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Stories
Tackling Football and Radical Politics
by Gabriel Kuhn
PM Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Tom Davies
From WSC 296 October 2011
The idea that football and politics cannot or should not mix has always been convenient nonsense. Both continually rub up against and influence each other, without either quite managing to bend the other to its will. The question of how football has been approached politically is addressed here – from an unashamedly leftist perspective – by Austrian activist and one-time semi-pro player Gabriel Kuhn in this collection of essays, interviews and excerpts from journals and pamphlets, interwoven with commentary from Kuhn himself.
The Manchester City flop was coveted by United as a teenager and was a star in Greece. Dan Brennan diagnoses an ego problem
For the second year running, the January transfer window will see striker Nery Castillo make his exit quietly through the back door. For a player once coveted by Chelsea, Juventus and Manchester United, and fought over by three national federations, ignominious endings are becoming the norm.
Chris Taylor went to listen to a player with radical views on Italian football culture
A lecture called “Money, Politics and Violence: does Italian football have a future?” doesn’t sound a barrel of laughs. As one of the speakers, John Foot, author of Calcio, A History of Italian Football, once wrote: “Calcio is a stinking corpse riddled with maggots.” Foot now admits his outlook, written following the death of a policeman in Catania, was a little pessimistic. Now he compares the game to American televised wrestling – “violent, over-the-top, hysterical and fake” – but he still feels that it has a bright future.