On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we interview William Heyen about his poem “Parity,” concerning the 1944 football match at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Beside crematoriums, Nazis engineered the ultimate perversion of sport.
Football grounds around the world have a tradition of offering refuge from disasters. Stadiums and soccer itself offer shelter and solace in Haiti following the devastating earthquake Jan 12.
Update on the Haiti earthquake from Laura Anduze, international liaison for L’Athlétique d’Haiti, the youth soccer program founded in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, in 1996 by Robert Duval.
With Orthodox nativity celebrations upon us, we wonder if Ukrainian traditions of religious iconography and football offer creative ideas for recovering lost history and making one nation.
A six-team fulbito tournament in Lima in December concluded a nationwide competition involving more than 40,000 indigenous Andean women, who don colorful skirts(polleras) and play on weekends as respite from hard labors at home and in the fields.
The title of Aleksandar Hemon’s essay in the current Granta, “If God Existed, He’d Be a Solid Midfielder,” would not impress seminarians in Hemon’s adopted home, Chicago. But for the writer from Sarajevo, lack of soccer means spiritual death. With interview »
Football’s powers of resurrection have rarely had a better exemplar than Martin Afrika. The 32-year-old captain for South Africa at the Homeless World Cup has reconstructed his identity through sport. With podcast »
Eudy Simelane, former midfielder for the senior South African women’s national team, Banyana Banyana, shaped her world around football before her murder in Apr 08.
Some 30,000 Ukrainians descended on Moscow in Aug 1969 and sang folk songs in the heart of the Soviet empire. FC Karpaty supporters celebrated the regional second-division club’s surprising place in Soviet soccer history.
Club América shirts predominate in the Georgia Dome in a friendly against AC Milan. The club has made itself a continental brand but has drawn loathing from Mexican compatriots, who shout, “Those colors make me sick!” With video »
Gay Talese, following the Women’s World Cup final on 10 Jul 99, takes interest in the Chinese player who misses a penalty kick, Liu Ying. With podcast »
Even women’s football in Ukraine has shown effects of globalization, with players from South Africa, Spain, Mexico and Australia joining one club in 2008.
World football stands poised between an obscenity and a dream—the obscenity the £136 million to send two Lusophone footballers to Real Madrid, the dream a 2010 World Cup in South Africa that might make soccer here a sport for all.
Anatoly Kuznetsov’s work, smuggled to the UK in 1969, contained what would become, when translated, one of the first English-language accounts of Dynamo Kyiv’s deeds during World War II.
In Itay Meirson’s first novel, Milchemet Tisheem Hadakot (The 90-Minute War), the intractable Middle Eastern dispute over Palestine is decided in one football match. The winning team keeps the Holy Land. The losers get eastern Oregon.
The sixth edition of the 11mm Fußballfilmfestival revels in Ostalgie (“Eastalgia”) by screening 14 films from or concerning the former East Germany. With film listing and podcast »
The list of 35 feature films and documentaries at the 11mm Fußballfilmfestival in Berlin, 3–6 Apr 09.
Municipal de Fútbol focuses on what the project’s essayist, Jennifer Doyle, calls the most developed subculture in Los Angeles: improvisational soccer. With podcast »
In the whirl of 17th-century London life, diarist Samuel Pepys had too many appointments to indulge in the well-established practice of street soccer. But, one frosty morn in Jan 1665, he notices a street “full of footballs.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has campaigned to relocate the remains of goalkeeper-cum-existentialist Albert Camus from their resting place in Lourmarin. More about language & literature »