Cinema | A soccer player’s escape from Argentina … into philosophy (w/ podcast)

The film Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape) has released to DVD in North America. We interview Claudio Tamburrini—philosophy professor and former goalkeeper—about his Mar 1978 decision to “opt for life.”

Canada | Far west of the Carpathians, Ukraine unites (w/ multimedia)

Toronto, Jun 9 | 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.

Grassroots | A big day for Haiti, a big day for little Haitians (w/ multimedia)

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, an all too rare inner-city, publicly funded, full-size soccer pitch opened on one-time industrial ground north of downtown. With multimedia and podcast.

Ukraine | Near Chernobyl, the ‘football forest’ designed to radiate life

Pripyat, Ukraine, Apr 29 | Twenty-two years ago, more than 1,000 buses commandeered from Kyiv rumbled north toward this company town 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.

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)

Islands | A multihued archipelago, tuned to soccer’s harmonics

Honolulu, Feb 29 | Gamba Osaka’s 6–1 victory over Houston Dynamo in the Pan-Pacific Soccer Championships final added another jot to the history of the Japanese on the Hawaiian Islands—a history that spans three centuries and that has helped create a multicultural population well-suited to building soccer from the grassroots.

Supporters | Material evidence of unruly rooting

Barcelona, Feb 20 | An exhibit of more than 400 pictures and artifacts of football fandom’s recent checkered history occasions surprise not for its place within the halls of culture but that the material evidence—a formaldehyde-drenched pig’s head, an evenly toasted Vespa—has been so lovingly preserved.

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)

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.

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.

Visuals | Round ball, flat art (w/ multimedia)

British Museum database shows football in mix of media

London, Nov 20 | Perusing institutional archives for football-related arcana has been made considerably easier in the Internet age.

A recent example is 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.