In places without a name, ‘Pelada’ films the football we never knew
Pelada debuts at the South by Southwest Film Festival as the ultimate expression of football’s capacity for communion.
Category: Teaching Resources
Mar 16, 2010 | 2 comments
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Auschwitz and the perversion of football
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.
Jan 28, 2010 | 0 comments
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Anatoly Kuznetsov and Dynamo Kyiv’s ‘almost incredible’ story
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.
Jun 18, 2009 | 0 comments
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No último minuto (‘In the last minute’)
We publish a translation of a 1978 short story by Brazilian author Sérgio Sant’Anna in which a goalkeeper’s anxiety and his separation from fellows figure large: “The stadium explodes and I feel my own head bursting apart. … It’s like everything is very far away, without any relation to me.”
Feb 25, 2009 | 2 comments
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Cinema | A soccer player’s escape from Argentina … into philosophy
Claudio Tamburrini—philosophy professor and former goalkeeper—speaks about his Mar 1978 decision to “opt for life” and escape an Argentine prison. With podcast »
Aug 27, 2008 | 0 comments
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Canada | Far west of the Carpathians, Ukraine unites
Toronto | At any given time, an uncountable number of football universes exist in parallel. Such was the case in late May when Ukraine United and Shakhtar FC faced each other in a friendly match, not in the motherland, but on an artificial pitch at the 25-acre Ontario Soccer Centre.
Jun 09, 2008 | 5 comments
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Grassroots | A big day for Haiti, a big day for little Haitians
Miami | Haiti past, present and future came together early in May on an urban oasis in Little Haiti. After 10 years of negotiation and bureaucratic delay, a rare inner-city, full-sized pitch opened on what was industrial ground north of downtown. With multimedia and podcast »
May 31, 2008 | 2 comments
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Ukraine | Near Chernobyl, the ‘football forest’ designed to radiate life
Twenty-two years ago, more than 1,000 buses commandeered from Kyiv rumbled north toward the company town of Pripyat to evacuate its 50,000 residents. By sunset on 27 Apr 1986, as Chernobyl reactor no. 4 burned, in one soldier’s recollection, like a “beautiful blue fire,” the town was empty.
Left behind in the silence: a newly built football stadium sitting just to the north of a bright yellow Ferris wheel, a gift from Soviet authorities in commemoration of the upcoming May Day holiday.
Apr 29, 2008 | 5 comments
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Books | ‘Global Game’ anthology en route from University of Nebraska Press
The Global Game: Writers on Soccer is scheduled for November release—the product of some three years of compiling, winnowing and permissions seeking by myself and editors Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, along with strong support and belief from the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln and heroic efforts from a network of translators, working in Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and Slovenian. (Apr 24)
Apr 24, 2008 | 0 comments
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History | Soccer fields, for King and Atlanta, lent space to move ‘beyond Vietnam’
Atlanta, Feb 5 | His work in ministry, as a public speaker and as face of the American civil rights movement prevented him from developing strong sporting enthusiasms, but at least once in his career Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto a soccer field.
Metaphorically, King’s strides on the Sacramento State pitch in Oct 1967 point toward soccer as a place of social change in America of the civil rights era.
Religion | Holocaust-era exile haunts Chelsea manager’s father
In an interview Jan 11 with the Jewish Chronicle of London, Meir Granat—father of Chelsea manager Avram Grant—details the displacement and death that met the Hasidic family in wartime Europe (Simon Griver, “Shoah Horrors That Haunt Avram Grant”). (Jan 11)
Jan 11, 2008 | 0 comments
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Women’s football | The hard playing surface of Palestine (w/ video)
Bethlehem, West Bank, Jan 11 | The statement of the biblical Ruth, the Moabite, a poor woman gleaning in Bethlehem (“house of bread”) behind reapers of barley strikes a parallel with the women’s football team from Palestine, taking its passion and pleasure from scraps left by a patriarchal culture and occupying authorities.
Jan 11, 2008 | 2 comments
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Bosnia | ‘Joyful fandom’ & the flares of Sarajevo (w/ podcast)
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dec 10 | Özgür Dirim Özkan, in fieldwork among supporters’ groups in Sarajevo since Feb 07 and on the Bosnian Football Culture website, has examined football as but a small part of a society that, in the Western frame, implies little but ethnic-riven conflict and a constellation of indecipherable place names. With 28-minute podcast.
Dec 10, 2007 | 2 comments
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Mixed media | Round ball, flat art
The quiet launch to the Web of a portion of 50,000 drawings and an even greater number of prints—so-called flat art—within the British Museum collection makes football-related arcana even easier to find. With multimedia »
Nov 20, 2007 | 0 comments
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Morocco | Players on a masculine stage
Rabat, Morocco | Fulbright fellow Nicole Matuska wonders why players with the women’s club side she has been following for the past year are not watching the Women’s World Cup. “A paradox still exists. In spite of [their] achievements, the football field remains a masculine stage.”
Oct 01, 2007 | 6 comments
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Iran | ‘As if one were under water’
In Iran, Kreuzberg team learns about football under cover
Berlin, Sept 29 | Filmmaker Ayat Najafi had to content himself with experiencing the centerpiece of his new project, Football Under Cover, as an exile.
At Ararat Stadium in Tehran on 28 Apr 06, Najafi stood outside the arena along with husbands of the women inside—players for the Iranian women’s national team, their amateur opponents, BSV Al-Dersimspor of Kreuzberg, and about 1,000 female supporters.
Sep 29, 2007 | 2 comments
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England | Rough girls, delicate boys
England women try to surmount culture of contempt
Leicester, England, Sept 21 | With the United States and England preparing to meet in a Women’s World Cup quarterfinal Sept 22 in Tianjin, China, the contest matches players who, to some degree, owe their footballing fortunes to the deeds of Lancashire forebears.
We interview Jean Williams of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture on the early history of English women’s football and on the “contemptuous” attitude that has endured toward women playing the national game.
Sep 22, 2007 | 2 comments
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Making space on a ‘crooked field’ | Black Queens and Super Falcons dare to transgress in male preserve
Berkeley, California, Sept 20 | One of the important implications of Martha Saavedra’s research into women’s sport in West Africa is discovery of the extent to which football helps define masculinity in much of the world.
“For a woman to play [football] in many places is a transgression,” says Saavedra, associate director of the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, in our Sept 4 podcast. “People think of it as saying something about what it means to be a man.”
Sep 20, 2007 | 2 comments
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Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has campaigned to relocate the remains of goalkeeper-cum-existentialist Albert Camus from their resting place in Lourmarin. 
