John Doyle

The World Is A Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer.

Toronto: Doubleday Canada 2010.

410 pages

CDN$29.95/US$32.95 (cloth ISBN 978-0-385-66498-1);

CDN$19.95/US$15.95 (paper ISBN 978-0-385-66499-8)

Ted Richards, ed.

Soccer and Philosophy: Beautiful Thoughts on the Beautiful Game.

Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing 2010.

416 pages

US$21.95 (paper ISBN 978-0-8126-9676-9)

John Doyle is the television critic for a Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. He writes with wit and detached amusement/amazement/despair (as deemed appropriate) not only about the day's shows but about trends in the industry generally. He is also a football nut. He persuaded the newspaper to let him cover the three World Cups and two European Football Championships of the past decade, as a fan and cultural commentator in addition to rather than instead of the paper's regular sports commentator. The World Is A Ball is not a mere compilation of columns, but as the cover blurb rightly says a combination of travelogue, match reporting and social history. It is a very entertaining read.

Soccer and Philosophy is an anthology of thirty-one essays averaging around fifteen pages in length. The authors are mostly professors or graduate students of philosophy, with some representation from communication studies, law, computer science and other fields, 'very bright and intelligent folk--people who know their philosophy--writing passionately about the game they love', to quote editor Richards' introduction. I did not find it to be an entertaining read.

Many themes are common to both books: the way that football at its best is a combination of formal elegance and expressive beauty; the destructive ugliness of the game at its worst;...