As the World Cup descends on Kansas City, a literary warmup for understanding soccer’s spread

These authors, instead, dive into the fascinating undercurrent of the sport, where soccer is an expression of cultural identity, community, and, oftentimes, deeply held political views. One of the best alternative books is “A People’s History of Soccer” (Pluto Press, 2023) by Mickaël Correia, a French journalist who pushes back against the commercialization of the game, unhappy with how FIFA, the worldwide soccer organizer, has catered to authoritarian regimes in exchange for profit. Correia focuses his research on the untold social histories behind professional teams, circling the globe to find and describe those who have risen from working class origins or stood up to injustice.

Correia explains how the earliest professional soccer players in England, birthplace of the modern game, wrestled through a period of classist discrimination when aristocratic “amateurs” derided and banned poorer, paid athletes who arose from factory communities. In the process, Correia depicts how players from the London ironworkers, nicknamed “Hammers,” became what we know as West Ham United, or how munitions workers at the Royal Arsenal launched the team we now know as Arsenal. Correia also reports on an array of teams that resisted tyrannical governments, such as the Catalan team FC Barcelona, which gave hope to repressed Spaniards during the fascist rule of Franco.

Similarly, he chronicles how the Brazilian team SC Corinthians defied not only its own top-down management but the rigid oligarchy of generals who had commandeered the nation. In the early 1980s, with the help of a sociologically trained coach and the free-thinking player Socrates, all members of the Corinthian team banded together and began deciding matters by majority vote. They decided, as a group, to emblazon their jerseys with the words “Democracia corinthiana” and eventually took the field wearing shirts that declared “Dia 15 Vote,” a call for democratic voting on November 15, 1982.

Together, they helped to end the oppression of the Brazilian military junta. Correia does a remarkable job of reporting on soccer globally, including teams from the four nations whose players will be hosted by Kansas City and Lawrence during the upcoming World Cup: England, Argentina, Algeria and the Netherlands. He takes readers to Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mideast as well, and he describes how women began playing the game.