My editor at Basic Books, Brian Distelberg, was the first to dream up this book and propose the idea to me. Of course I said “Yes!”—and working with him and the wonderful editorial and marketing team there, including Liz Dana and Melissa Veronesi, has made writing this book a pleasure. My agent, Wendy Strothman, was also enthusiastic from the first and helped me envision the work.
I wrote most of the chapters during a utopian 2016–2017 year at the National Humanities Center here in North Carolina, the perfect environment for musings on soccer and human nature. I am grateful to Marlene Daut, who happily was also a fellow at the NHC, and who kindly read early drafts of the chapters. Her keen editor’s eye combined with her experience as a collegiate soccer player helped me find the right voice to tell these stories. Soccer historian Brenda Elsey provided me with useful comments on a later draft, as did my Duke colleague Negar Mottahedeh.
My thoughts here are rooted in many years of dialogue with fellow football scholars—including the wonderful network of the Football Scholars Forum led by Alex Galarza and Peter Alegi at Michigan State University—as well as endless, often hilarious, conversations about Arsenal and African football with my friend Achille Mbembe. And they have been shaped by the insights and work of the Duke students in my Soccer Politics class, which I have taught since 2009, most recently with students reading and writing in multiple languages on our class blog.
Duke University has been a wonderful place to work on this topic over the years, allowing me to host events about soccer that have informed my work. A weeklong visit from Lilian Thuram in 2009 was without a doubt the coolest thing I’ve ever done as a professor, and ongoing conversations and visits with him since then have shaped my vision of the game. I learned a lot from the delightful crew that came together for a conference on “The Futures of Women’s Soccer,” co-organized with Joshua Nadel, in the spring of 2015: Shireen Ahmed, Jennifer Doyle, Brenda Elsey, Sarah Gerke, Mónica González, Jen Schaefer, and Jean Williams, along with local luminaries Carla Overbeck and Cindy Parlow Cone. And that summer, thanks to Grant Wahl and Avi Creditor at Sports Illustrated, a group of us from the conference—along with historian Lindsay Krasnoff—were able to bring feminist critical theory to that venerable magazine through the “Upfront and Onside” series of dispatches and analysis from the Women’s World Cup.
That experience was one among a series of opportunities to write for magazines about soccer in recent years. I owe thanks to the editors and journalists who opened up these spaces for me. Sean Jacobs and Elliot Smith at Africa Is a Country were the first to reach out, and then Roads & Kingdoms and Sports Illustrated for their 2014 series on the men’s World Cup. Franklin Foer had me join the remarkable crew penning reflections that summer for the Goal Posts blog, which also led to participation in what is probably the most literary fantasy sports league on the planet. In 2016, Josh Levin at Slate invited me to write about the European Cup. Writing for these venues helped me develop the voice for this book, and I thank them for the opportunities.
My son, Anton Dubois, offered crucial encouragement: accepting my curious obsession, he made me a customized Lionel Messi Lego figure with a speech bubble saying “Goal!,” as well as a portrait of me with a soccer ball as a head. Katharine Dubois, also known as the novelist Katharine Ashe, offered crucial stylistic and interpretive guidance as I completed the final draft.
This work is meant to be an offering to the future of soccer, which I sense is in good hands thanks to the conversations I’ve had about tactics and free kicks with the young midfielder Zora Lentz, whom I look forward to cheering for on the US Women’s National Team in about a decade.