"Soccer is a language, probably the most universal language on the planet. It is spoken more widely than English, Arabic, or Chinese and practiced more widely than any religion. In 1954, the French soccer journalist Jean Eskenazi wrote an essay on the 'universality' of the game. It is, he declared, 'the only denominator common to all people, the only universal Esperanto . . . a world language, whose grammar is unchanging from the North Pole to the Equator.' Although mutually intelligible everywhere it is played, it is still delightfully varied, 'spoken in each corner of the globe with a particular accent.' The Swedish writer Fredrik Ekelund similarly calls the game the 'Esperanto of the feet.' The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote a book of letters about the 2014 men’s World Cup with Ekelund, offers a vivid example of how this language works. ..."
LitHub
LitHub: Football is Everything (Which is to Say Soccer)
amazon: The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer, The Age of Football: Soccer and the 21st Century - David Goldblatt, Soccer in Sun and Shadow - Eduardo Galeano, The Illustrated History of Football - David Squires
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