“It is football that tells the history and it is the history that tells football.”
Do you know when you’re lost in a bookstore, looking for a gift for a teenager, and you have a doubt about what to choose? This book could save you.
Witty and engaging enough, Marco Cattaneo’s text turned out to be a pleasant surprise; and if to say it is a person who does not like the football, then it means that it is written really well.
The love for sport is the common thread of the stories that follow one another in the different chapters, all focused on single football match destined in one way or another to mark the future of this game or, in some cases, the history of nations. The narrated facts, in a romanticized form, have the advantage of never losing sight of the truthfulness of the facts.
Thus come men and women from different ages, ready to get involved in order to make their dreams come true. The supreme joy of embracing a partner after having reached an unexpected result, or the conscious sadness of putting one’s life in dangerous in order to follow a higher ideal (reference not by chance, but to understand it you have to read the book).
We particularly liked the choice to sow some curiosities about the evolution of the game of football sparingly, for example the explanation of why the two teams are made up of eleven members, or the decision by England not to participate to international competitions in the first years.
A book that must be bought to be displayed in the home library once the reading is finished. An evergreen to pass from brother to brother, or from father to son, because the historical contemporaneity of the events written will never make it go out of style.
After all, loving football, and by extension any form of team sport, doesn’t it help to love yourself and others more?
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Marco Cattaneo, Challenge the sky, Rizzoli, Milano, 2020
