South America is a region that enjoys an unusually high profile as the origin of some of the world s greatest writers and most celebrated footballers. This is the first book to undertake a systematic study of the relationship between football and literature across South America. Beginning with the first football poem published in 1899, it surveys a range of texts that address key issues in the region s social and political history.

Drawing on a substantial corpus of short stories, novels and poems, each chapter considers the shifting relationship between football and literature in...