Soccer resists being written about, and the book starts from that difficulty. A match is already its own tragedy and its own comedy; the writers who try, from Knausgaard imagining a book built on a single ninety minutes to a poet who answered all sixty-four games of a World Cup in verse, end up assembling fragments.

Part of what makes the game strange is its time. The clock never stops, whatever happens, and the referee may add only a few minutes at the end. Ninety minutes is a promise the sport keeps, unlike basketball or baseball. The rules have barely shifted since the nineteenth century, though the Situationist Asger Jorn once devised a three-sided version on a hexagon with no referee, where alliances form and dissolve as play goes on.

From there the book proceeds position by position — the goalkeeper, isolated and blamed; the defender — using each role to explain how the game is actually played and watched.