to global sports superpower - and its recent fall from grace. It includes interviews with the towering personalities responsible for transforming Barca including Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola. It details the work of coaches, medics, data analysts and nutritionists, as well as extraordinary players like Lionel Messi, in building not just a club but a football philosophy. It analyses the unique structure of Barca from the Catalan power politics at the top, the cutting-edge sports science hub it has created and its legendary youth academy known as La Masia. This is truly a book decades in the making, which establishes how an army of coaches, medics, data analysts and nutritionists have built the foundations for one of the outstanding successes of the modern game.
Through a blend of memoir and anthropology, the author reflects on his two decades in Paris, navigating its complexities and transformations. He shares personal experiences, from enjoying local life to enduring significant events like terrorist attacks and social upheaval. The narrative captures Paris as both a multicultural haven and a city facing challenges, including gentrification and climate crises. As the city prepares for the Olympics and the Grand Paris project, the memoir offers a fresh perspective on contemporary urban life, free from clichés.
The 2018 World Cup edition of the international bestseller and "the most intelligent book ever written about soccer" (San Francisco Chronicle) is updated throughout and features new chapters on the FIFA scandal, why Iceland wins, and women's soccer. Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guardian, Slate, Financial Times, Independent (UK), and Bloomberg News Written with an economist's brain and a soccer writer's skill, Soccernomics applies high-powered analytical tools to everyday soccer topics, looking at data and revealing counterintuitive truths about the world's most beloved game. It all adds up to a revolutionary new approach that has helped change the way the game is played. This World Cup edition features ample new material, including fresh insights into FIFA's corruption, the surge in domestic violence during World Cups, and Western Europe's unprecedented dominance of global soccer.
'Soccernomics' applies high-powered analytical tools to everyday football topics. It's about looking at data in new ways, revealing counterintuitive truths about football and explaining all manner of things about the game which newspapers just can't see.
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Oxford has produced most of the prominent Conservative politicians of our time. The university newspapers of thirty years ago are full of recognisable names in news stories, photos of social events, and Bullingdon Club reports. Many walked straight out of the world of student debates onto the national stage. Unfortunately, they brought their university politics with them.Eleven of the fifteen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford. This narrowest of talent pools has shaped the modern country. In Chums, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of Oxford University - and the friendships and worldviews it created - helped give us today's Britain, including Brexit.
The Extraordinary Story of Russian Double Agent George Blake
288 pages
11 hours of reading
This book, originally published in Great Britain, delves into the life of a notable figure known as "the happy traitor." It explores themes of betrayal, loyalty, and the complexities of personal and political allegiances. Through engaging narrative and historical context, the author sheds light on the motivations and consequences of choices made by individuals in tumultuous times, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on trust and treachery in a world of shifting loyalties.
The 'Good Chaps' theory holds that those who rise to power in the UK can be trusted to follow the rules and do the right thing. They're good chaps, after all. Yet Britain appears to have been taken over by bad chaps, and politics is awash with financial scandals, donors who have practically bought shares in political parties, and a shameless contempt for the rules.Simon Kuper, author of the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller Chums, exposes how corruption took control of public life, and asks: how can we get politicians to behave like good chaps again?
In 'Football against the enemy', Simon Kuper crossed the globe in search of the links between football, politics and culture; in 'Ajax, the Dutch, the war', he narrows his focus to western Europe-chiefly Holland- and events between 1933 and 1945: A book about football and World War II would go to the heart of Holland. Football was a place where the Holocaust met daily life. What happened in Dutch football clubs during the war would be a microcosm of what happened in the country. It might even produce wider truths about the war in the rest of occupied western Europe. Prior to the war, Amsterdam was seen as a city of 'Jews and cyclists'. Crammed into the Jewish quarter was a population of around eighty thousand, many of them rag merchants, banana sellers and diamond cutters. A couple of miles to the east lay Ajax's De Meer stadium - of a Sunday, a bustling hub of activity at the furthest edge of the Quarter. By 1940 the Germans had sealed off the Quarter with barbed wire; by 1945 almost eighty per cent of the ghetto's population had been wiped out. And by the end of the century the long-held notion that, by and large, half the Dutch population had some kind of link to the Resistance was coming under question. This, in a country falling under the shadow of Pim Fortuyn's party... In looking into the lives of individual players, club officials and ordinary fans during this tumultuous period Simon Kuper ha skilfully pieced together an alternative account of World War II, one seen through the lens of football. He also widens the scope to take in England, France and Germany, and in depicting a continent obsessed with football during war-time - on the thousand spectators were in place for the kick-off of the German league final in Berlin - he challenges accepted notions of the war in occupied Europe -------------------------------------------------------------- L’Ajax era la squadra del ghetto di Amsterdam. Ogni domenica, le bancarelle del mercato ebraico chiudevano in tempo per andare a vedere la partita. Poi è arrivato Hitler. Kuper, giornalista e scrittore olandese, racconta la tragedia della Shoah e della Seconda guerra mondiale da un’angolazione inedita: quella delle pagine sportive dei vecchi giornali, delle storie dei tifosi e atleti sopravvissuti, degli archivi delle squadre olandesi. L’utilizzo del calcio da parte di Hitler e Mussolini viene calato da Kuper nella cronaca della partita, nella memoria del singolo atto di discriminazione. Il libro contiene un prezioso apparato fotografico: la nazionale inglese che fa il saluto nazista, la faccia di un’ala destra ebrea dell’Ajax, di cui Kuper sessant’anni dopo ricostruisce gli ultimi giorni ad Auschwitz. Grazie alla sua indagine, la storia del calcio olandese, europeo e italiano diventa lo schermo su cui scorrono decine di storie di collaborazionismo e deportazione.
