High five: Summer of sport

Three great reads on football, cricket and the cult of fandom

Image by Jimmy Conover, Unsplash

Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story. The podcast will follow at the w/e.

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The Big Story:

A high summer of sport crammed with global action – football, cricket, tennis, cycling, golf and the Olympics.

(Sporting calendar in The Backstory at the end of this post.)

• The Euro 2024 tournament in Germany is the first proper, non-pandemic European football championship since France 2016. Running almost simultaneously is the South American tournament Copa América, which is being held in the US. Football, incidentally, is the world’s most popular sport.¹ Ahead of France’s opening Euros game, its national football captain Kylian Mbappé was at the centre of a political row.²

• The T20 Cricket World Cup, co-hosted by the West Indies and the United States, is on American soil for the first time. Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport.

• Also coming: the Tour de France, which starts just as the cricket finishes. So too Wimbledon and the British Open, the world’s oldest golf tournament. Late next month, the Paris Olympics, which will hand off to the nearly 100-year-old Vuelta a España bicycle race.

This Week, Those Books:

• Sports fandom is like nationalism…no, really.

• An American football fan’s fake ‘fiction’ on life as an addict.

• Believe it or not, cricket is part of New York’s DNA.