For many years, soccer fans have been branded as someone who can become ignorant, both to discredit the most popular sport on the planet and all of us who enjoy watching and playing it.
What those who demerit don't know football– and maybe he didn't know either Borges when he said that football was popular because stupidity was popular – it is that there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of writers who have dedicated themselves to writing football books, and many of them turn out to be invaluable reading.
Whether or not you know the best soccer players in history, even if you don't like the beautiful game, surely you have recorded a moment where the world has stopped to enjoy a game.
With that in mind, we invite you to go through our list of must-see books that revolve around the most wonderful sport in the world: the football.
God is round - Juan Villoro
One of the inevitable comes thanks to the pen of one of the best fans of the Necaxa, Juan Villoro.
It is a compilation of experiences, memories, fictions and stories that begin with dissertations of time and takes place in reading through different times and players.
It is a tour that includes part of the cultural and football baggage of those who approach both football fans and the most intellectual circles by making cultural references that range from characters like Homero to ball heroes like Totti.
Soccer in sun and shadow – Eduardo Galeano
This book pays homage to soccer, music for the body, a feast for the eyes, and also denounces the power structures of one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.
Writing this book, Galeano has wanted to do with his hands what he could never do with his legs, which is that when he was a child, he wanted to be a soccer player, but he only played well while he was sleeping.
This final edition includes the text that Galeano wrote regarding the 2014 World Cup, held in Brazil.
"The technocracy of professional sports", writes the author, "has been imposing a football of pure speed and great strength, which renounces joy, atrophies fantasy and prohibits daring. Luckily, it still appears on the pitches, even if it is very occasionally, some cheeky dirtyface who goes out of the script and commits the nonsense of dribbling the entire rival team, and the judge, and the public in the stands, for the sheer enjoyment of the body that launches into the forbidden adventure of freedom."
The Football War – Ryszard Kapuscinski
Between 1958 and 1976, Kapuściński was in the most troubled areas of the planet as a correspondent for the press agency of Poland. This is how he covered, for example, the uprisings in the Congo of 1960, the coup in Algeria of 1965, and the "soccer war", which were five days of bloody fighting and looting between Honduras y El Salvador, whose apparent motive was a series of soccer matches between teams from both countries seeking to qualify for the World Cup.
The result is the experiences of one of the most intelligent contemporary chroniclers in these memories of life in the very center of chaos, in the generating vortex of contemporary history.
It is a book as unclassifiable as others by its author, a remarkable combination of autobiography, testimony and report.
