Soccer historian David Goldblatt

The writer, journalist, academic, and author of the seminal (for soccer enthusiasts, at least!) book The Ball is Round will visit via Zoom FYS 025 “Fútbol: Inside the Beautiful Game” on Tuesday at 1:15 p.m. Email Prof. Manuel Ospina-Giraldo  for the Zoom link.

Goldblatt was born in London in 1965. After studying medicine and sociology at Cambridge University, he worked for the Labour Party at the House of Commons and wrote a Ph.D. thesis on social theory and the environment, and on globalization and global history, while a lecturer at the Open University.

In 2006, he published The Ball is Round, the definitive history of football. He also has published a global history of the Olympics; a history of Brazilian football, The Game of Our Lives: The Making and Meaning of English football, which won the 2015 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award; and a successor volume to The Ball is Round, The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty First Century.

He is a frequent contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, and The Financial Times, and has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Statesman, and New Left Review. Goldblatt has won the Foreign Media Association’s Sports Story of the Year three times.

He has been a regular visiting professor at Patzer College, Los Angeles, since 2012, and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, U.K., since 2005. In 2020 he helped found Football for Future, campaigning for a carbon zero global game. He takes equal inspiration from Karl and Groucho Marx.