• World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments By Simon Kuper (Pegasus Books)

When I went to my first World Cup in 1990 to watch Scotland with my dad and a couple of mates, it took me half a morning to organize. I booked two weeks leave and phoned the Italian sales rep of the magazine I worked at to organize tickets. “Sure,” he said. “No problem.” At the time, the tickets didn’t seem cheap, but none of us had to sell our family heirlooms to buy them. In fact, good seats for all three group games cost us each today’s equivalent of around $230.

Italia 90 was also Simon Kuper’s first tournament, and he opens this memoir with a similar story of spontaneously jumping on a ferry from England with friends to take advantage of corporate tickets no one else wanted. Security guards at the Italian border didn’t want to let them in because, as they were coming from England, they were surely hooligans. When they explained that they were students at Oxford University, the officials relented and allowed them to enter the country. “That’s how professional the security operation for the 1990 World Cup was,” Kuper recalls, as well as empty seats in stadiums, and a “village fête” atmosphere while watching an “amateurish” U.S. team get hammered 5-1 by the Czechs.

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