: Robert McCrum
: The Penalty Kick The Story of a Gamechanger
: Notting Hill Editions
: 9781912559732
: 1
: CHF 10.80
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 208
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Football in the 1880s was an unruly, rough, and often dangerous game. To curb the state the sport was in, William McCrum proposed a new and drastic sanction. He called it a penalty kick.' In 1891, a contentious new measure against an excess of foul play, Rule 13, was proposed to the FA by an amateur goalkeeper from County Armagh. 'The Irishman's Motion' modernised the world's most popular game. Today - in the shootout - Rule 13 continues to influence the sport through its astonishing psychological grip on our imaginations. A tale of sportsmanship, chance and obsession, The Penalty Kick explores both the addiction of risk, and a doomed father-son relationship that could have been torn from the pages of a late-Victorian novel, inspired by the edgy, ruthless and egalitarian spirit of Northern Ireland.

Robert McCrum is a writer whose most recent book, Shakespearean, was published to great acclaim in 2021. He is also the author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004) and a classic memoir My Year Off. As editor-in-chief of Faber& Faber, he published Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore and Milan Kundera, among many others, and was subsequently literary editor of the Observer from 1996-2008.

Powerbrand


‘Everything is theory,’ said the German, but Mbappé’s kiss tells us that football is more serious than that. Theory, or money, or global sponsors (Adidas, Coca-Cola, Wanda, Hyundai/Kia, Qatar Airways, Visa and Qatar Energy): football is about so much more than merely playing the ball. The modern game lies at the secret heart of a greater Game – the skein of everyday life that’s woven from memory, history and events; childhood and school; family, work and friendship; plus money, TV and the marketplace. To some fans it’s a way of life, a habit of being, and the most sublime obsession.

Football shirts, socks and boots; aprons and shower curtains; rulers, kitchen towels, sleeping bags, travel mugs, napkins, tablecloths, toffee tins, first-aid kits, memo pads, book bags, pencil sharpeners, key chains, fridge magnets, ring binders, address books, envelopes, wastebaskets and even garden gnomes: such are the ephemera that define the gaudy global commerce of football. The World Cup’s money-tree has promoted countless other products, too. In 2022, consumer electronics (Vivo), dairy and soy food (Mengniu), home-and-away kit (Hummel) and footwear (Puma; Nike), contributed to the phenomenon advertisers call a ‘powerbrand’, where the sport’s global status seems so natural that we take every aspect of its role for granted. (In 2015, the seamy side of this omnipotence fell under the spotlight with the dramatic prosecution of some shocking revelations about FIFA corruption.)

This all-conquering game, in its various guises (football in the UK;soccer in the US;calcio in Italy;Fußball in Germany), often claims a worldwide audience of billions. In the most impetuous versions, this can become a figure that exceeds the world’s actual population by a factor of four or five. From the wilder shores of hyperbole, it’s also been claimed that Striker, America’s World Cup mascot, had an audience of more than a trillion v