Ebook: Soccer in Sun and Shadow

In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer, award winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles of play, the players and goals that express the unique personality of certain times and places. In the revised and fully updated edition of Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Galeano takes us to ancient China, where engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have been designed by Adidas, to Victorian England where gentlemen codified the rules that we still play by today, and to Latin America where the “crazy English” spread the game only to find it creolized by the locals.

All the greats—Pelé, Di Stefano, Cruyff, Eusebio, Puskas, Gullit, Baggio, Beckenbauer—have joyous cameos in this book. Yet soccer, Galeano cautions, “is a pleasure that hurts.” Thus there is also heartbreak and madness. Galeano tells of the suicide of Uruguayan player Abdon Porte, who shot himself in the center circle of the Nacional’s...