I was a little starstruck when David Goldblatt showed up on my screen today. His books have done very well for very good reason. You may have read The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football or The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.

David is a sociologist, has a part time academic home in the US as well, at Pitzer college in LA, and this one, Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency, is a book for the moment. The thesis is simple: a lot of the spaces for communicalism have been devolved in neoliberal Great Britain. But football is the dominant cultural form in modern Britain, not only a reflection or mirror, but the “central metaphorical space” in which the country still speaks with itself. It is in the game, he believes, that English people clearly see themselves. The good and the bad. And the potential for the good, and the bad.

Part 2 will come out in 2 weeks

LINK: Injury Time, book page

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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/