Professor Alberto del Campo Tejedor deepens his work on the heroes and villains of the sport that explains our world
Love it or reject it, football is hugely popular and undeniably important to millions of people around the world. It is a sport that is a total social fact, and if we enter it with our curiosity intact, beyond the superficial glance, we understand better the functioning and the values of our globalized society, but also its contradictions or its diversity, the resistances to homogenization, the best and the worst of the human condition.
In an attractive balance between anecdotes and anthropological analysis, ‘The great theater of football’ travels through the mythical stadiums of the most famous clubs, through the fields of the third division or the tournaments of the saraguros in Ecuador, through the schoolyards or the stands full of ultras and supporters of all walks of life, who interpret football’s relationship to political, economic and media power, the new masculinity, national identities or corruption.
Through extensive fieldwork, his experience and interviews with ex-football players, players, coaches and journalists, Alberto del Campo combines accuracy and dissemination to get to know the world of the ball from the inside, covering literature and history, major themes such as love, humor and death, or the stories of suffering and hope of so many lives. Almost without realizing it, we close the book to get to know each other a little better.
“Sport, and football in particular, is the last bastion of the Western dream. Once the old truths are shaken, the ideologies in which everyone believed—communism or capitalism, nations, the state, Europe or humanism—is sport is one of the few western inventions that remains intact» , the author points out the social importance of sport in general and football in particular, which goes far beyond the playing field.
“Football fascinates because it has both comedy and tragedy, it allows you to fly with the imagination as you move up in the category and come face to face with the starkest reality: the one with the biggest budget wins mostly. If this book had any originality, it was to capture this complexity, this double face with a thousand nuances, not so much in the context of macropolitics and the economic flows of globalization, but rather in the experiences experienced by the actors in this drama. To add.
Source: La Verdad
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