Power and the Glory

The first comprehensive history of the World Cup, the most watched sporting event on the planet, a global obsession that has become the greatest cultural event there has ever been offering a quadrennial insight into the broader currents of world history. For readers of David Goldblatt and Franklin Foer, and for Coach Beard (of Ted Lasso) who devotedly read Jonathan Wilson's classic book on soccer tactics Inverting the Pyramid, here is the definitive cultural and social history of the world's greatest spectator event bar none: the World Cup. Nor since Eduardo Galeano's epigrammatic Soccer in Sun and Shadow has a book displayed the full century of soccer history and all of its global significance to such captivating effect.