PositiveThe New Statesman...[an] extraordinarily wide-ranging new book ... There are two great lies told about football: that it is only a game, and that it shouldn’t mix with politics. The Age of Football exposes both ... From the Arab Spring to the leftist surge in South America, from prestige-building in the Caribbean to what Goldblatt refers to as the \'Potemkin village\' of Vladimir Putin’s World Cup in Russia in 2018, The Age of Football offers an exhaustive and at times exhausting survey of how football has been used for political ends ... Goldblatt’s 2006 work The Ball is Round remains by some distance the best global history of football from a political and economic perspective. The Age of Football is essentially a companion work, offering a painstaking survey of the game as it is now and leaving no doubt that football is both a tool of globalisation and representative of its paradoxes.
