THE GAME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

A global game’s many meanings.

Villoro’s winning collection of soccer essays and reporting includes gratifying entries on fandom, rivalries, scandals, coaches, officials, and players both famed and obscure. An early chapter showcases the talented Mexican journalist’s erudition. A team possessing the ball controls “time itself,” he notes, a feature of the sport not lost on many football-mad poets and novelists. He sees a link between Albert Camus’ anti-death-penalty stance and his experience as a goalkeeper, always outnumbered and under siege. A recurring theme—and an inspiration for some funny observations—is the romantic appeal of perpetual losers. Mexico has never won a World Cup, despite qualifying for the tournament as often as Argentina, Brazil, and other multi-winners. “Accustomed to adversity, we Mexicans consider the scoreline a suggestion we can ignore.” Villoro’s chapter on women’s soccer is tip-top. In 1971, he and 112,000 others packed the stands for a women’s world championship in Mexico, covered by the New York Times under the headline “Soccer Goes Sexy South of the Border.” He blends his wife’s recollections of her experience as a player—she played on unkempt fields in ill-fitting men’s cleats—with research on periods when women were legally prohibited from playing in France, Spain, and elsewhere. Villoro pens a useful rundown of the game’s Mesoamerican roots and a memorable chapter on the contemporary fan experience. Attending a tense game in Argentina, he’s handed a flyer from a lawyer seeking clients shot or beaten “inside a football stadium.” Villoro reminds us that premature death shadows the sport, recounting the shocking murder of a Colombian player and mayhem perpetrated by fan clubs that double as gangs. For a reader seeking a wide-ranging soccer book before this year’s World Cup, this one’s hard to beat.

Entertaining, perceptive analysis of soccer in the Americas and beyond.