Professor Alberto del Campo Tejedor deepens his work on the heroes and villains of sport that explains our world
Whether we love it or repel it, football is enormously popular and undeniably important to millions of people around the world. It is a sport that constitutes a total social fact, and if we enter it with our curiosity intact, beyond the superficial gaze, we better understand the functioning and values of our globalized society, but also its contradictions or its diversity, the resistances to homogenization, the best and the worst of the human condition.
In an attractive balance between anecdotes and anthropological analysis, ‘The great theater of football’ travels through the mythical stadiums of the most famous clubs, through the third division fields or the tournaments of the saraguros in Ecuador, through the schoolyards or the stands full of ultras and followers of all stripes, interpreting the relationship of football with political, economic and media power, the new masculinities, national identities or corruption.
Through extensive fieldwork, his experience and interviews with ex-soccer players, players, coaches and journalists, Alberto del Campo combines rigor and dissemination to get to know the world of the ball from the inside, addressing literature and history, great themes such as love, humor and death, or the stories of suffering and hope of so many lives. Almost without realizing it, we close the book getting to know each other a little better.
“Sport, and football in particular, is the last bastion of the Western dream. Once the old truths are shaken, the ideologies in which everyone placed their faith -communism or capitalism, nations, the State, Europe or humanism-, sport is one of the few Western inventions that remains intact» , points out the author about the social significance of sport in general and football in particular, which goes far beyond the field of play.
«Football fascinates because it has both comedy and tragedy, it allows you to fly with the imagination when you go up in category and come face to face with the starkest reality: the one with the biggest budget usually wins. If this book intended any originality, it was to capture this complexity, this double face with a thousand nuances, not so much in the context of macropolitics and the economic flows of globalization, but rather in the experiences experienced by the actors in this drama. Add.
