(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000).
There’s sadly little written on the Jewish soccer renaissance. There’s John Bunzl’s Hoppauf Hakoah: Jüdischer NOTE ON SOURCES
Sport in Österreich von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart (Vienna: Janus, 1987) and the Vienna’s Jewish
Museum’s exhibition catalog Hakoah: Ein Jüdischer Sportverein in Wien, 1909–1995 (Vienna: Der Apfel, 1995). In addition, there is an important book commemorating the club’s fiftieth anniversary: Otto Bahr’s 50 Jahre Hakoah (Tel Aviv: Verlagskomitee Hakoah Tel Aviv, 1959). Hungarian soccer has received a little bit more attention. The historian, cultural critic, and MTK
fan Tamás Krausz has a superb essay on his favorite club’s ethnic heritage that can be found online at http://eszmelet.tripod.com/angol1/krauszang1.html.
Miklós Hadas and Viktor Karády have also published a history of MTK’s Jewishness that can found at
http://www.replika.c3.hu/1718/hadas.htm. David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football (London: Bloosmbury, 2000) is one of the great books written about the sport. I particularly recommend his chapter on Ajax and the Jews. The same subject gets a more comprehensive treatment in Simon Kuper’s Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (London: Orion, 2003).
Finally, there’s lots written about Max Nordau, but I leaned heavily on Michael Stanislawski’s Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism for Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Chapters from Alan Garrison’s manuscript can be found at http://www.chelsea-desktop-wallpaper.co.uk/. For an understanding of the recent transformation of the English game, I relied on David Conn’s The Football Business (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997). NOTE ON SOURCES
Alex Bellos’s Futebol, the Brazilian Way (London: Bloomsbury, 2002) provided an account of corruption in the Brazilian game. I frequently found myself referring to Péle: His Life and Times (London: Robson Books, 2000).
Much of my knowledge of Brazilian history derives from Joseph A. Page’s The Brazilians (Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1995) and Marshall Eakin’s Brazil: The Once and Future Country (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy: Travels through Time and Space Across Italy (London: Faber and Faber, 2003) has a superb chapter on the Italian game.
I’ve found no better survey of Italian politics than Patrick McCarthy’s The Crisis of the Italian State: From the Origins of the Cold War to the Fall of Berlusconi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
Jimmy Burns’s Barca: A People’s Passion (London, Bloomsbury, 1998) does a marvelous job synthesizing the history of my beloved club. Phil Ball’s Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football (London: WSC Books, 2001) was also a useful source.
For Iranian soccer, I depended on the scholarship of Houchang Chehabi. He allowed me to view an
advanced copy of his essay “The Politics of Football in Iran.” I also relied on his essay “The Juggernaut of Globalization: Sport and Modernization in Iran,” published in volume 19 of The International Journal of the History of Sport. Christian Bromberger’s essay
“Troisième mi-temps pour le Football Iranien” can be found online ( http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/1998/04
/BROMBERGER/10280).
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Peterjon Cresswell and Simon Evans for putting together The NOTE ON SOURCES
Rough Guide’s European Football: A Fan’s Handbook (London: Penguin Books, 1999). I followed their anthropological insights and travel tips across the continent. Depressingly, many pages from my edition slowly came unglued from their binding and ultimately floated away in a Vienna breeze. Simon Kuper’s Football Against the Enemy (London: Orion, 1994) was an inspiration for this book. A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
When I first tentatively mentioned the idea of this book to my agent, Rafe Sagalyn, I expected him to laugh it o¤. Instead, he told me to drop everything and write a proposal. And after I dropped everything, he never dropped me. I am so grateful for his loyalty, advice, and friendship. Tim Duggan, my editor, isn’t even a soccer fan—which makes me even more appreciative of his commitment to this book. Book editing, as a discipline, takes a lot of knocks. Editors are said to have become bean counters and tools of marketing departments. But Tim is wonderfully old school. He can structure a chapter, tease out an argument, and walk a writer back from the literary ledge. He cares about ideas.
Gabriele Marcotti is my learned soccer guru. He doesn’t just know his football, he knows his politics, economics, and culture. I’m so grateful for the many hours he spent with me on the phone. Thanks to him, I also found a network of journalists who opened their Rolodexes and shared their considerable reportorial expertise: Ben Lyttleton, Ian McGarry, and Graham Hunter. In Italy, Gabriele connected me with Aurelio Capaldi, who generously led me by the hand through Rome.
My cousin Marcelo Waimberg took two weeks o¤
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
his job to serve as my translator. Those were the two best weeks I spent working on this book. Even though he is an engineer, he has the mind and soul of a journalist—skeptical and inquisitive. My entire Brazilian clan continually sets new, unsurpassable benchmarks for hospitality. I spent several weeks living in Jacques and Nair Waimberg’s guest bedroom.
On my travels, I found myself in the protective grasp of an international fraternity of journalists. A thousand thank-yous to Fiachra Gibbons, Angelique Chrisafis, Pat Kane, Andrew Jennings, Richard Wilson, Gustavo Poli, Juca Kfouri, João Carlos Assumpcão, Mario Magalhães, Raul Lores, Leonardo Pinto da Silva, Dejan Nikolic, Dejan Anastasijevic, Ivan Colovic, Kevin Mousley, John Carlin, Taras Hordiyenko, Mike Ticher, Grant Wahl, Gunnar Persson, Joan Poqui, Beppe Sev-ergnini, and Tommaso Pellizzari. I’m also grateful for the help of Andy Markovits, Aleksandar Hemon, Colin Jose, Houchang Chehabi, Amir Afkhami, Afshin
Molavi, John Bunzl, Viktor Karády, Péter Szegedi, Sándor Laczkó, Tim Parks, Mario Sconcerti, Martin Vogel, Alex Alexiev, Eric Gordy, Walter Laqueur, Doug McGray, David Brett Wasser, and John Efron. (Efron came through with essential information about
