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Games Without Frontiers
Is soccer inherently political? What does soccer actually mean today? Games Without Frontiers seeks force us to think about what we mean when we say 'soccer'. Along the way, it skewers media cliches about footballers and fans, considers the sport's implications for radical politics and aesthetics, and situates the 'working-man's game' in relation to twenty-first century discussions of political authenticity. Written half as a travelogue, this book seeks to protect football from some of its would-be saviors without ever losing sight of what it means to have a fan's investment in the game.
300 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 16, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 16, 2018
I loved this book, and I intend to revisit it, but until then, here are some initial thoughts.
For years I’ve struggled to understand what it is that I actually like about football. Despite listening to numerous podcasts, wasting hours playing FM2013 and reading articles in the Blizzard, when I actually attend a match (more often a financial decision rather than a self determined one) or tune in to watch a game on TV, I often find the act of watching football quite cold and dissatisfying, or as Kennedy puts it, the experience of watching professional football feels almost sterile;
“Fans are made to spend huge amounts of cash to sit bored, in isolating anti social ‘comfort’ to watch games determined by caution and pragmatism”
With the exception of trips to the Old Spotted Dog and Champion Hill - both of which are mentioned here in a wonderful chapter about ‘authenticity’ (there’s also a brilliant description of Rod Liddle’s dog whistle style journalism as ‘golf club realism’) - I often feel like a fraud, reconciling my enjoyment of football and realising it isn’t analogous with the product I’m being sold, but rather linked to some non-existent memory of what football ‘was’, a memory largely informed by the paintings of L.S Lowry. It’s a feeling exacerbated by how modern grounds feel more like entering a shopping centre than a factory turnstile, with what should be a ritualistic act of faith and community becoming just another conscious capitalist choice. Football never used to be quite so prohibitively expensive, but as Kennedy establishes quite early on, it’s dangerous to romanticise the past. It leaves the reader caught somewhere between what he describes as a false sense of community harvested by localised industrial capitalism and the cold sterile universality of global hypercapitalism.
This is some of the best football writing I’ve ever read. Part travelogue, part theoretical analysis of the relationship between football and politics, Kennedy writes with a mix of verve and venom, combining memoir with literary criticism and broader philosophical theories in an attempt to shatter many of the myths surrounding modern football. I’ll be honest, a few of the loftier ideas flew well over the crossbar of my understanding, but the four personal accounts included here of Kennedy’s experiences at different matches beautifully articulates the febrile energy of the terrace and the simple pleasures that can still be found on a matchday.
I would recommend this book to anyone who struggles to balance their political beliefs with their love of the game. Kennedy examines this contradiction through intense analysis, but keeps things light and relatable by drawing on the social and economic constraints imposed on fans. A book with remarkable scope; Games Without Frontiers is a witty, intelligent and passionate study of a game all too often maligned, with Kennedy proving that Football is about far more than the events that unfurl on the pitch
For years I’ve struggled to understand what it is that I actually like about football. Despite listening to numerous podcasts, wasting hours playing FM2013 and reading articles in the Blizzard, when I actually attend a match (more often a financial decision rather than a self determined one) or tune in to watch a game on TV, I often find the act of watching football quite cold and dissatisfying, or as Kennedy puts it, the experience of watching professional football feels almost sterile;
“Fans are made to spend huge amounts of cash to sit bored, in isolating anti social ‘comfort’ to watch games determined by caution and pragmatism”
With the exception of trips to the Old Spotted Dog and Champion Hill - both of which are mentioned here in a wonderful chapter about ‘authenticity’ (there’s also a brilliant description of Rod Liddle’s dog whistle style journalism as ‘golf club realism’) - I often feel like a fraud, reconciling my enjoyment of football and realising it isn’t analogous with the product I’m being sold, but rather linked to some non-existent memory of what football ‘was’, a memory largely informed by the paintings of L.S Lowry. It’s a feeling exacerbated by how modern grounds feel more like entering a shopping centre than a factory turnstile, with what should be a ritualistic act of faith and community becoming just another conscious capitalist choice. Football never used to be quite so prohibitively expensive, but as Kennedy establishes quite early on, it’s dangerous to romanticise the past. It leaves the reader caught somewhere between what he describes as a false sense of community harvested by localised industrial capitalism and the cold sterile universality of global hypercapitalism.
This is some of the best football writing I’ve ever read. Part travelogue, part theoretical analysis of the relationship between football and politics, Kennedy writes with a mix of verve and venom, combining memoir with literary criticism and broader philosophical theories in an attempt to shatter many of the myths surrounding modern football. I’ll be honest, a few of the loftier ideas flew well over the crossbar of my understanding, but the four personal accounts included here of Kennedy’s experiences at different matches beautifully articulates the febrile energy of the terrace and the simple pleasures that can still be found on a matchday.
I would recommend this book to anyone who struggles to balance their political beliefs with their love of the game. Kennedy examines this contradiction through intense analysis, but keeps things light and relatable by drawing on the social and economic constraints imposed on fans. A book with remarkable scope; Games Without Frontiers is a witty, intelligent and passionate study of a game all too often maligned, with Kennedy proving that Football is about far more than the events that unfurl on the pitch
February 8, 2025
Joe Kennedy has presented less of a book on football, more a collection of thoughtful academic essays alongside a diary of some travels to disparate football games around the UK, on what being a football fan means, especially in the 21st century. It is a high-brow view on what being a football fan means to Joe, and to someone who maybe doesn’t follow football in the way it is presented and portrayed in mainstream contemporary media.
I have been a football fan since I was a young child, but I must admit that the way I watch and consume football has changed over the years, I am a fan who appreciates the more thoughtful side of football, the data and the why of how things happen, so to have someone write about how being a different kind of fan and the intersectionality of that with modern football is personally an interesting read. It is a short book, but it is chocked full of content.
Despite the short running time of the book, the following are areas which are tackled:
- Football clubs as identity for individuals;
- Classism Vs commercialism, and has it ever really been separate since the dawning of football?;
- What is "proper" football?;
- Football Vs art, can football given its nature ever really be an art form? Or is the depiction as art something which gives tacit permission to higher brow individuals to be football fans?;
- The intersection of patriotism and football, societal class and football and intellectualism
- Can technology ever be reliably used on the pitch to help govern the rules due to limits of the fundamental rules of the game?;
- The modern day proliferation of data and sabermetrics and the interplay with spectating the game;
- How to be authentic and anti-racist, sexist, etc…;
- Wokeness Vs rise of far right in fan culture, how gentrification plays against "working class roots,"; and
- Into COVID lockdown and the loss of the weekly traditions and the importance of those to the individual.
Despite loving each of these topics, I have rated this book 3 out of 5 stars, it is a bit too self congratulatory of Joe in places, due to the short nature some of the topics are written about for a couple of pages and then forgotten before a real deep dive is done and while I enjoyed it, it is not the most accessible of books due to Joe’s writing style, it is very academic in nature. I would love Joe to do some deeper dives in to some of the topics, particularly the intersectionality of societal class, inclusivity, authenticity and the modern world.
I have been a football fan since I was a young child, but I must admit that the way I watch and consume football has changed over the years, I am a fan who appreciates the more thoughtful side of football, the data and the why of how things happen, so to have someone write about how being a different kind of fan and the intersectionality of that with modern football is personally an interesting read. It is a short book, but it is chocked full of content.
Despite the short running time of the book, the following are areas which are tackled:
- Football clubs as identity for individuals;
- Classism Vs commercialism, and has it ever really been separate since the dawning of football?;
- What is "proper" football?;
- Football Vs art, can football given its nature ever really be an art form? Or is the depiction as art something which gives tacit permission to higher brow individuals to be football fans?;
- The intersection of patriotism and football, societal class and football and intellectualism
- Can technology ever be reliably used on the pitch to help govern the rules due to limits of the fundamental rules of the game?;
- The modern day proliferation of data and sabermetrics and the interplay with spectating the game;
- How to be authentic and anti-racist, sexist, etc…;
- Wokeness Vs rise of far right in fan culture, how gentrification plays against "working class roots,"; and
- Into COVID lockdown and the loss of the weekly traditions and the importance of those to the individual.
Despite loving each of these topics, I have rated this book 3 out of 5 stars, it is a bit too self congratulatory of Joe in places, due to the short nature some of the topics are written about for a couple of pages and then forgotten before a real deep dive is done and while I enjoyed it, it is not the most accessible of books due to Joe’s writing style, it is very academic in nature. I would love Joe to do some deeper dives in to some of the topics, particularly the intersectionality of societal class, inclusivity, authenticity and the modern world.
April 27, 2024
This was fantastic overall. Barring a school tournament with six-a-side teams where our only goal in three matches was an own goal produced by myself, i have never played football in any organized way. At the end of my school years, i have played three- to five-a-side evenings weekly, on an indoor pitch far too big for our fitness to be played on for two hours. But that is it.
Despite that, i have for periods watched a ton of men's first-leagues and cup competitions, as well as international tournaments and a handful of women's international matches. But that as well has decreased so much, that now for years i maybe watch 15-20 games live. Of all those matches i watched, only three of them i watched in a stadium, and never have i been to a football pitch below the men's third tier. Despite all that, i estimate the time i take daily to read about football-related things to be something like an hour, sometimes less, sometimes more.
This book provoked so many new thoughts, fundamental insights, so many angles through which one could judge, view, play, think about football, it will probably take a few days to process all the things this book offered to genuinely reflect all of that.
I have to say, that some of the arguments felt more complicated than convincing, but overall, i consider those ambiguous passages negligible. My brain is deeply grateful for having been exposed to these 150 pages of writing.
Despite that, i have for periods watched a ton of men's first-leagues and cup competitions, as well as international tournaments and a handful of women's international matches. But that as well has decreased so much, that now for years i maybe watch 15-20 games live. Of all those matches i watched, only three of them i watched in a stadium, and never have i been to a football pitch below the men's third tier. Despite all that, i estimate the time i take daily to read about football-related things to be something like an hour, sometimes less, sometimes more.
This book provoked so many new thoughts, fundamental insights, so many angles through which one could judge, view, play, think about football, it will probably take a few days to process all the things this book offered to genuinely reflect all of that.
I have to say, that some of the arguments felt more complicated than convincing, but overall, i consider those ambiguous passages negligible. My brain is deeply grateful for having been exposed to these 150 pages of writing.
February 16, 2023
A small book with a broad scope: I have scribbled in the margins and know I need to return to many of the insights from “Games without Frontiers”. My second book chosen to try and understand what it is about football that is seemingly so compelling and so frustrating, especially within the sterility of hyper capitalism. This tension, or dialectic (because this book is a work of theory, but often delivered in an inclusive and easy way), is the central theme of the book: how do we retain what makes football football, not giving it up to an almost nameless, false universality that seems to commercialise it (and contain it) beyond reproach, whilst also not sinking back into, equally false, nostalgia and traditionalism. Brilliant book all round, and the travelodge-d sections are just really lovely reading
Read
July 1, 2020rec’d by a friend who knows me too well— Kennedy triangulates between neolib economics, football strategies and analysis of modernist aesthetic to produce this coruscating critique of British politics and society. these analyses are interspersed with engaging travelogues— in these, he interrogates what it means to be a ‘spectator’ (“watching yourself watch a match”) or to ‘win’ (a collective aversion to being remembered as a loser, by its nature an ephemeral emotion). also for a non-league fan, the focus on the bottom rungs of the pyramid— inhabited by the lumpenproletariat of the footballing ecology— is most welcome. it concludes w fascinating, thought-provoking reflections on Blairite politics and the bleak future not just of football, but of Left politics
January 15, 2024
Basically a political version of my favourite ever book, Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch.
Very dense in theoretical knowledge at the start, I found myself growing into this book, with the chapters on the games attended grabbing my attention the most.
The final chapter though I must say, is one of the most well composed pieces on football I've ever read, with it perfectly articulating my thoughts to the playing of the game and how one day, when I hang my boots up, it will be the unruly kickabout in year 5 that I remember the most, rather than any organised 5 a side game, or game I've watched rather than played in.
Very dense in theoretical knowledge at the start, I found myself growing into this book, with the chapters on the games attended grabbing my attention the most.
The final chapter though I must say, is one of the most well composed pieces on football I've ever read, with it perfectly articulating my thoughts to the playing of the game and how one day, when I hang my boots up, it will be the unruly kickabout in year 5 that I remember the most, rather than any organised 5 a side game, or game I've watched rather than played in.
October 17, 2020
Joe Kennedy sets forth to explain soccer (Association Football) through the lense of art, economics, society, and politics. Kennedy tells stories from some of the numerous football games he has attended across Europe to anecdotally make a case for his football philosophies. Kennedy makes the point that things that happen on the football pitch are influenced by everything that happens outside of the touch lines.
March 28, 2023
Think this would've been better if it was more academic - it's at its best when it's drawing clear lines between soccer's existence and the neoliberal capitalism that drives it - but its an easy and likeable theory read with a agreeable conclusions.
January 11, 2018
Some of the best writing on football I’ve ever come across.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews