Colombia coach Jose Pekerman is a thin man who has endured the lean years that inevitably come with a life devoted to soccer. When the Argentine’s playing years ended due to a knee injury in the late 1970s, he supported himself with odd jobs, like driving a taxi. Now he has pulled Colombia’s national team…
Getty Images As Team USA carries the hopes of the English-speaking world in Brazil, inquiring minds are wondering why England is so perennially terrible at the sport it invented (and let’s not get started on cricket). It is a question that was surprisingly well answered in 2009, along with the corollary question about how America…
Italy soccer star Mario Balotelli may have put the kiss of death on England with his winning goal at their World Cup opener, but now he wants royal recompense if he becomes their savior. England’s second loss in Group D, to Uruguay on Thursday, left them on the brink of elimination. But there is a…
There are two Jonathan Wilsons writing about soccer in a knowledgeable way. One is Jonathan Wilson from the Guardian, arguably the foremost journalistic expert on tactics in the modern game, the other is Jonathan Wilson, the Tufts University Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, who covered the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker and…
British Jews have never accounted for more than 1% of the population. And their contribution to soccer has always been obscured. But, in his well-researched and compellingly-written history, “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The History of Football’s Forgotten Tribe,” Anthony Clavane explains the outsize contribution of British Jews to British soccer and their pivotal…
Getty Images Thinkers from Cass Sunstein to Eli Pariser in “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You,” have elucidated the threat to social discourse posed by the Internet. Increasingly able to insulate ourselves from disagreement, we live in bubbles of like-mindedness. From whichever angle, it’s epistemic closure in sociological jargon, “bullshit mountain”…
Image courtesy Abraham Klein Israel has reached the World Cup finals just once — Mexico 1970 — where, after losing to Uruguay and tying with Sweden and Italy, it failed to progress beyond the group stage. That year in Mexico, though, there was an outstanding Israeli success — referee Abraham Klein. An unlikely figure to…
Colombia’s Coach Jose Pekerman is among the Jewish participants in the World Cup/Getty Images (JTA) — Israel’s not in the World Cup, and none of the star players is Jewish. But never fear: We still managed to compile a list of six Jewish things about Brazil 2014. The coach: Jose Pekerman, the coach of Colombia’s…
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