Simon Kuper

Profile: Full name: Simon Kuper Area of interest: Sport, Football Journals/Organisation: Financial Times Email: simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com | simon.kuper@ft.com Personal website: Website: FT.com / http://www.ft.com/life-arts/simon-kuper Blog: Representation: Networks: https://twitter.com/#!/kupersimon

Biography: About: Education: Oxford; Harvard; Technische Universität of West Berlin Career: Current position/role: Sports writer also writes/written for: Other roles/Main role: Other activities: Disclosures: Viewpoints/Insight: Broadcast media: Video: Controversy/Criticism: Awards/Honours: William Hill Sports Book of the Year, 1994 - for Football Against the Enemy Scoops: Other:

Books & Debate: Perfect pitch OCLC 42215132, 1998 (with Marcela Mora y Araujo) Perfect pitch 2, Foreign field OCLC 44828269, 1998 Ajax, the Jews, the war: football in Europe during the Second World War OCLC 59362448, 2003 Soccer against the enemy: how the world's most popular sport starts and stops wars, fuels revolutions, and keeps dictators in power OCLC 66900713, 2006 Why England lose & other curious phenomena explained OCLC 495597725 (with Stefan Szymanski), 2009 Latest work: Forthcoming work: Speaking/Appearances: Debate:

Financial Times: Column name: Remit/Info: writes about sport "from an anthropologic perspective" Section: Role: Pen-name: Email: simon.kuper@ft.com Website: FT.com / Simon Kuper Commissioning editor: Day published: Regularity: Column format: Average length:

Articles: 2012 How aid got smarter - Academics, donors and some aid agencies have begun measuring what works. Development is becoming a science - 19th May Take the plunge and emigrate - Emigration is probably the quickest way of improving your career prospects, both now and for your lifetime - 12th May A nation of pessimists - The French fear change because they have best way of life on earth - 5th May The FA opts for compromise: a cosmopolitan Englishman - The new England football manager is cultured but lacks relevant qualifications - 5th May Why we follow football - Going to a match is one of the comforting rituals that carry you through life. Yet this ritual is poorly understood - 28th April Why CEOs shouldn’t run the world - Running an economy – let alone a country – is of a different order of complexity to running a firm - 21st April Why the old schools still rule - If voters wanted to be led by proletarians, they would elect proletarians. Cameron isn’t in Downing Street by accident - 14th April End football’s cult of Corporate Man - The sport must rememember it is part of the entertainment industry - 14th April Let’s lose the religious labels - The words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are overused and have become catch-all terms to explain everything - 7th April #Revolutionwhatrevolution? - How the global addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet and peaceful - 31st March Reasons to be cheerful. Seriously - Life has ceased to be quite so poor, nasty, brutish and short – although you wouldn’t know it from watching TV news - 24th March Can this man fix Fifa? - Next week, Mark Pieth will propose radical reforms that could make the ‘football family’ respectable once more. But will Fifa listen? - 24th March The French media: in bed with power - Nicolas Sarkozy’s links with press barons are almost hilarious, with the entanglements of a Brazilian soap opera - 17th March Eternal music from a literary quartet - George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell are rarely discussed together, and yet are best understood as a cohort - 10th March My quest for football’s Holy Grail - Where is the Jules Rimet trophy? The statuette vanished in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 – or perhaps in Europe in the 1950s - 3rd March Meet Europe’s new scapegoats - After September 11 the Muslims took a beating. Now it’s the turn of eastern and southern Europeans - 25th February Why I’m happy to be a parasite - Much of the journalism profession is motivated by a desire to tell stories without concern for the people in them, but someone’s got to do it - 18th February Tackling racism tops football’s agenda - Cameron to hold meeting on discrimination - 18th February My life as a literary character - It turns out that writing a book about one’s adopted country is the solution to the integration issue - 11th February Capello’s exit casts England as the loser - Fabio Capello’s resignation as England manager suggests he figured his team was not equipped to win Euro 2012 - 9th February Are you a striver, slacker or fantasist? - In truth, real people are usually a mix of the three archetypes, but most people tend towards one particular type - 4th February How to change your view of Africa - Chimurenga, a pan-African English-language journal, depicts the continent’s horrors and champions long-form journalism - 28th January A sporting chance for politicians - With the economic crisis discrediting party politicians, sport has become the perfect trampoline into politics - 21st January Under the influence - Dimitri Verhulst’s ‘The Misfortunates’, a novel about his chaotic Flemish upbringing, is a subtle and wonderfully told story - 21st January Why American teens should go Dutch - Dutch parents treat teenage sex much as Dutch society treats drugs or prostitution: permit it, hug it close, control it - 14th January A new beginning - In this special issue, the FT asked leading photographers to show how survivors of last year’s upheavals are rebuilding their lives - 7th January

Articles: 2011 All articles Why Ferguson remains at the top of his game - The Manchester United manager adds exceptional value to his teams - 28th December A work of art? It’s in the bag - Luxury goods companies now wrap themselves in the language of high art. They call themselves ‘cultural and creative industries’ - 10th December Happiness is a table for one - Lunch is dead but not in Paris, where Simon Kuper has stayed for 10 years largely because the meal is often a glimpse of bliss - 3rd December Squabbling while the world burns - The sceptics aren’t the block to action on climate change. Instead, they are an irrelevant sideshow - 26th November Norway: an Eden with wifi - Along with oil, the Scandinavian country has built its economy on another natural resource: its women - 19th November The end of identity politics - Sex, drugs and old wars are fading from voters’ heads, leaving the economy as the only issue. Simon Kuper thinks this shift may not be goo - 12th November The hits and misses of history - Assassinations are rare occasions when the fate of nations can seem to hang on a sandwich or briefcase - 5th November Why politicians deserve a break - Today’s leaders are shrunken figures. Yet they are due a rebound - 29th October How the (book) world works - Rogue states such as Iran get to steal other people’s books with impunity, and nobody buys books in Abu Dhabi - 22nd October Tyrants’ Paris: the tour - The choicest bits of the west’s great cities belong, in part, to foreign dictators. We complain, but we need these guests - 15th October Is South Africa the new Russia? - Simon Kuper looks at the striking parallels between the two countries in terms of leadership and party politics - 8th October Ms Murphy’s law will help push football in a new direction - Clubs are finally starting to monetise their global brands. Their battle to do so is the story of the new British economy - 8th October The truth about English football - Studying football helps us see why the English are always beating themselves up, and why they shouldn’t - 1st October How I lost my love of reading - Simon Kuper hopes for a time when one can look at books not as status symbols but as a source as an uncomplicated pleasure - 24th September Climate change: who cares any more? - Rich countries will buy protection by building dikes or piping in more water, but poor states probably won’t cope well - 17th September The end of Eurabia - Slogging through several books helped Simon Kuper understand possibly the most influential western geopolitical theory since the attacks of 9/11 - 10th September Europe’s racists sail new waters - Potential miscreants are reminded that anti-Semitism is a habit rather like nose-picking: something best not done in public - 3rd September Scouting, statistics and rice: the rise and fall of Arsène Wenger - The manager’s decline is a warning to all pioneers - 3rd September Let’s put the meaning back in politics - With a new political season about to start, now is a good time to get rid of another batch of bogus words and phrases - 27th August Home is where the holiday is - It is summer and Parisians are disappearing to the French countryside, the place they like to imagine they are really from - 6th August Lessons from the Field - In journalism, you are expected just to pick things up, says Simon Kuper, who proceeds to list the things he has learned over a 25-year career - 30th July Call this a media storm … ? - Amid the furore surrounding the phone hacking scandal, Alastair Campbell tells Simon Kuper he thinks newspapers have become much less important - 23rd July Food status: an update - Peasant food will go the way of wigs and long fingernails, which once upon a time were considered to be status symbols too - 16th July The middle-class trapdoor - When you fall from first world to third, your life changes in ways small and big, and so does your worldview - 9th July The tulips of Srebrenica - For Simon Kuper, the idealistic, blue-eyed Netherlands where he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s died some time after the Bosnian massacre - 2nd July Now the rich are always with us … - The 2.5 billion people with less than $2 a day get ignored by the media, due to being poor, non-white and non-Anglophone - 18th June My killer excuse: the kids - It’s becoming possible for fathers to use childcare to buy more time at the workplace. That’s because status for men in western countries is changing - 11th June Why the euro is in the wars - The common currency, which topped off a project aimed at ‘binding in’ Germany, was born because European leaders were still obsessed with the second world war - 4th June No game for ideal women - Nowadays hardly anyone wants to keep football male. The rest of us are delighted that women now play, yet hardly any of us want to watch them do it - 28th May Paris: a higher version of life - The Paris in the heads of foreign artists such as Woody Allen and Henry Miller is not the actual capital of France. Rather, it is the opposite of home - 21st May Analysis: Sport: Trophies and trinkets - A scandal involving alleged kickbacks that surrounds football’s global governing body highlights both an absence of external scrutiny and a loss of western influence - 14th May The power of respect - After reading a letter Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, Simon Kuper concludes that great politicians focus on only one or two goals. For them, the rest is just detail - 14th May Five ages of a professional footballer - In the run-up to the FA Cup final, Simon Kuper reads the autobiographies of five leading English players. The result is a composite portrait of the strange life of the modern footballer - 14th May Speaking of the British - Running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously for the UK’s ruling classes – or at least not yet - 7th May Springtime for tyrants - Soviets liked only one thing about Stalinism: the personality cult around Stalin. So when Khrushchev denounced the dictator’s crimes, the party slew him - 30th April What counts now is capital - In this crisis, people have switched en masse from living off wages to living off capital that they have accumulated on their own or through other people - 23rd April Why football is in a fix - Partly because of Chinese betting, and partly because the world now wagers online, the sums gambled on European games have soared - 16th April When Paris becomes utopia - Each country does one or two things brilliantly, and the French know how to live, but never more so than in their city in the spring. Simon Kuper explains why - 9th April France: Claudie Haigneré - The first Frenchwoman in space once watched the Earth turn while listening to Callas singing ‘Norma’ in the silence of the night while her colleagues slept - 2nd April Why expats don’t get tinnitus - Living in the media bubble means having a constant dreadful ringing in your ears. But, as Simon Kuper has found, life as an expat can clear up all that sound - 26th March The funny thing about Britain - Peter Cook, a comedian strangely little remembered today, created a genre of ‘declinist’ humour Americans can now expect as the US joins the UK on the down escalator - 19th March Home is where the art is - Why did two great artistic forces emerge three centuries apart from the small, dull Dutch town of Leiden? Could a similar European town ever do it again - 12th March Don’t touch me, I’m British - The French kiss people in greeting but the permitted intimacy does not extend to every country where each has its own unique rules - 5th March I think about my mortgage constantly - Everyone has had to become his or her own accountant, actuary and pension planner. Unfortunately most Britons are poor at saving and budgeting, or can’t afford it - 19th February Toppled in the fog of war - The story of referee Martin Hansson has meaning beyond football. He stands for all successful strivers who overestimate their ability to see clearly through the chaos of life - 12th February Lessons from the class of ’92 - Things will get better but not for all of today’s youth. Academic research says some will suffer for decades for having been young in a recession - 5th February A hell of an inheritance - Only recently have large numbers of Europeans begun accusing their own families of taking part in Nazi crimes, but it will be decades away before the war may cease to be a family trauma - 29th January Rugby flexes its muscles - Tom Palmer, about to contest the Six Nations as an England forward, epitomises everything that has changed about the game - 29th January A disastrous truth -It’s true that floods and hurricanes do more damage every decade. However, that’s because ever more people, owning ever more ‘stuff’, live in vulnerable spots - 22nd January Debt: another word for guilt - Many voters actually like austerity and will accept almost any amount of personal pain if it means government debt falling as a proportion of GDP - 15th January Indignant? We should be - Stéphane Hessel tops France’s bestseller lists with ‘Indignez-vous!’, his 12-page pamphlet that reveals something about his country and lleftwingers everywhere - 8th January

All articles: 2010 I’ve seen the future, and it’s Monaco - Simon Kuper briefly returns to middle-class life in the principality, which has survived the recession and demands for tax transparency just fine - 18th December Comedy in a Minor Key - After thousands of works about the Holocaust, Hans Keilson’s 107-page novella – one of the very first – adds to our understanding - 14th December I am a negative role model - Simon Kuper, who spends about 30 hours a week on childcare, laments that boys receive no training for fatherhood and that fathers rarely debate parenting - 11th December The world needs French lessons - The death of French as a major language and the collapse of foreign interest in the country has deprived the world of a great corrective to bad ideas - 4th December Lessons for the green movement - Simon Kuper tries to distil what environmentalists could learn from past struggles to get the message through about climate change - 27th November What are we bid for a World Cup? - Fifa is set to announce the host nations of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The bidding process for the right to host the football tournament is one of the most secretive in sport. So how does it work? - 27th November My friend, the Cuban Peter Pan - Fifty years after Operation Peter Pan, the airlift to Miami of 14,000 children escaping Fidel Castro’s regime, Simon Kuper says that exiles are now reaching out to ordinary Cubans - 20th November How sport went global - Over the past ten years, elite athletes in the west have become a worldwide TV phenomenon. In this extract from ‘Decade’, Simon Kuper traces the rise of ‘electronic colonialism’ - 13th November Bring back sloth - The old welfare state anticipated the findings of later research: that happiness is time with friends and relatives - 6th November South Africa’s football lesson - Hosts need to understand what a World Cup is: a party. It is fun, but it leaves nothing behind except a hangover, good memories and a large bill - 30th October The battle of Wayne - The Battle of Wayne transfixed the nation. Yet no one – least of all Alex Ferguson – really understands the footballer - 30th October I may, finally, be the man of the future - Non-drivers like Simon Kuper no longer face a social handicap as driving goes out of fashion and cars lose their status symbols to climate change, obesity and traffic jams - 23rd October What happened to the Holland I knew? - Dutch life remains pretty gentle, and yet the country has fallen for the far right. The rise of Geert Wilders is a symptom of the transformation in recent decades - 16th October Why proper English rules OK - At a conference featuring speakers from across northern Europe, Simon Kuper realises that the global rise of bad English is giving native speakers an advantage - 9th October Stuck in the rush-hour of life - The current 35-year career is dysfunctional. It allocates too much work to young fathers, and too little to mothers and older people - 2nd October Why England fails: Hiddink sees a lack of footballing intelligence - Specifically, players don’t ‘coach’ their team-mates during a game. There are exhortations but no specific instructions - 18th September Religion and politics trump basketball for Turks - Turks no longer define themselves in opposition to foreigners but in opposition to each other - 11th September Sporting life - Some managers understand football, but goalkeeping is something else entirely: it seems as foreign a craft as flower-arranging - 28th August The laws of football back big spenders on road to success - You are not supposed to be able to buy a winning team but Simon Kuper thinks Manchester City has m anaged to avoid the usual traps of the transfer market - 21st August Cold war rivals vie to stage football’s big event - On December 2, the 24 men on Fifa’s executive committee will select the countries that will host the World Cup football tournaments in 2018 and 2022. Simon Kuper offers an interim report on how the race stands - 31st July Price of tax-funded happiness keeps team moguls going - As fans and cities get poorer, some are starting to resent handing money to players and owners - 24th July A new world for America’s sporting couch potatoes - The quality of the TV commentary on these distant sports has gone through the roof - 17th July Netherlands kick, Spain score - The difference in class was most apparent in the first five minutes, when Spain passed the Dutch apart - 12th July Did South Africa win the World Cup? - What is the tournament’s legacy to the people of the host nation? Richard Lapper and Simon Kuper ask five South Africans of different backgrounds to join the debate - 10th July How Van Gaal created a trio of pass masters - Despite South America dominating the quarter-final stage of the World Cup, three of the semi-finalists are European, and their shared heritage is that of Bayern Munich’s Amsterdammer coach - 5th July Maradona gambles on the ‘owner’ to deliver Cup glory - Lionel Messi should be the key player of these last eight days of the tournament. The only problem is how to use him - 3rd July France crowned World Cup losers - Despite strong cases made by North Korea, Cameroon and Italy, the FT has voted France the worst team of this World Cup for its all-round calamitous performances on, and off, the pitch - 26th June High-speed trains will transform Europe - The Eurostar connected London and Paris, influencing lifestyles and changing both cities. Now, newer and faster lines are set to remake the continent - 19th June Why England’s fans loathe their celebrity team - The job of any national team is to be the nation made flesh - 26th June The growing tribe of soccer nerds following America - There’s a growing American tribe of soccer nerds who can knock you out with an analysis of Manchester City’s defensive issues - 12th June World Cup marks a milestone in S Africa’s evolution - Back in 1985, the country was a hermit republic where 90% of the population was under orders to shut up. Now the country is welcoming the world - 5th June A new era kicks off - In 1993, South Africa’s fledgling post-apartheid team faced its first big test, against Nigeria. Simon Kuper recalls a time when a mixed colour squad seemed a big deal - 5th June Man in the News: Fabio Capello - Simon Kuper looks at the skills the Italian coach brings to managing the England football squad - 5th June The cup’s changing line-up of mankind - The World Cup tournament provides some of the national glue once supplied by churches or royal weddings - 29th May The spiritual twins of Bayern Munich and Inter Milan - Mourinho’s Inter Milan face Van Gaal’s Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, a battle of Europe’s foremost coaches - 22nd May There is a world of difference in how football is played - There are cultural differences in the way nations play soccer and these are about to be exposed in all their glory during next month’s World Cup - 15th May Soccer legend who supports all African teams – and Brazil - We remember Weah as the ferocious Liberian forward but he has already moved on - 1st May How Barcelona spawned Mourinho as its nemesis - As in all dysfunctional relationships, Mourinho and Barcelona know just how to hurt each other: he regularly beats Barça, and Barça pretend not to respect him - 24th April Why football players’ salaries will keep rising - A club that cut wages might increase profits, but clubs pursue victories, not profits - 17th April Maradona must unleash heir to lift the world cup - Watching Messi score four against Arsenal, you realise Argentina’s chances of winning are much better than commonly thought - 10th April Beane recognises a kindred business spirit at the Arsenal - Like the Oakland A’s baseball manager, Arsène Wenger knows he needs a different strategy from richer rivals - 3rd April Secrets of Bayern’s ungainly schoolmaster - Everything about Bayern’s Dutch coach is ungainly - being a football manager is mostly a presentational job, and Van Gaal does that terribly. He has only one saving grace: he’s brilliant - 27th March Rugby is long-lost France made flesh - The oval ball is inspiring the French in a way that Les Bleus once did – by presenting a united front. But while football was the face of urban france, rugyby is that of rural south-western villages - 20th March When it comes to coaching, your skin colour still matters - The story of race in US sports is told as if it ended in the 1960s, but a biography of basketball coach Nolan Richardson dispels that notion - 13th March The Red Knights cannot restore United’s innocence - Since the 1980s, United has passed through the same stages as the British economy itself - 6th March Football is not about corporations. It's about clubs and communities - The seduction of big business and rejection of its roots has prompted the crisis in English football - 28th February (writing in The Observer) Rugby gave South Africa a founding myth - Sport almost never changes history, but does the film ‘Invictus’ tell a truth about Mandela’s ‘long walk to freedom’ - 27th February Smurf with boundless belief - Just when globalisation was supposed to have eroded national styles in football, here is the Dutch footballer of eternal stereotype – pint-sized Wesley Sneijder of Inter Milan who faces Chelsea in the Champions League this week -20th February The Prenzlauer Berg transformed - Soon after the wall fell, Simon Kuper lived as a student in a bullet-ridden building in east Berlin. Twenty years later, he returns to a polished neigbourhood of cafés, chic restaurants and bourgeois-bohemian ideals - 13th February Beckham comes face to face with his spiritual descendents - While at Manchester United the midfielder helped determine what the club became - 13th February Why football clubs no longer flock to the January sales - Ever fewer soccer officials believe that buying players will improve their team 6th February Ice hockey starts to slip as Canadians also fall for soccer - Immigrants who pour into Canada rarely bother with hockey. Most stick with soccer or even cricket - 30th January Stand up to the dangers of sitting down - Standing is physical activity. That’s why it can be tiring. If you stand you burn more calories than in the signature posture of our age: the motionless slouch behind a screen, snack in fist - 23rd January Africans may find their Cup not English enough - Many African soccer fans will ignore the African Cup of Nations, which kicks off in Angola tomorrow, preferring instead to watch the English Premier League. What does this say about nationalism in Africa - 16th January Africans may find their Cup not English enough - Many African soccer fans will ignore the African Cup of Nations, which kicks off in Angola tomorrow, preferring instead to watch the English Premier League. What does this say about nationalism in Africa - 9th January Inequality is the price of a ‘clásico’ - Even fans of small clubs enjoy imbalance. They relish the David vs Goliath encounters. Much of the point of supporting Almería, or Sevilla, comes from resenting the Big Two - 2nd January

All articles: 2009 The public knows what it takes to forgive a Tiger - The good news for Woods is that there is a ritual of exoneration: the ‘confession cure’ - 19th December Happiness that Americans can still afford - College football doesn’t exist to make universities richer or better. Its job is to give Americans happiness and a sense of belonging - 12th December Barcelona’s strategy to get beneath the Messi flowerpot - Twice before it has had the world’s best young footballer. Both left town prematurely - 5th December The World Cup is no economic boon for South Africa - Every big sports tournament tells a story that transcends sport. For South Africans, it’s about the economy. But will the 2010 tournament enrich the nation’s poor - 28th November Baseball’s love of statistics taking over football - The search is still on for the best data to evaluate players and the holy grail would be discovering the key to victory - 21st November Emiratis throw cash around in quest for true love - In Abu Dhabi’s sport ‘strategy’, the F1 race is meant to be a tourist ad. Sport must help keep the emirate rich forever - 31st October Home cooking and triangles for Barca’s victorious youth - Many youth academies are ruled by brutes, but Barcelona’s coaches talk like traditional Catholic mothers. In this family, the sons come home for supper, study hard and behave - 24th October The hermit kingdom summons the spirit of ’66 - North Korea’s football players appeared to have dismissed goal-scoring as bourgeois individualism - 17th October Why Argentina chose ‘ganas’ and ‘pibes’ over winning - Maradona was chosen as coach because the football team had to be the nation made flesh - 10th October In the fifth age, most are merely average players - If humans will soon routinely live to be 100, is there any hope for sporting triumphs after 40? If there is not, asks Simon Kuper, then what is the role of sport in the downhill phase of life? - 3rd October Football abandons the fantasy that it is a business - Clubs are immortal chiefly because creditors dare not pull the plug. The brands are strong enough to cow banks and taxmen. And so clubs can incur debts without fear - 26th September Olympic bidders prepare to dash for the finishing line - In the past it was easier to predict a winner, as some bids were terrible or incompetently presented - 19th September Playing the long game pays off for FC Barcelona - Barcelona’s economic model works in good times and bad: it made profits while winning nothing in 2008, and made profits while winning the Treble last season - 12th September How to drink from the poisoned chalice and prosper - Fabio Capello has created a new template for England managers. For the benefit of future England managers, here are his secrets - 5th September Second world war was just not cricket for the British - It would be mad to minimise the loss and devastation of that or any other war. But many Britons spent much of it thinking harder about football than fighting - 29th August Advantage Federer: his twins could improve his game - A father is presumably less likely to be out at 4am expending energy on other causes - 15th August Time to end our deluded obsession with club managers - The fact is that players’ salaries alone almost entirely determine football results - 8th August Outside Edge: Sport pushes at the final frontier - The evolution of sport has limits - 1st August Why Europe’s best football clubs hail from the provinces - Almost all of Europe’s best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies - 1st August What Google tells us about the global obsession with sport - The country that devotes the highest proportion of its searches to David Beckham is Burma - 25th July Uprooted footballers need support on and off the pitch - In recent years a new animal has appeared inside English clubs: the player liaison officer, whose job is to help new players settle - 18th July The rise and fall of the British sporting aristocracy - The Brits originally did not see the point of playing sports against foreigners. Then, later, they took control - 13th July How flawed sportsmen became a thing of the past - Modern sport is so demanding that you can’t do it occasionally. You have to live it and nothing else - 11th July Doping scandals likely to lead each stage of the Tour - The Tour de France starts on Saturday, but you’d barely notice it. No one is talking about the legendary race, and figures show that doping is finally destroying it - 4th July Learning how to play dad on the sports field - Playing or watching sport is how men bond with people they don’t want to talk to - 27th June Theatres of dreams and drama take centre stage - When Rod Sheard began building sports stadiums in the 1970s, somebody said to him: “What do you need an architect for?” Sports architects get more respect now - 20th June Some heroes still need to score on the likeability charts - Being nice matters, especially for great sportsmen. It is something Cristiano Ronaldo may eventually find out - 13th June Isolationist mindset keeps South Africa playing ticky-ticky - The typical foreign coach lands in South Africa saying that the football players already have great technique but lack discipline. But the fans and players don’t want discipline - 6th June Barcelona’s Iniesta shows why technique trumps tenacity - In Rome, Andres Iniesta – whom Wayne Rooney calls “the best player in the world at the moment” – seemed to float past United players, his yellow boots barely marking the grass - 30th May How to win that elusive French title: Federer’s tip sheet - The Swiss has won every grand slam but this one. Simon Kuper says the 27-year-old has few chances left, and so solicited advice from Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander and Serena Williams - 23rd May This could be the best football match in the world, ever - According to the theory developed by a German sports writer, the Barcelona and Manchester United game could be more than memorable - 16th May There’s more to life than tennis, says Serena Williams - Catching up with her, Simon Kuper finds it’s hard to talk about tennis. These sisters do it on the side. In a sporting world of monomaniacs, they embody the Victorian ideal of the dilettante athlete - 9th May Dutch football’s great storyteller honoured in stone - The story of Hans Hollander, the Jewish sports broadcaster who died in the Holocaust and has finally received the recognition he deserves, is tragically typical of the Dutch war - 2nd May Cabrera reluctant to talk up his golfing heroics - The Argentinian winner of golf’s Masters is a man who believes more in the precision of his game than in the power of words - 25th April How Xavi quietly became Barcelona’s new pass master - The Spanish central midfielder, who drives on both of the world’s best football teams, should win the award for Europe’s most under-appreciated footballer - 18th April Regulations will not end England’s rule of football - In football, if nowhere else, the English still rule and will strongly resist any attempts at regulation dreamt up by Michel Platini, president of the European football association - 11th April Australia finds room for the beautiful game - Fifty per cent of Australians are said to be interested in soccer, more than follow either rugby code, and only a fraction behind cricket and Aussie rules - 4th April Damned rebellion of English football’s Muhammad Ali - The new film disappoints, but trapped somewhere inside it is a great story: of Brian Clough as the British Ali. Both men charged at their society head-on – and both got hurt - 28th March Sporting life - Josep “Pep” Guardiola has led Barca to footballing triumph. The next step is sainthood - 21st March Pushy parents and fantasies that last for life - Being a professional athlete is a normal childhood fantasy. Thanks to overparenting, those children get to live it out - 14th March Terror and greed combine to restore old colonial order - It was the same risk appetite driving sport to bold new places that lured investors into emerging markets - 7th March Sport can teach bankers fair play on pay - Athletes barely network and are not hired based on which university they got into aged 17 - 28th February Never mind the soccer, listen to the chatter - The highbrow scorn for the game that prevailed before the 1990s is dying as hierarchies of high and low culture collapse - 21st February A modest man at Chelsea - After Hiddink led Korea to the World Cup semis, his dad just said: ‘Well, that wasn’t bad. Coffee?’ - 14th February Forget pop psychology - bring back superstition - If all else fails, try voodoo,” is a rule taught at the more progressive business schools. Now it has reached Mexican soccer fans - 7th February Depressed America set for another lavish ritual of unity - Super Bowl Sunday, the finale of the American football season, has become an American tribal ritual to rank with Christmas and Thanksgiving - 24th January Wilander spies a wilier Federer set to reclaim Melbourne - Mats Wilander is the insider’s insider who can explain tennis to outsiders, in rapid-fire speech that makes you wonder if he really is Swedish - 17th January Haunted by the ghosts of apartheid - White South Africans do brilliantly at sport, and the blacks badly. In South Africa, as in the rest of the world, sport favours the rich - 9th January 2009

All articles: 2008 Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? - A fantastically erudite account of how and why the British created modern sport - 15th December 2008 Teams should think twice before shedding their fat players - Ronaldo, once the greatest footballer on earth, now has the belly of late-phase Elvis Presley. Despite this, Corinthians in his native Brazil have signed him - 12th December 2008 India can fight the flab by gorging on other games - As Calcutta fêtes Diego Maradona, it’s another sign that India, sport’s final frontier, has begun playing the world’s games - 5th December 2008 Winning book depresses value of writing prize - Marcus Trescothick’s book describes how cricket – like many other modern sports – eats its young, with burn-outs being common - 28th November 2008 Chicago can be an Olympic kind of town - With Barack Obama’s election as American president, the Windy City has surged ahead of its rivals to host the 2016 Games - 21st November 2008 Dealmaker who sees beyond silverware - Harris, once a poor kid supporting Manchester United, later chief executive of HSBC’s investment bank, has brokered five takeovers in the Premier League - 14th November 2008 Maradona’s chance as a national coach - Of course Argentina shouldn’t have let Diego Maradona coach its football team. He won’t last long in the post - 7th November 2008 Football cops shun tear gas - Several dozen burly men are gathered in Amsterdam to plan for this season’s matches and new ways of treating fans - 31st October 2008 Candidates tackle political football - A politician’s relationship to sport is a window on to his soul. This is particularly true in the US, because Americans have so many sports to choose from - 24th October 2008 Notables from the margin - American sport exists largely to tell allegorical stories about America. Dave Zirin overturns them in People’s History of Sports in the United States - 17th October 2008 Wags lyrical - It’s strange to think that “Wag” – the acronym for footballers’ wives and girlfriends – entered the Oxford English Dictionary only last year. Already Wags seem as traditionally English a concept as out-of-town supermarkets or chicken vindaloo - 10th October 2008 Iceman Borg melteth - The silent tennis player with the 1,000-mile stare now chats and laughs like a cocktail-party guest. Indeed, he regards the young Borg with wonder, as if he were another person - 3rd October 2008 Fab four born in soccer’s most fertile week - On September 22 1976 a great footballer was born in Rio. “Do you know who Ronaldo was named after?” his father asked the writer Frans Oosterwijk years later. “After the doctor who closed off his mother’s tubes after his birth. Ha, ha. Doctor Ronaldo, his name was.” - 26th September 2008 Anelka’s alternative pose off the pitch - Anelka’s personality has impeded him from reaching the heights his body deserves. The personality also arguably cost his club, Chelsea, last season’s Champions League final - 12th September 2008 Spain’s new nationalism - The country’s improbable run of sporting triumphs has revealed a new Spanish nationalism. And sport itself is changing Spain - 5th september 2008 A festival of fraternisation that gets too friendly - For athletes, the Olympics really is the festival of international fraternisation it’s cracked up to be - 1st August 2008 The eternal games - An impressive quintet of surveys shows how the Olympics have grown so all-consuming that they now eat their competitors and the host cities (book reviews) - 28th July 2008 Bird’s Nest allows Beijing to prove its mettle - Jacques Herzog, a thin shaven-headed Swiss architect, sits eating dry brown bread in his group’s offices off a quiet square in Basel. This is his home. It was in kindergarten in Basel that Herzog met his future architectural partner, Pierre de Meuron, and in Basel that they first designed a stadium - 25th July 2008 Relief for English cousins as family makes up - On the phone from Munich, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is talking about the “football family”. Rummenigge, once a great German footballer, now chairs the new European Club Association, which represents 103 leading European clubs. “The ECA must be in on all decisions in the football family,” says Rummenigge, who is also chairman of Bayern Munich. “There were big irritations in the past. These irritations are happily over.” - 18th July 2008 Sisterly love - As the Williams sisters recalled once on The Oprah Winfrey Show, their father told them when they were children: “Go ahead, pick a tournament you want to win.” Venus, the elder sister by 15 months, chose Wimbledon. Then it was Serena’s turn. “Wimbledon,” she said. Their father Richard ordered Serena to pick another one, but it was already too late - 4th July 2008

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