The World Cup starts today ! ! Which means that for the next four weeks, football is going to be everywhere. Or as Joe Kennedy sums it up so well in his Games Without Frontiers:
Football becomes unpleasantly ubiquitous during the World Cup… The unpleasantness is a consequence of ubiquity’s tendency towards dilution, which has the consequence of football being turned into “footie”, that abstracted version which lends itself to all kinds of dismal exercises in masculinist and nationalistic identity formation… The sport becomes the preserve of geezerish dilettantes and the themed ladvertising kicks in. It’s at this stage that I usually start to feel sympathy for people who dislike football entirely.
And to celebrate the “unpleasantly ubiquitous” nature of football over the next month, we’re offering 50% off our football books (including Joe’s), plus one on Russia, from today until England are knocked out of the tournament.
Check out the three titles below:
Games Without Frontiers
Joe Kennedy
Is football inherently political? What does “football” actually mean today?
“… a rich exploration of football in its broadest sense – not as merely a set of match results, statistics and tactical approaches but as a living social entity.” – Dan Howdon, When Saturday Comes
1966 and Not All That
Edited by Mark Perryman
A unique 50th anniversary collection of superlative writing and new football thinking.
“… an enjoyable collection of essays by a cadre of distinguished football writers […] that examines the tournament from many angles, with the informal but informed tone of the best fanzines.” – The Guardian
No Less Than Mystic
John Medhurst
To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, John Medhurst trashes Leninism to show us the way forward for a non-authoritarian left.
“The book is very comprehensive and insightful, and linked in perceptive ways to current affairs.” – Noam Chomsky
1996 & the End of History
David Stubbs
An entertaining history of politics, culture, music and sport in 1996 – an era of confidence, prosperity and retrograde optimism, that looks, in hindsight, extremely complacent.
Repeater and Zero Books are publishing imprints that have become a culture. That culture will endure longer than the individuals that helped bring it about,
If the measure of writing is to get as close as we can to the truth of existence, I know I will never write a
To accompany his latest piece with Tariq Goddard in The Quietus on True Detective Season 4 and the legacy of In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene
Repeater and Zero Books are publishing imprints that have become a culture. That culture will endure longer than the individuals that helped bring it about,
If the measure of writing is to get as close as we can to the truth of existence, I know I will never write a
To accompany his latest piece with Tariq Goddard in The Quietus on True Detective Season 4 and the legacy of In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene
