David Goldblatt Bio

For the better part of two decades, David Goldblatt has written the kind of football and sports history that treats the games as a way of understanding politics, money and national identity. His work covers the global story of football, the modern Olympics, the specific case of Brazil, and the climate crisis bearing down on sport. And he’s done all of it while writing journalism for most of Britain’s serious newspapers and teaching the sociology of sport on two continents.

Early Life and Education

Born in London in 1965, Goldblatt now lives in Bristol. He grew up supporting Tottenham Hotspur, a loyalty he describes with some wry resignation, since he inherited the club from his father and grandfather. Since moving west, he’s shared his affections between Tottenham Hotspur and Bristol Rovers. His academic path wasn’t a straight line into sport. Before the sociology degree came later, he was a medical student first.

Writing Career

The book that made his name arrived in 2006. That year, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football was published by Penguin, and it’s been called the definitive historical account of the world’s game. It runs to roughly a thousand pages. In the words of its publisher, it tells the story of football’s rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world’s most popular sport. The reach of the book is unusual for a sports title. It explores the cultural meanings and political uses of football under Perón, Adenauer, Stalin and Mussolini, and it ranges from the postcolonial politics of African football to the manufacturing history of the football boot, from the history of stadium architecture to the architecture of power in global football’s leading institutions. Before it, he’d already compiled the World Football Yearbook for Dorling Kindersley in 2002, which was published in nine languages and ran to three editions.

In 2014 he published two national studies in quick succession. The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, first published in 2014 by Penguin, looks at the development of football in England from the 1990s onwards, and at how footballing culture reflected changes in wider English culture. The book argues that the sport closely tracks the economic and political shifts of the period. It shows how the English Premier League was forged in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain by an alliance of the big clubs, the Football Association, and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV. That same year came Futebol Nation, his footballing history of Brazil.

Style and Themes

What marks Goldblatt out is the way he uses sport as a route into everything around it. He’s put the idea plainly himself, describing football as truly the most extraordinary lens on society. His books draw on wide reading across history, economics and politics, and that scope has drawn consistent praise from critics. According to the historian Dominic Sandbrook, Goldblatt is possibly not merely the best football historian writing today but the best there has ever been. He also narrates his own audiobooks and has made documentaries for radio, so his voice carries into forms beyond the printed page.

Later Work and Climate Campaigning

In 2016 he moved from football to the wider sporting world with The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, published by Macmillan in Britain and W. W. Norton in the United States. The book traces the Olympics from their reinvention in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016 through national triumphs and tragedies, individual victories and failures. It was recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. The Games was named a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.

For his 2019 book, he returned to football. The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-first Century charts football’s global cultural ascent, its economic transformation and deep politicisation. It takes in prison football in Uganda, amputee football in Angola, the role of football fans in the Arab Spring, the footballing presidencies of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, China’s declared intention to both host and win the World Cup by 2050, and the FIFA corruption scandal.

More recently his attention has turned to the environment. In 2020 he wrote Playing against the clock: Global sport, the climate emergency and the case for rapid change, a report for the Rapid Transition Alliance that provided the first provisional estimate of the impact of global sport on the climate. That interest runs through his current life. He teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles, he’s working and campaigning for a carbon-zero football world, and he lives in Bristol. Over the years his academic teaching has taken in the sociology of sport at Bristol University, at De Montfort University in Leicester, and at Pitzer College.

Alongside the books he’s been a prolific and well-regarded journalist. He’s written for most of the quality broadsheet newspapers, including the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times and The Independent on Sunday, as well as for magazines such as the New Statesman and the New Left Review. His reporting has been honoured too. In 2015 he won the Sports Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards for his Guardian Long Read article, The prison where murderers play for Manchester United, a piece about Luzira Prison in Uganda and its football league.