Overview

""Reminds me of why I love football - at its heart, it's a reflection of the communities that are built around it. A special book."" - Jamie Carragher You know when you’re in a Football City. The murals, the billboards, the graffiti, the colours on the bars and pubs. No two football cities are the same. That cross on the club badge, commemorating a 1st century fisherman martyr (Ajax). The ‘cemetery’ of graves dedicated to the club’s league rivals (Napoli). The guttural roar of fans chanting “Aupa Athletic, aupa Euskal Herria!” – a fierce declaration of Basque pride and identity, echoing through San Mamés like a battle cry (Bilbao). In a world of increasing corporate and homogenous sport, football cities preserve culture and exhibit the particular and the unique with glorious passion. Fandom in a football city is for everyone: for boys and girls, for elderly men and the infirm; for the fashionable, the outcasts and the hopeless: it gives their days meaning and clarity – it can unite divided cities and divide the otherwise united. This is Our Game is a celebration of these unique fan cultures. Part travel, part social history, giving voice to distinctive local experiences, revealing the atmospheres, attitudes, fables, fashions, tensions and triumphs of twenty-two unique places and communities across all continents. It was the Russian composer (and FC Zenit fan) Dmitri Shostakovich who said: “Football is the ballet of the masses.” This book takes us inside the dance.

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9781835985601

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Reviews

This is Our Game reminds me of why I love football - how, at its heart, it's a reflection of the communities that are built around it. It’s a really special book. -- Jamie Carragher This is Our Game has the double advantage of offering a fascinating read and giving an irresistible desire to travel – in order to listen of the sound the barra bravas of San Lorenzo in Buenos Aires, to devour an ice cream while walking along the Stadio Olympico in Roma or to admire the Johan Cruyff Arena where, as it beautifully described in the book, “the modern football era sits uncomfortably”. -- Pierre-Etienne Minonzio * L'Equipe * The daily battle for Rome, the class struggles in Buenos Aires, the self-assurance of Amsterdam; This is Our Game shares tales from the hottest football volcanoes in the world and how the people who live there come to shape their football clubs. -- Paolo Condò * La Repubblica * If this is an era where much of what we see on a football pitch blurs into one, This is Our Game is an important reminder of how the sport shapes identity in so many places, driving distinctions. By the end, it will feel as though the city you are reading about is underneath your fingernails. -- Simon Hughes * The Athletic / New York Times *

Author Information

Joel Rookwood is the Director of Sport and Exercise Management at University College Dublin, and has written widely about football as an academic, author and columnist. He is also Head of Research at Aalborg FC in Denmark and has written six academic books. Daniel Fieldsend worked for the academies of Everton and Liverpool FC before becoming the accomplished author of The European Game and Locãl, the latter of which was shortlisted for the Telegraph Sports Book of the Year 2020. His works have been translated into four languages and sold in over forty countries.

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