The two readings this week, Chapter 1 of Golazo! and the first few pages of The World Cup as World History share themes of sports history being rooted in many different cultures and the evolution of “kicking ball” games through the centuries, highlighting that this game “akin” to modern day soccer was prevalent in many cultures across the globe. It goes into detail in specific places the phenomenon of simple games that consisted of advancing a ball, usually by kicking, through a goal.
Bowman’s writing brings up the point and advances it that it was natural for the spread of soccer to take off in many cultures because of this, but he also delves into the history of not only soccer being used to “tame” a working and middle class in some European societies, specifically France. This relates to another point he makes in soccer being used as a tool to influence some European colonies outside of Europe.
Golazo! furthers most of the points that Bowman introduces but with a more anecdotal focus on South America and Latin America, looking at Cricket being a dominant sport and how soccer gets it foot into the door in these places.
The correlation between these two sections of the books is the early evolution of both soccer and similar sports in non-English countries, and the ways that soccer was used in the 19th and 20th century to spread across the globe to become the most popular sport for most of the world’s population.
(Cuju, the ancient Chinese kicking game that had similarities to Association Football, seen in other cultures early history before the spread of soccer.)
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