As the World Cup descends on Kansas City, a literary warmup for understanding soccer’s spread

Similarly, he chronicles how the Brazilian team SC Corinthians defied not only its own top-down management but the rigid oligarchy of generals who had commandeered the nation. In the early 1980s, with the help of a sociologically trained coach and the free-thinking player Socrates, all members of the Corinthian team banded together and began deciding matters by majority vote.

They decided, as a group, to emblazon their jerseys with the words “Democracia corinthiana” and eventually took the field wearing shirts that declared “Dia 15 Vote,” a call for democratic voting on November 15, 1982. Together, they helped to end the oppression of the Brazilian military junta.

Correia does a remarkable job of reporting on soccer globally, including teams from the four nations whose players will be hosted by Kansas City and Lawrence during the upcoming World Cup: England, Argentina, Algeria and the Netherlands. He takes readers to Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mideast as well, and he describes how women began playing the game.

A personal favorite is his stirring account of a Ukrainian baker in Kyiv who helped to pull together a team during the Nazi occupation of World War II, gathering players from teams the invaders had dissolved.

Eventually this makeshift squad, named FC Start, defeated German teams from the Wermacht artillery and the elite Luftwaffe airforce. Annoyed, Nazi leaders demanded a rematch for the Luftwaffe, and 45,000 spectators came to watch. FC Start refused the opening Nazi salute and took the lead before halftime, which sent furious officers storming into the locker room to warn of consequences if FC Start won.

The players refused to be bullied. They not only ended on top — 5 to 3 — but a player named Klymenko dribbled through the German defense, turned at the goal, and casually kicked the ball to midfield, mocking the losers.

The whole FC Start team was arrested soon after. Eight members were sent to a concentration camp. Then Klymenko and two teammates were executed to punish the Ukrainian resistance for a recent counterattack. It’s a sober bit of history but a striking example of how soccer can be about much more than soccer.

‘Football met politics’

A second standout book of this nature is “Kicking Off Around the World” (also from Pluto Press, 2024) by Ramon Usall, with the subtitle “55 Stories from when Football Met Politics.”

Because Usall lives in Catalonia, where the Barcelona team represented such resistance to the dictator Franco, his introduction takes us right to that area, describing how even the team Real Madrid, which had always been identified with the monarchy and then Franco, had a period when it let go of its royalist name (Real means “Royal”) and was overseen by a Communist Party member, although he was executed when Madrid fell to the fascist army in 1939.

Usall’s book, like Correia’s, takes us around the world, and some of the terrain is similar, such as a chapter about SC Corinthians in Brazil. In contrast to Correia, however, Usall has a full section about teams from the Iberian peninsula of Spain, and he covers more territory in the Balkan region as well as East Europe.

One gripping story from the southern satellite states of the former USSR is that of Qarabağ FK, which found itself caught in the vise of territorial war. The name Qarabağ refers to the region of Karabakh, right on the border between primarily Muslim Azerbaijan and primarily Christian Armenia. Karabakh had been assigned to Azerbaijan by the USSR, but with independence, Armenia attacked, determined to take the region back.

The Qarabağ team, based in the city of Aghdam, was increasingly at risk.

Qarabağ FK had already won an Azeri league championship in 1988, but as the war ramped up, its home games started to include the distant sound of shelling. Their coach Allahverdi Baghirov, who was a former player, left the team to help lead the Azeri military. He became internationally known when, during a prisoner exchange, he hugged an Armenian prisoner before freeing him, saying that they had played together and he didn’t want to have to fight against him.

Not long after, he was killed by an anti-tank mine, and the team had to flee the city. Its last home game was the league semi-final, and after taking refuge in the capital of Baku, it ironically won the league championship a second time, even though its home city had become a destroyed ghost town.

Soccer, known as football to most the world, is the undisputed favorite sport globally.

Sports analysts predict that more than 5 billion people will take time to watch some part of the upcoming World Cup. Officially, 265 million players are on registered teams, but that doesn’t begin to touch the hordes of unregistered youth and adults who take to fields every week in pickup games even in the most remote corners of the world, such as rural South Sudan, the Arctic region of Nunavut, Canada or the Galapagos islands.

The world loves to watch and play soccer, but because the sport is so universal, it is worth looking at in more ways than just as physical competition between standout teams or players. Correia and Usall show that the game is worth understanding sociologically, politically — even philosophically.

Tim Bascom’s newest book—”The Boundless Game: Soccer Stories from Across the Street to Around the World” (University Press of Kansas, 2026)—celebrates ways that soccer transcends cultural and national borders. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.