• Home
• |
• Future
  • Spring 2012
  • Ticket Options
• |
• Past
  • Browse
  • Past events
  • Hot Topics
  • Written debates
  • Talks
  • Transcripts
  • Quick Debates
  • Micro-sites
  • Partners
• |
• About
  • Background
  • Contact
  • Press
  • Newsletters
  • People

Subjects

• Politics UK
• Politics International
• History
• Media
• The Arts
• Literature
• Ideas
• Technology & Science
• Environment
• Travel

The best of...

• Great Writers
• Great Oratory
• Humorous
• Left-field
• Paradigm Shifts
• Right-wing

See all the best of...

Our partners

• Tate
• Institute of Ideas
• BALTIC
• Uncommon Knowledge
• Saatchi Gallery

See all our partners

Football is beautiful

Our national game excites fanatical loyalty and passion from its millions of followers, many of whom make lavish claims for its aesthetic appeal, its underlying moral qualities and its positive effects on society.

But there are those who see this very adulation as evidence of the stupidity of football's legion of fans and followers. Can they not smell the stink of rotten money and rotten morals. The so-called "beautiful game", say the malcontents, is spectacularly corrupt and decadent – and it isn’t even that much fun to watch.

related content

• The beautiful game? You're having a laugh!

  29 Apr 2010

• Rogues, Rotters, Rascals and Cheats by John Perry (2007)

  Perry examines the most infamous examples of cheating in sport, including Maradona's 'Hand of God' a...

• Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski (2009)

  Why do England lose? Why does Scotland suck? Why doesn't America dominate the sport internationally ...

• Broken Dreams by Tom Bower

  Broken Dreams is Bower's controversial account of how some of the sport's most high-profile managers...

• Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (2005)

  Fever Pitch is both an autobiography and a footballing bible rolled into one. Nick Hornby pinpoints ...