A Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year
'Goldblatt is the doyen of sports historians' Mail on Sunday
'A globe-trotting magnum opus' Tobias Jones, Sunday Times
In the twenty-first century, football is first. First among sports themselves, but it also now commands the allegiance, interest and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon. Nations, peoples and neighbourhoods across the globe imagine and invent themselves through playing and following the game.
In The Age of Football, David Goldblatt charts football's global cultural ascent, its economic transformation and its deep politicization, taking in prison football in Uganda and amputee football in Angola, the role of football fans in the Arab Spring, the footballing presidencies of Bolivia's Evo Morales and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China's declared intention to both host and win the World Cup by 2050, and the FIFA corruption scandal.
Following the intersection of the game with money, power and identity, The Age of Football is the account of how football has come to define every facet of our social, economic and cultural lives and at what cost, shaping who we think we are and who we want to be.

David Goldblatt was born in 1965 and inherited, for his sins, Tottenham Hotspurs from his father. He has published highly acclaimed books of football: The Ball is Round, an astonishingly ambitious global history of the game, Futebol Nation, a footballing history of Brazil, and The Game of Our Lives about the meaning and making of English football. He also edited the World Football Yearbook, made sporting documentaries for BBC Radio, reviewed sports books for the TLS and the Guardian and taught the sociology of sport at Bristol University, De Montfort University, Leicester and Pitzer College, Los Angeles.