Simon Kuper



Profile:
Full name: Simon Kuper

Area of interest: Sport, Football

Journals/Organisation: Financial Times

Email: [mailto:simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com] | [mailto:simon.kuper@ft.com simon.kuper@ft.com]

Personal website:

Website: FT.com / http://www.ft.com/life-arts/simon-kuper

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Networks: https://twitter.com/#!/kupersimon



Biography:
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Education: Oxford; Harvard; Technische Universität of West Berlin

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Current position/role: Sports writer


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Video:

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Awards/Honours: William Hill Sports Book of the Year, 1994 - for Football Against the Enemy

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Books & Debate:

 * Perfect pitch OCLC 42215132, 1998 (with Marcela Mora y Araujo)
 * Perfect pitch 2, Foreign field OCLC 44828269, 1998
 * Ajax, the Jews, the war: football in Europe during the Second World War OCLC 59362448, 2003
 * Soccer against the enemy: how the world's most popular sport starts and stops wars, fuels revolutions, and keeps dictators in power OCLC 66900713, 2006
 * Why England lose & other curious phenomena explained OCLC 495597725 (with Stefan Szymanski), 2009

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Financial Times:
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Remit/Info: writes about sport "from an anthropologic perspective"

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Email: [mailto:simon.kuper@ft.com simon.kuper@ft.com]

Website: FT.com / Simon Kuper

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Articles: 2017

 * Why there will never be a Trump in today’s Europe - The US is a plutocracy to a degree that is unimaginable in western Europe - 1st July
 * How Facebook is changing democracy - Targeting specific voters is more effective and cheaper than speaking to the public on TV - 17th June
 * What’s wrong with the cultural elite? - Trump voters see a class that talks equality while living privilege and exuding contempt - 27th May
 * How to make cities more child-friendly - New York and London were designed by men who didn’t do childcare, and it shows - 13th May
 * The power of a Syrian success story - Almost all the refugees I’ve met since 2015 want to work their backsides off in exchange for the life that the laziest westerner regards as his birthright - 22nd April
 * The power of a Syrian success story - Almost all the refugees I’ve met since 2015 want to work their - 15th Aprilbacksides off in exchange for the life that the laziest westerner regards as his birthright
 * Friends of Putin: Russia’s western elite networks - Russia has upgraded from information-gathering to influence-gathering, facilitated by its presence in international business - 1st April
 * Why populists are gluttons for punishment - Populist leaders act out revenge fantasies for people who feel slighted. Trump, being Trump, turns the dial up to eleven - 25th March
 * Forget about Trump. Tech will shape our futures - Imagine that Trump rules for eight years. In that time, life will change. By 2024, virtual reality will be mainstream - 18th March
 * Why Wilders doesn’t worry the Dutch - His extreme statements still make news but have lost impact over time. It’s as if Trump had been leading a party for 11 years - 11th March
 * Politics goes back to the future - Selling the present now probably works only in Germany. Everywhere else, you run either as the past or the future - 3rd March
 * We need to start being PC about the white working class - We have political correctness for women and minorities. If we had it for the working classes, too, that could change the political climate - 25th February
 * Why the French have switched off political views - In a country that still offers the most agreeable everyday life on earth, why depress yourself with the news? - 18th February
 * What Germany can teach the US about democracy - With Trump attacking judges, media and the electoral process, lawyer Heinrich Senfft’s life provides a model for how to defend democracy - 11th February
 * Why I’m boycotting Trump’s US - Driving through the American South one recent summer reminded me of visits to my grandparents in apartheid South Africa - 4th February
 * How to avert catastrophe - We need to expand our imaginations. The next catastrophe may take an unprecedented form - 21st January
 * The problem with English - Foreign countries are opaque to mostly monolingual Britons and Americans. Foreigners know us much better than we know them - 14th January
 * Fifa will make money but a bigger World Cup will be a duller one Premium - It will be like watching someone spend 90 minutes parking a bus - 10th January



Articles: 2016

 * From 'postfaktisch' to 'Samsonseks': the world's words of the year - The words of the year show that even apolitical people have become obsessed with political ideas - 23rd December
 * Poor, white and no longer forgotten - Mainstream parties can win these voters back from populism. But not by pretending their biggest problem is immigration - 23rd December
 * Arianna Huffington: Selling the zzzzeitgeist - A sleepless overachiever, Huffington changed her habits . . . and saw that sleep was a business opportunity - 7th December
 * Truman to Trump: a centenarian’s tale - Morris, possibly the photo-editor who did most to depict the 20th century, says, “I’m afraid photojournalism helped Trump achieve the presidency” - 2nd December
 * The lingering legacy of apartheid - Black lives in South Africa are improving but most middle-class blacks are one mis-step away from calamity - 26th November
 * Trump: a liberal loser responds - For many people, everything we journalists said was discredited by the fact that we said it - 19th November
 * How Qatar is feeling the heat - Many nationals feel lost — 90 per cent of the population is foreign, pork is sold legally and English has displaced Arabic in schools - 12th November
 * The long shadow of 1989 - Merkel, Putin, Orbán and Kaczynski were all shaped by the 1989 revolutions - 5th November
 * America’s elections — or the world’s? - ‘Abroad’ seems tiny to most American voters — and yet it’s the only place where their presidents can have much impact - 29th October
 * Driverless cars will change everything - If you think personal cars will survive as status symbols, remember horses were once status symbols - 22nd October
 * Why the west has abandoned Aleppo - The UN Refugee Agency’s budget shortfall last year was $9bn — about half what Europeans spent on pet food - 14th October
 * How to cope when robots take your job - When your industry goes, you lose both your income and your identity - 8th October
 * Safety first: parenting in an age of terrorism - A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain - 1st October
 * Sam Allardyce is one more character in football’s morality play - Insiders treat the game as an industry but fans see it as something higher - 29th September
 * Barack Obama: anthropologist-in-chief - Obama’s formative experience as a cultural outsider makes him almost unique among US presidents - 24th September
 * Down (but not out) in Paris - Krishna taught me something about this strange new era in which globalisation randomly blows people around the planet - 17th September
 * The rude truth of modern politics - The age of diplomacy is ending. Personal insults are becoming the norm in affairs of state - 10th September
 * How Turkey tramples free speech - Turkey is on track to surpass China this year as the country that jails the most journalists - 3rd September
 * Can Trump take Florida? - The septuagenarian New York snowbird with a mansion in Palm Beach is a Florida archetype made flesh - 26th August
 * Why star football managers are overrated - Best predictor of success is the squad’s total wage bill - 13th August
 * Why do we still watch the Olympics? - In the face of global terror, inequality — and sporting scandals — the Games must cling on to its power to bring us together - 30th July
 * Civil servants will decide what Brexit means - The British public is not very interested in detail, judging by the largely fact-free campaign - 23rd July
 * How the terror attacks have changed life for the French - The country’s population now lives with the constant fear of terrorism - 18th July
 * Wanted: a new type of politician - If you represent an established party, then campaigning against politics is an act of self-harm - 16th July
 * Oxford Union to disunited kingdom - The traditional climax of a Union election was one Etonian backstabbing another for the presidency - 9th July
 * We’ll always have Paris - Since that sleepless night of June 23, I feel less British and less likely ever to move back - 1st July
 * The fan who came in from the cold - Klopfleisch spent match days standing beside the Wall, listening to the sounds from the stadium in West Berlin - 25th June
 * Euro 2016 – How to deal with the French - Visitors to the football competition might need a user manual - 10th June
 * Euro 2016, where uppity fans may be in for a shock - The French have the least trust in others of any western Europeans - 9th June
 * The rise and fall of a prototype Trump - Tymiński promised Poles that if he became president, the country would “be better in a month” - 4th June
 * The new French royalty - In a nod to modernity, the peasants in their exurbs are now allowed to elect the monarch, whose title is “president’’ - 28th May
 * How to live to 100 and be happy - Many young people are working out how they want to spend the next seven or so decades - 21st May
 * The psychic cost of leaving London - Find a mate, then leg it before you’re sharing your bedroom with a baby - 13th May
 * Satisfaction v populism - The dominant western political mood is, “Things are OK really, not that I care much”  - 7th May
 * How England won the World Cup in 1966 - Was it down to stamina, ability or good luck? And why has it never happened again? - 7th May
 * The simple truths of language - Impenetrable language thrives best in zones where people have an incentive to bore the public away - 30th April
 * Football managers: a career of two halves - It’s hard to be a pioneer twice, especially when you have to win a match every three days - 23rd April
 * Why we’re reliving the 1970s - The 1970s analogy gives us reason to hope. Back then, the centre held — as it has so far today, after eight years of economic misery - 16th April
 * How cosmopolitans can win the argument - Nationalists clash with cosmopolitans. The cosmopolitans cite facts. The nationalists pay no attention and sail blithely on - 8th April
 * From Cambridge spies to Isis jihadis - The story of Soviet agent Guy Burgess and his generation may foretell the path of today’s Isis recruits - 2nd April
 * Cruyff, the man who remade football, dies - 1970s Ajax, Barcelona and Holland playmaker was the lightbulb and Edison in one - 26th March
 * Why Merkel dreams in black and white - Asked once on TV what the word “Germany” inspired in her, she replied: “Pretty, airtight windows” - 19th March
 * The deadly human factor - In 2014, for the first time in 60 years, guns killed about as many Americans as cars did - 12th March
 * Journalists need to get out more - Sending educated young people to the countryside may sound like a Maoist re-education campaign but the media need a shake-up - 5th March
 * What’s wrong with sports officials? - Most global sports federations enjoyed a degree of “self-regulation” that bankers just dreamt of - 20th February
 * How to buy a foreign election - US campaigns have become so pricey that donors now see better returns on investment in smaller economies - 12th February
 * Lessons in listening - If someone tells you something like, “I’m thinking of murdering my husband,” show no surprise and just nod understandingly - 6th February
 * How to get over losing an empire - There are some post-imperial techniques to make you feel great. The best is winning a small war - 30th January
 * Passivity to fixers threatens fair play - Internet gambling makes it easier for punters to bet on any event - 23rd January
 * How to get over losing an empire - There are some post-imperial techniques to make you feel great. The best is winning a small war - 23rd January
 * Brought to book - The triumph of writing a book elevates you above the frauds who tell people at parties that they want to write one - 15th January
 * Life lessons from original thinkers - Our era undervalues original thinkers, because we tend to rank people by their fame and money - 9th January



Articles: 2015

 * Why political apathy rules - The only bits of politics that most people enjoy are personal stories about politicians - 19th December
 * How to be a 21st-century dad - I grew up thinking I would fulfil myself through work. Kids, I dimly imagined, would be taken care of by my lovely wife - 12th December
 * French lessons from a Nobel Prize winner - Jean Tirole’s great concern is reducing French joblessness, now a record 3.59 million - 5th December
 * The latest forecasts on climate change - One possible future for the rich world is as a giant Netherlands, protected by dykes and dams - 28th November
 * The ultimate political goal - Macri struck me as a man of destiny: rich, intelligent, funny. But none of it could have happened without football - 21st November
 * The power of stereotypes - Northern leaders inevitably brought to Brussels their voters’ prejudices about southerners - 14th November
 * How to treat expired geniuses - Whole nations pushed Michel Platini, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruijff into roles they couldn’t handle - 2nd November
 * The global elite is taking over sport - All but the super-rich are being priced out of sporting fixtures once available to everyone - 24th October
 * Small ideas are better than big ones - The right’s cult of free markets was the last surviving big idea. Then the financial crisis of 2008 killed it off - 24th October
 * How to invest in babies - Practically all parents want their children to thrive. Some just don’t know how to do it - 17th October
 * How to be an older colleague - Today’s junior employee is tomorrow’s senior, whereas today’s senior is tomorrow’s old reject - 10th October
 * Log out, switch off, join in - For many young people, life now happens on phones. Everything else is backdrop - 3rd October
 * The 1 per cent? Not for my kids - The true luxury isn’t money; it’s not having to think about money - 26th September
 * Why we should welcome migrants - Norway found oil under the seabed but it would have been better off if it had discovered 50,000 nurses there instead - 12th September
 * The age of innocence - I thought Blair was, in his words, “a pretty straight kind of guy”. Lest this sound insane, most Britons in 2001 thought so too - 5th September
 * Costa Rica’s good life - This humid little Central American country devotes valuable real estate to making people happier - 8th August
 * Green lessons from gay marriage - Don’t be liberal. There’s nothing inherently leftie about keeping the earth habitable - 1st August
 * Miami advice for Republicans - If Republicans want to win in modern America, they ought to visit its sexiest and most immigrant city - 18th July
 * Our deadliest problem? Not terrorism - Terrorists killed nearly 18,000 people in 2013 — 1.5 per cent of those killed by traffic - 11th July
 * Why safety now trumps freedom - Western governments plead security to spy on citizens, and most citizens accept it. They have learnt to love Big Brother - 26th June
 * Why we need German thinking - Because Germans are seldom heard outside Germany, the German take on events often gets simplified and parodied - 20th June
 * France’s forgotten class - A study of a poor district in Lyon reveals surprising results about an ignored community in flux - 6th June
 * The future belongs to cities of the west - These are places where today’s 0.1 per cent, the most mobile class in history, might want to live - 3rd June
 * Endangered: the middle-aged man - Besieged by rising robots and women, no wonder many of us end up fighting the zeitgeist - 30th May
 * Why Sepp Blatter is a genius - Fifa boss understood very early that there’s a new world order in which westerners don’t matter much - 23rd May
 * Art and the billionaire heirs - HNWI artists have time to hone their talent — not like us plebs - 16th May
 * Stop these WW2 comparisons - Memories of the war have shaped our responses to everything from the Viet Cong to today’s jihadis - 2nd May
 * Health: how to avoid lazy thinking - People prefer to blame disease on factors beyond their control: their genes or their mobile phones or radiation - 25th April
 * Welcome to the Londonsphere - The trains that carry occasional Londoners will themselves act as de facto offices - 18th April
 * A very cosmopolitan spy - Philby and Burgess couldn’t cope. Philby wallowed in drink; Burgess died of it. But for Blake, Moscow wasn’t exile. He embraced it as his fate - 21st March
 * How westerners became PRs for terror - Dead whites in Paris are bigger news than dead Muslims in Syria or Gaza. Our overreaction makes the terrorists’ point for them - 13th March
 * Why the west loves a kleptocrat - Angolan oligarchs inhabit the global luxury economy of British public schools, Swiss asset managers, Hermès stores - 7th March
 * The art of name-dropping - Today, neither birth nor stuff conveys status any more. So the quickest way to convey status has become, unfortunately, conversation - 21st February
 * In defence of the liberal media - The implication is that we don’t believe the liberal stuff ourselves. Well, I actually think the things I write are true. At least give me credit for sincerity - 14th February
 * How tourists took over the world - By 2030, there will be 1.8 billion international tourist arrivals, up from 940 million in 2010 - 7th February
 * A postscript to the end of Britain’s empire - The UK has begun recruiting its rulers abroad, chiefly in former white colonies - 6th February
 * What happened to the lost World Cup? - Oliver found the original base ‘unnoticed and unlogged, hidden away on a shelf in Fifa’s vast archives’ - 31st January
 * Why is France so misunderstood? - Many foreigners feel that they understand France, and disagree with it. Hence the phenomenon that the French call “le French bashing” - 24th January
 * Can Parisians all get along? - Fanatics such as the Kouachis insist they have a single identity: Muslim only. Most people are more complicated - 17th January
 * My Paris after the attacks - London has done well since its Islamist attack. So should my adopted city - 10th January



Articles: 2014

 * From IDC to YOLO, #Words of the year - Language, driven by social media and texting, is renewing itself faster than ever - 20th December
 * Middle-class sexism: who cares? - Many educated women and men have unexamined sexist assumptions, chiefly about childcare - 13th December
 * How Italy lost la dolce vita - The old have nice pensions, the middle-aged are unsackable and the young fight for temporary contracts - 6th December
 * Urbanism: the new ideas for city living - Working in cafés is very 2003. The next step: working in parks, even in winter - 29th November
 * Which way is Ireland going? - After rule by Brits, bishops and then bankers, Ireland for much of the crisis was practically run from Germany - 22nd November
 * Slow pressure best way to change Fifa - A World Cup boycott by the west sounds superficially plausible but would fail - 22nd November
 * The man who made data play ball - Bill James is arguably the father of today’s analytics revolution ... He has rethought the world using numbers - 15th November
 * Berlin: a tale of two cities - Current Berlin chatter about house prices recalls Ireland circa 2003. Tourist hordes have replaced the old occupying armies - 8th November
 * Confessions of a white Oxbridge male - I feel very little sense of achievement. I didn’t get here on merit. I was born to be a minor establishment functionary - 25th October
 * The working classes deserve respect - Rights for gay people, women and other groups are in the ascendant but the working class gets dismissed as an embarrassing relic - 18th October
 * How Brad Pitt brings out the best in dads - We mustn’t present the new fatherhood as a taming of men - 11th October
 * Why a harmonious team is just not cricket - Cruyff thought quarrels drove creativity because they made everyone think harder about how to play - 11th October
 * Author economics: the brutal truth - I’ve found pdfs of my books free online. ‘Information wants to be free,’ says a modern mantra. Well, my information doesn’t - 4th October
 * How Paris put everything on the menu - The French should feel more superior. While world cuisine conquers Paris, French cuisine has conquered the world - 27th September
 * Why the world is getting safer - From 1970 to 2008, death rates fell even in war zones because gains from better healthcare trumped deaths from fighting - 20th September
 * France – the way the French see it - The country is the way that it is because most French people want it that way - 13th September
 * Jorge Mendes, broker for football’s elite - with Peter Wise: The agent controls the game’s primary commodity – top talent - 6th September
 * America - the best place to be British - The three great omissions of American life – the BBC, football and healthcare – are now increasingly on tap - 30th August
 * From my inbox: the hot topics - Thanks to social media, I get more responses to my columns every year. Most are smart and friendly. Some aren’t - 26th July
 * How to travel: my rules - The ideal – admittedly impossible – is to arrive fully informed yet with no preconceptions - 19th July
 * For Brazil, it’s not the end of the world - People feel more connected to each other. Even the communal shame this week is a bonding experience - 12th July
 * Why Brazil’s already won - Strolling on Copacabana, you realise that a first-rate beach should be a compulsory element at all future World Cups - 5th July
 * The great Dutch football tradition - Holland’s football team may be the last surviving unmistakably Dutch cultural product - 28th June
 * Brazil united: the World Cup effect - This is the one competition in which footballers have to present themselves as citizens, fans, patriots - 21st June
 * Van Gaal may be as good as he thinks he is - The Dutch re-evaluate their World Cup chances after Spain ‘miracle’ - 18th June
 * Fandom – it’s bigger than football - Half a country’s inhabitants might watch the national team play a big game. That’s a rare taste of togetherness - 7th June
 * The rise of the global capital - Many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite. They want to join the global elite - 31st May
 * Why Europe works - Mobility is everything in a region where nations live in fruitful proximity - 24th May
 * How to free yourself from email - It should have been the best business tool since the telephone. Instead email has become the biggest time-waster since television - 17th May
 * Even boom times get the blues - The poor will be forgotten amidst talk of rising tides lifting all boats, and how much the neighbour’s house went for - 10th May
 * The chains of liberation - The liberator redeemed us with his blood. He can therefore ignore whatever voters think. Anyone who doesn’t like him is an enemy of the people - 3rd May
 * The next big rights revolution - The new interest in disabled people reflects the belated discovery that there are no second-class humans - 19th April
 * The surprising power of peace - In the current conflict, nobody seems eager to kill. Not even John McCain proposes American military intervention - 29th March
 * Sarajevo: the crossroads of history - On a street corner here 100 years ago, a 19-year-old Serb nationalist shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and triggered the first world war. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, is still a potent and divisive symbol - 22nd March
 * Another outbreak of Blair Disease - Most ex-leaders link up with the plutocratic class while still in office. These people have been planning their careers since kindergarten - 22nd March
 * Respect the past, change the present - Catholic Ireland and Britain weren’t always adversaries. Rethinking the first world war has probably helped bring peace to Northern Ireland - 15th March
 * How to save the US - The solution to America’s problems is obvious – it should model itself on its military... - 8th March
 * ‘Muddling through’ is the new politics -Politicians can improve the world but only bit by bit. Try something small, that’s easily reversed. If it works, scale it up. If not, you drop it - 1st March
 * How to save the UK - Plonking the government in central Glasgow, where male life expectancy is 54, could transform British social policy - 22nd February
 * What are we working for? - Both men and women now want to combine work with raising kids. That means nobody can stay in the office all hours - 15th February
 * How to save France - As a Briton married to an American, I know about national decline. The key is to embrace it - 8th February
 * Skating on thin ice - This love of the native landscape can be entirely innocent. Often, though, it segues into anti-immigrant feeling - 31st January
 * The economist’s guide to the future - In 100 years, the world’s poorest people may live like today’s middle-class Americans - 25th January
 * Peace in our time - ‘They’d have stopped the first world war fast if soldiers had live-tweeted the carnage - 17th January
 * Football’s new superheroes - Today’s great footballers are incomparably fitter than their predecessors. But their perfection goes beyond the physical - 11th January
 * The squabble for Holland’s soul - Blacks, Jews and asylum-seekers have all taken a kicking lately. But anti-racists have grown louder too - 4th January



Articles: 2013

 * The squabble for Holland’s soul - Blacks, Jews and asylum-seekers have all taken a kicking lately. But anti-racists have grown louder too - 21st December
 * The soulmate revolution - 2013 was the year when most western societies sanctified the equal relationship - 14th December
 * What Mandela taught us - Arguably a saint, he was definitely a politician who understood power - 7th December
 * An everyday taste of happiness - The fastest-growing demographic category from Britain to China today is ‘cheese bores’ - 30th November
 * How Dallas survived JFK - Many Americans couldn’t accept that a lone loser had changed history. Some blamed the city itself - 16th November
 * The great middle-class identity crisis - Fewer stay in the same profession for life. We are ceasing to be our jobs - 9th November
 * Africa? Why there’s no such place - The word ‘Africa’ has lost what meaning it ever had and should be binned - 2nd November
 * My return to Oxford - The university I knew – shot through with racism, dilettantism and sherry – has been replaced by something quite professional - 26th October
 * Why Danny the Red dreams of Europe - The May 1968 student revolutionary who sent de Gaulle into retirement is 68 himself now - but still a fighter - 12th October
 * England expects … quite wrongly - It is a delusion that the nation that invented modern football is destined to triumph - 5th October
 * The sun sets on the west - ‘If the west really is losing global significance, then anti-western movements are in trouble’ - 28th September
 * How we all went Dutch - Policy makers in Holland aren’t hippie potheads. They legalised dope because they are cold-headed realists - 14th September
 * Paris: the affordable London suburb - The French capital offered a luxury even better than money: not having to think about money. I’ve lived there ever since - 7th September
 * Would you buy a Picasso or a Bale? - The record-breaking deal is like the acquisition of a work of art - 3rd September
 * Paris: the affordable London suburb - The French capital offered a luxury even better than money: not having to think about money. I’ve lived there ever since - 31st August
 * Miami: the gathering storm - Why the prospect of Miami’s destruction through climate change bothers me - 3rd August
 * My column in pictures - Soon nobody will need words any more and we journalists will become even more redundant. This week I’ve been replaced by drawings - 27th July
 * Mandela’s miracles - Most fathers of a nation made their nation on a battlefield. Mandela did it with smiles - 20th July
 * How to raise a winning child - There are a few simple things new parents could be told: speak to your child, read to it, sing to it - 6th July
 * The Brazilian lesson - ‘The poor forced the state to see that they existed as anything other than labourers or potential criminals’ - 28th June
 * A forgotten war comes back to life - In China, the Sino-Japanese war now looms so large that it sometimes eludes the party’s control - 22nd June
 * Priced out of Paris - Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself - 15th June
 * Lionel Messi: Simply the best - The world’s greatest footballer has been pitched into tax problems - 15th June
 * How the west has won - China may be conquering the world economically but the west is winning the battle of ideas - 8th June
 * French ‘exception culturelle’ makes sense - The country accepts that most global culture is in English, it just wants its own to get funding too - 8th June
 * What Putin learnt from Berlusconi - With 80 per cent of Russians getting their news from TV, the Russian president knows it’s the best place for propaganda - 1st June
 * If only I’d been taught to learn - Techniques for remembering are essential study tools - taking a nap is another - 25th May
 * What David Moyes and Sir Alex really do - A fascination with football managers coexists with romantic misconceptions about what their job actually consists of - 18th May
 * Sir Alex Ferguson: football’s last Boss - The manager’s exit marks the end of an era for the game - 11th May
 * The French elite - France’s “énarques” weren’t trained to succeed in the world but in central Paris - 11th May
 * Fergie offers managerial lessons for many - Despite his success, Sir Alex never kidded himself that he knew everything - 9th May
 * Everton: how the Blues made good - Why does Everton football club keep beating their richer and starrier rivals? - 4th May
 * Smile if you’re European - It’s all relative: why it’s not so bad to be European after all - 4th May
 * Professional sport enters 21st century - The announcement by a US basketball player that he is gay is a landmark - 1st May
 * The Beatrix factor - It’s the end of an era as the Dutch monarch - as familiar a presence to many as their own grandmother - steps down to make way for her son - 27th April
 * My Juventus - Has Juve – and the whole Italian game – fallen victim to the nation’s problems itself? Andrea Agnelli, president of the legendary football club, offers an answer - 27th April
 * Preaching to the unconverted - The gay marriage campaign has worked chiefly because it borrows the right’s language of ‘family values’ - 20th April
 * Margaret Thatcher 1925-2013 - Her followers were evangelical. The violence of her opposition was a measure of her power. Simon Schama analyses how Thatcher transformed Britain, while Simon Kuper looks at her legacy abroad - 13th April
 * A Malaysian story - An audience with Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s opposition leader, who spent six years in solitary confinement, where he he read the Bible, Lao Tse and all of Shakespeare - 13th April
 * Pity the poor footballers - These tax-dodging schemes are achingly complex, even if you aren’t a kid who has just left school - 6th April
 * A life in the sun - As owners are sought for unidentified photographs from Dutch Indonesia’s lost colony, Simon Kuper argues that western colonial nostalgia is finally being challenged by brutal facts - 29th March
 * Poverty: a very poor show - I’ve read columns by prisoners and by people with terminal cancer, but I’ve never seen one by someone living on benefits - 29th March
 * How social media improved writing - Texts, blogs, emails and Facebook posts are affecting other kinds of writing – mostly for the good - 23rd March
 * In praise of the outcome-driven life - In the 1980s, the seize-the-day folks started losing ground. Increasingly, it made sense to pursue long-term outcomes - 16th March
 * Business à la française - A routine meeting or an ‘intellectual orgy’? A new bilingual guide tries to ease the stresses of Anglo-French business relationships - 9th March
 * Gay marriage: telling it straight - As gay couples become more integrated, more gay families will enter a hetero world of kids’ playdates and freezing parents at Saturday morning hockey games - 2nd March
 * Carry on panicking - Moral panics serve to express the desired social order: brave policemen good, independent young people bad - 16th February
 * Dangerous myth of the role model athlete - The sports-industrial complex should be shrunk before it destroys society - 16th February
 * Why I’ve fallen out of love with football - Anyone who peeks behind the game’s curtain discovers there is no magic there - 9th February
 * Israel: perched between hope and fear - ‘The country is more focused on living than on fighting, perhaps,’ says former premier Ehud Olmert - 2nd February
 * When a man is tired of Paris … - ‘After more than a decade I can say: beneath the snooty unfriendly façade, Paris is a snooty, unfriendly city - 26th January
 * And the Oscar for best career goes to… - Movies nudge middle-class young people without a particular vocation into certain professions - 19th January
 * The sin of bad science - Different societies deal differently with sinners, and the Dutch seem particularly unforgiving - 5th January



Articles: 2012

 * The sin of bad science - Different societies deal differently with sinners, and the Dutch seem particularly unforgiving - 29th December
 * Arab women on the frontline - ‘I still cannot understand why they keep hammering away despite everything, but they do’ - 15th December
 * An African murder mystery - Someone killed UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. It’s just not clear who - 8th December
 * Brazil’s goal: a clean sheet - Hosting the World Cup and the Olympics is meant to showcase a transformation: Brazil is attacking corruption - 1st December
 * A question of identity - The nation-state is shrinking to just a flag, some sports teams and a pile of debts - 23rd November
 * How to handle the media - An interview is like a seduction: the journalist aims to charm you into giving him your best stuff. Sometimes the seduction is literal -10th November
 * Falling out of love with America - The French media have catalogued the US election as if documenting the mating habits of an Amazonian tribe - 3rd November
 * The man who kicked our butts - Richard Doll, born 100 years ago this Sunday, saved more lives than probably anyone else in 20th-century medicine - 27th October
 * Why the French went off wine - In drinking habits, as elsewhere, globalisation is giving French people more choice about how to live - 20th October
 * Fortysomething: a midterm report - ‘Nowhere in my peer group have I witnessed a textbook midlife crisis. Nobody has the time’ - 13th October
 * Changing the world on the quiet - Lives are saved not by ideology or personality but by boring details - 6th October
 * Why three is the magic number - Money spent on early childhood yields higher returns than in any other phase of life. It can also reduce galloping inequality - 29th September
 * How we can beat the far right - ‘Reluctant radicals’ make up the majority of Europe’s rightwing populist voters. But there are ways to win them back - 22nd September
 * A very un-British hero - Fans had better get used to the Andy Murray type, writes Simon Kuper - 15th September
 * So you want to be an artist … - For most people, being a hack is the happiest, simplest and probably the most authentic way to live - 8th September
 * A time-traveller in London - ‘Wandering around town before and during the Games, I saw ghosts of people I’d known on almost every street corner’ - 18th August
 * Happiness is only legacy from Olympics - Intangible benefits are greater than any economic boost - 13th August
 * When the flame goes out - Olympic memories are for ever. The best an Olympian can do is give those memories a happy place - 11th August
 * The new British establishment - Whether you are working class, a woman or a cocker spaniel, this lot will let you in. But it has its disadvantages - 4th August
 * The original Olympic hero - What moved the world in 1908 was the sight of an ordinary man attempting something extraordinary - 28th July
 * Gripes give way to stronger capital identity - Grumbling phase turns to tempered enthusiasm for Olympics - 28th July
 * What makes London different - If they want to be Londoners – to be part of this thrilling, rich city – people have to rub along together despite fantastic inequality - 21st July
 * Why citizenship tests are full of holes - To be a citizen, it doesn’t matter what you know, or what crazy stuff you have in your head - 14th July
 * Do you believe in progress? - Politicians now try to present themselves not as saviours but as managers: Romney, Mario Monti and even Hollande - 7th July
 * Lost tribe of the Rainbow Nation - Afrikaners can flourish as individuals but may dissolve into white English-speaking South Africa - 29th June
 * Italy ignores scandal to excel at Euros - Azzurri decouple from domestic tribulations - 29th June
 * Football reflects economics for Germany - Building teams with lessons from abroad - 28th June
 * England are more than just a football team - The side has become a popular forum for debating British identity - 23rd June
 * A letter from Ukraine - In this country with its terrible history, somehow a degree of political civility has emerged - 23rd June
 * Spain’s football unity shows regions the way - Team spirit reflects new national pride amid gloom - 18th June
 * The app of life - Technologies are transforming city life in countless ways: everything from finding a date to finding a bus in an instant - 16th June
 * The Olympians - In this special edition of FT Weekend Magazine, meet the heroes from every Olympic Games since 1928 - 9th June
 * How EU politicians can learn from football - Nations have copied each other’s strengths - 8th June
 * The family holiday ‘challenge’ - It’s hard enough getting on with your spouse and kids at home, let alone when cooped up with them for days - 2nd June
 * The posh-ing of English football - The national team is becoming middle-class. It hasn’t been so upmarket since public schoolboys disappeared from the side circa 1900 - 26th May
 * Didier Drogba is a case study in mobility - Increasingly, the biggest salaries are outside football’s traditional heartland - 26th May
 * How aid got smarter - Academics, donors and some aid agencies have begun measuring what works. Development is becoming a science - 19th May
 * Take the plunge and emigrate - Emigration is probably the quickest way of improving your career prospects, both now and for your lifetime - 12th May
 * A nation of pessimists - The French fear change because they have best way of life on earth - 5th May
 * The FA opts for compromise: a cosmopolitan Englishman - The new England football manager is cultured but lacks relevant qualifications - 5th May
 * Why we follow football - Going to a match is one of the comforting rituals that carry you through life. Yet this ritual is poorly understood - 28th April
 * Why CEOs shouldn’t run the world - Running an economy – let alone a country – is of a different order of complexity to running a firm - 21st April
 * Why the old schools still rule - If voters wanted to be led by proletarians, they would elect proletarians. Cameron isn’t in Downing Street by accident - 14th April
 * End football’s cult of Corporate Man - The sport must rememember it is part of the entertainment industry - 14th April
 * Let’s lose the religious labels - The words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are overused and have become catch-all terms to explain everything - 7th April
 * #Revolutionwhatrevolution? - How the global addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet and peaceful - 31st March
 * Reasons to be cheerful. Seriously - Life has ceased to be quite so poor, nasty, brutish and short – although you wouldn’t know it from watching TV news - 24th March
 * Can this man fix Fifa? - Next week, Mark Pieth will propose radical reforms that could make the ‘football family’ respectable once more. But will Fifa listen? - 24th March
 * The French media: in bed with power - Nicolas Sarkozy’s links with press barons are almost hilarious, with the entanglements of a Brazilian soap opera - 17th March
 * Eternal music from a literary quartet - George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell are rarely discussed together, and yet are best understood as a cohort - 10th March
 * My quest for football’s Holy Grail - Where is the Jules Rimet trophy? The statuette vanished in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 – or perhaps in Europe in the 1950s - 3rd March
 * Meet Europe’s new scapegoats - After September 11 the Muslims took a beating. Now it’s the turn of eastern and southern Europeans - 25th February
 * Why I’m happy to be a parasite - Much of the journalism profession is motivated by a desire to tell stories without concern for the people in them, but someone’s got to do it - 18th February
 * Tackling racism tops football’s agenda - Cameron to hold meeting on discrimination - 18th February
 * My life as a literary character - It turns out that writing a book about one’s adopted country is the solution to the integration issue - 11th February
 * Capello’s exit casts England as the loser - Fabio Capello’s resignation as England manager suggests he figured his team was not equipped to win Euro 2012 - 9th February
 * Are you a striver, slacker or fantasist? - In truth, real people are usually a mix of the three archetypes, but most people tend towards one particular type - 4th February
 * How to change your view of Africa - Chimurenga, a pan-African English-language journal, depicts the continent’s horrors and champions long-form journalism - 28th January
 * A sporting chance for politicians - With the economic crisis discrediting party politicians, sport has become the perfect trampoline into politics - 21st January
 * Under the influence - Dimitri Verhulst’s ‘The Misfortunates’, a novel about his chaotic Flemish upbringing, is a subtle and wonderfully told story - 21st January
 * Why American teens should go Dutch - Dutch parents treat teenage sex much as Dutch society treats drugs or prostitution: permit it, hug it close, control it - 14th January
 * A new beginning - In this special issue, the FT asked leading photographers to show how survivors of last year’s upheavals are rebuilding their lives - 7th January



Articles: 2011
All articles
 * Why Ferguson remains at the top of his game - The Manchester United manager adds exceptional value to his teams - 28th December
 * A work of art? It’s in the bag - Luxury goods companies now wrap themselves in the language of high art. They call themselves ‘cultural and creative industries’ - 10th December
 * Happiness is a table for one - Lunch is dead but not in Paris, where Simon Kuper has stayed for 10 years largely because the meal is often a glimpse of bliss - 3rd December
 * Squabbling while the world burns - The sceptics aren’t the block to action on climate change. Instead, they are an irrelevant sideshow - 26th November
 * Norway: an Eden with wifi - Along with oil, the Scandinavian country has built its economy on another natural resource: its women - 19th November
 * The end of identity politics - Sex, drugs and old wars are fading from voters’ heads, leaving the economy as the only issue. Simon Kuper thinks this shift may not be goo - 12th November
 * The hits and misses of history - Assassinations are rare occasions when the fate of nations can seem to hang on a sandwich or briefcase - 5th November
 * Why politicians deserve a break - Today’s leaders are shrunken figures. Yet they are due a rebound - 29th October
 * How the (book) world works - Rogue states such as Iran get to steal other people’s books with impunity, and nobody buys books in Abu Dhabi - 22nd October
 * Tyrants’ Paris: the tour - The choicest bits of the west’s great cities belong, in part, to foreign dictators. We complain, but we need these guests - 15th October
 * Is South Africa the new Russia? - Simon Kuper looks at the striking parallels between the two countries in terms of leadership and party politics - 8th October
 * Ms Murphy’s law will help push football in a new direction - Clubs are finally starting to monetise their global brands. Their battle to do so is the story of the new British economy - 8th October
 * The truth about English football - Studying football helps us see why the English are always beating themselves up, and why they shouldn’t - 1st October
 * How I lost my love of reading - Simon Kuper hopes for a time when one can look at books not as status symbols but as a source as an uncomplicated pleasure - 24th September
 * Climate change: who cares any more? - Rich countries will buy protection by building dikes or piping in more water, but poor states probably won’t cope well - 17th September
 * The end of Eurabia - Slogging through several books helped Simon Kuper understand possibly the most influential western geopolitical theory since the attacks of 9/11 - 10th September
 * Europe’s racists sail new waters - Potential miscreants are reminded that anti-Semitism is a habit rather like nose-picking: something best not done in public - 3rd September
 * Scouting, statistics and rice: the rise and fall of Arsène Wenger - The manager’s decline is a warning to all pioneers - 3rd September
 * put the meaning back in politics'' - With a new political season about to start, now is a good time to get rid of another batch of bogus words and phrases - 27th August
 * is where the holiday is'' - It is summer and Parisians are disappearing to the French countryside, the place they like to imagine they are really from - 6th August
 * from the Field'' - In journalism, you are expected just to pick things up, says Simon Kuper, who proceeds to list the things he has learned over a 25-year career - 30th July
 * this a media storm … ?'' - Amid the furore surrounding the phone hacking scandal, Alastair Campbell tells Simon Kuper he thinks newspapers have become much less important - 23rd July
 * status: an update'' - Peasant food will go the way of wigs and long fingernails, which once upon a time were considered to be status symbols too - 16th July
 * middle-class trapdoor'' - When you fall from first world to third, your life changes in ways small and big, and so does your worldview - 9th July
 * tulips of Srebrenica'' - For Simon Kuper, the idealistic, blue-eyed Netherlands where he grew up in the 1970s and 1980s died some time after the Bosnian massacre - 2nd July
 * the rich are always with us …'' - The 2.5 billion people with less than $2 a day get ignored by the media, due to being poor, non-white and non-Anglophone - 18th June
 * killer excuse: the kids'' - It’s becoming possible for fathers to use childcare to buy more time at the workplace. That’s because status for men in western countries is changing - 11th June
 * the euro is in the wars'' - The common currency, which topped off a project aimed at ‘binding in’ Germany, was born because European leaders were still obsessed with the second world war - 4th June
 * game for ideal women'' - Nowadays hardly anyone wants to keep football male. The rest of us are delighted that women now play, yet hardly any of us want to watch them do it - 28th May
 * a higher version of life'' - The Paris in the heads of foreign artists such as Woody Allen and Henry Miller is not the actual capital of France. Rather, it is the opposite of home - 21st May
 * Sport: Trophies and trinkets'' - A scandal involving alleged kickbacks that surrounds football’s global governing body highlights both an absence of external scrutiny and a loss of western influence - 14th May
 * power of respect'' - After reading a letter Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, Simon Kuper concludes that great politicians focus on only one or two goals. For them, the rest is just detail - 14th May
 * ages of a professional footballer'' - In the run-up to the FA Cup final, Simon Kuper reads the autobiographies of five leading English players. The result is a composite portrait of the strange life of the modern footballer - 14th May
 * of the British'' - Running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously for the UK’s ruling classes – or at least not yet - 7th May
 * for tyrants'' - Soviets liked only one thing about Stalinism: the personality cult around Stalin. So when Khrushchev denounced the dictator’s crimes, the party slew him - 30th April
 * counts now is capital'' - In this crisis, people have switched en masse from living off wages to living off capital that they have accumulated on their own or through other people - 23rd April
 * football is in a fix'' - Partly because of Chinese betting, and partly because the world now wagers online, the sums gambled on European games have soared - 16th April
 * Paris becomes utopia'' - Each country does one or two things brilliantly, and the French know how to live, but never more so than in their city in the spring. Simon Kuper explains why - 9th April
 * Claudie Haigneré'' - The first Frenchwoman in space once watched the Earth turn while listening to Callas singing ‘Norma’ in the silence of the night while her colleagues slept - 2nd April
 * expats don’t get tinnitus'' - Living in the media bubble means having a constant dreadful ringing in your ears. But, as Simon Kuper has found, life as an expat can clear up all that sound - 26th March
 * funny thing about Britain'' - Peter Cook, a comedian strangely little remembered today, created a genre of ‘declinist’ humour Americans can now expect as the US joins the UK on the down escalator - 19th March
 * is where the art is'' - Why did two great artistic forces emerge three centuries apart from the small, dull Dutch town of Leiden? Could a similar European town ever do it again - 12th March
 * touch me, I’m British'' - The French kiss people in greeting but the permitted intimacy does not extend to every country where each has its own unique rules - 5th March
 * think about my mortgage constantly'' - Everyone has had to become his or her own accountant, actuary and pension planner. Unfortunately most Britons are poor at saving and budgeting, or can’t afford it - 19th February
 * in the fog of war'' - The story of referee Martin Hansson has meaning beyond football. He stands for all successful strivers who overestimate their ability to see clearly through the chaos of life - 12th February
 * from the class of ’92'' - Things will get better but not for all of today’s youth. Academic research says some will suffer for decades for having been young in a recession - 5th February
 * hell of an inheritance'' - Only recently have large numbers of Europeans begun accusing their own families of taking part in Nazi crimes, but it will be decades away before the war may cease to be a family trauma - 29th January
 * flexes its muscles'' - Tom Palmer, about to contest the Six Nations as an England forward, epitomises everything that has changed about the game - 29th January
 * disastrous truth'' -It’s true that floods and hurricanes do more damage every decade. However, that’s because ever more people, owning ever more ‘stuff’, live in vulnerable spots - 22nd January
 * another word for guilt'' - Many voters actually like austerity and will accept almost any amount of personal pain if it means government debt falling as a proportion of GDP - 15th January
 * We should be'' - Stéphane Hessel tops France’s bestseller lists with ‘Indignez-vous!’, his 12-page pamphlet that reveals something about his country and lleftwingers everywhere - 8th January



All articles: 2010

 * seen the future, and it’s Monaco'' - Simon Kuper briefly returns to middle-class life in the principality, which has survived the recession and demands for tax transparency just fine - 18th December
 * in a Minor Key'' - After thousands of works about the Holocaust, Hans Keilson’s 107-page novella – one of the very first – adds to our understanding - 14th December
 * am a negative role model'' - Simon Kuper, who spends about 30 hours a week on childcare, laments that boys receive no training for fatherhood and that fathers rarely debate parenting - 11th December
 * world needs French lessons'' - The death of French as a major language and the collapse of foreign interest in the country has deprived the world of a great corrective to bad ideas - 4th December
 * for the green movement'' - Simon Kuper tries to distil what environmentalists could learn from past struggles to get the message through about climate change - 27th November
 * are we bid for a World Cup?'' - Fifa is set to announce the host nations of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The bidding process for the right to host the football tournament is one of the most secretive in sport. So how does it work? - 27th November
 * friend, the Cuban Peter Pan'' - Fifty years after Operation Peter Pan, the airlift to Miami of 14,000 children escaping Fidel Castro’s regime, Simon Kuper says that exiles are now reaching out to ordinary Cubans - 20th November
 * sport went global'' - Over the past ten years, elite athletes in the west have become a worldwide TV phenomenon. In this extract from ‘Decade’, Simon Kuper traces the rise of ‘electronic colonialism’ - 13th November
 * back sloth'' - The old welfare state anticipated the findings of later research: that happiness is time with friends and relatives - 6th November
 * Africa’s football lesson'' - Hosts need to understand what a World Cup is: a party. It is fun, but it leaves nothing behind except a hangover, good memories and a large bill - 30th October
 * battle of Wayne'' - The Battle of Wayne transfixed the nation. Yet no one – least of all Alex Ferguson – really understands the footballer - 30th October
 * may, finally, be the man of the future'' - Non-drivers like Simon Kuper no longer face a social handicap as driving goes out of fashion and cars lose their status symbols to climate change, obesity and traffic jams - 23rd October
 * happened to the Holland I knew?'' - Dutch life remains pretty gentle, and yet the country has fallen for the far right. The rise of Geert Wilders is a symptom of the transformation in recent decades - 16th October
 * proper English rules OK'' - At a conference featuring speakers from across northern Europe, Simon Kuper realises that the global rise of bad English is giving native speakers an advantage - 9th October
 * in the rush-hour of life'' - The current 35-year career is dysfunctional. It allocates too much work to young fathers, and too little to mothers and older people - 2nd October
 * England fails: Hiddink sees a lack of footballing intelligence'' - Specifically, players don’t ‘coach’ their team-mates during a game. There are exhortations but no specific instructions - 18th September
 * and politics trump basketball for Turks'' - Turks no longer define themselves in opposition to foreigners but in opposition to each other - 11th September
 * life'' - Some managers understand football, but goalkeeping is something else entirely: it seems as foreign a craft as flower-arranging - 28th August
 * laws of football back big spenders on road to success'' - You are not supposed to be able to buy a winning team but Simon Kuper thinks Manchester City has m anaged to avoid the usual traps of the transfer market - 21st August
 * war rivals vie to stage football’s big event'' - On December 2, the 24 men on Fifa’s executive committee will select the countries that will host the World Cup football tournaments in 2018 and 2022. Simon Kuper offers an interim report on how the race stands - 31st July
 * of tax-funded happiness keeps team moguls going'' - As fans and cities get poorer, some are starting to resent handing money to players and owners - 24th July
 * new world for America’s sporting couch potatoes'' - The quality of the TV commentary on these distant sports has gone through the roof - 17th July
 * kick, Spain score'' - The difference in class was most apparent in the first five minutes, when Spain passed the Dutch apart - 12th July
 * South Africa win the World Cup?'' - What is the tournament’s legacy to the people of the host nation? Richard Lapper and Simon Kuper ask five South Africans of different backgrounds to join the debate - 10th July
 * Van Gaal created a trio of pass masters'' - Despite South America dominating the quarter-final stage of the World Cup, three of the semi-finalists are European, and their shared heritage is that of Bayern Munich’s Amsterdammer coach - 5th July
 * gambles on the ‘owner’ to deliver Cup glory'' - Lionel Messi should be the key player of these last eight days of the tournament. The only problem is how to use him - 3rd July
 * crowned World Cup losers'' - Despite strong cases made by North Korea, Cameroon and Italy, the FT has voted France the worst team of this World Cup for its all-round calamitous performances on, and off, the pitch - 26th June
 * trains will transform Europe'' - The Eurostar connected London and Paris, influencing lifestyles and changing both cities. Now, newer and faster lines are set to remake the continent - 19th June
 * England’s fans loathe their celebrity team'' - The job of any national team is to be the nation made flesh - 26th June
 * growing tribe of soccer nerds following America'' - There’s a growing American tribe of soccer nerds who can knock you out with an analysis of Manchester City’s defensive issues - 12th June
 * Cup marks a milestone in S Africa’s evolution'' - Back in 1985, the country was a hermit republic where 90% of the population was under orders to shut up. Now the country is welcoming the world - 5th June
 * new era kicks off'' - In 1993, South Africa’s fledgling post-apartheid team faced its first big test, against Nigeria. Simon Kuper recalls a time when a mixed colour squad seemed a big deal - 5th June
 * in the News: Fabio Capello'' - Simon Kuper looks at the skills the Italian coach brings to managing the England football squad - 5th June
 * cup’s changing line-up of mankind'' - The World Cup tournament provides some of the national glue once supplied by churches or royal weddings - 29th May
 * spiritual twins of Bayern Munich and Inter Milan'' - Mourinho’s Inter Milan face Van Gaal’s Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, a battle of Europe’s foremost coaches - 22nd May
 * is a world of difference in how football is played'' - There are cultural differences in the way nations play soccer and these are about to be exposed in all their glory during next month’s World Cup - 15th May
 * legend who supports all African teams – and Brazil'' - We remember Weah as the ferocious Liberian forward but he has already moved on - 1st May
 * Barcelona spawned Mourinho as its nemesis'' - As in all dysfunctional relationships, Mourinho and Barcelona know just how to hurt each other: he regularly beats Barça, and Barça pretend not to respect him - 24th April
 * football players’ salaries will keep rising'' - A club that cut wages might increase profits, but clubs pursue victories, not profits - 17th April
 * must unleash heir to lift the world cup'' - Watching Messi score four against Arsenal, you realise Argentina’s chances of winning are much better than commonly thought - 10th April
 * recognises a kindred business spirit at the Arsenal'' - Like the Oakland A’s baseball manager, Arsène Wenger knows he needs a different strategy from richer rivals - 3rd April
 * of Bayern’s ungainly schoolmaster'' - Everything about Bayern’s Dutch coach is ungainly - being a football manager is mostly a presentational job, and Van Gaal does that terribly. He has only one saving grace: he’s brilliant - 27th March
 * is long-lost France made flesh'' - The oval ball is inspiring the French in a way that Les Bleus once did – by presenting a united front. But while football was the face of urban france, rugyby is that of rural south-western villages - 20th March
 * it comes to coaching, your skin colour still matters'' - The story of race in US sports is told as if it ended in the 1960s, but a biography of basketball coach Nolan Richardson dispels that notion - 13th March
 * Red Knights cannot restore United’s innocence'' - Since the 1980s, United has passed through the same stages as the British economy itself - 6th March
 * is not about corporations. It's about clubs and communities'' - The seduction of big business and rejection of its roots has prompted the crisis in English football - 28th February (writing in The Observer)
 * gave South Africa a founding myth'' - Sport almost never changes history, but does the film ‘Invictus’ tell a truth about Mandela’s ‘long walk to freedom’ - 27th February
 * with boundless belief'' - Just when globalisation was supposed to have eroded national styles in football, here is the Dutch footballer of eternal stereotype – pint-sized Wesley Sneijder of Inter Milan who faces Chelsea in the Champions League this week -20th February
 * Prenzlauer Berg transformed'' - Soon after the wall fell, Simon Kuper lived as a student in a bullet-ridden building in east Berlin. Twenty years later, he returns to a polished neigbourhood of cafés, chic restaurants and bourgeois-bohemian ideals - 13th February
 * comes face to face with his spiritual descendents'' - While at Manchester United the midfielder helped determine what the club became - 13th February
 * football clubs no longer flock to the January sales'' - Ever fewer soccer officials believe that buying players will improve their team 6th February
 * hockey starts to slip as Canadians also fall for soccer'' - Immigrants who pour into Canada rarely bother with hockey. Most stick with soccer or even cricket - 30th January
 * up to the dangers of sitting down'' - Standing is physical activity. That’s why it can be tiring. If you stand you burn more calories than in the signature posture of our age: the motionless slouch behind a screen, snack in fist - 23rd January
 * may find their Cup not English enough'' - Many African soccer fans will ignore the African Cup of Nations, which kicks off in Angola tomorrow, preferring instead to watch the English Premier League. What does this say about nationalism in Africa - 16th January
 * may find their Cup not English enough'' - Many African soccer fans will ignore the African Cup of Nations, which kicks off in Angola tomorrow, preferring instead to watch the English Premier League. What does this say about nationalism in Africa - 9th January
 * is the price of a ‘clásico’'' - Even fans of small clubs enjoy imbalance. They relish the David vs Goliath encounters. Much of the point of supporting Almería, or Sevilla, comes from resenting the Big Two - 2nd January



All articles: 2009

 * public knows what it takes to forgive a Tiger'' - The good news for Woods is that there is a ritual of exoneration: the ‘confession cure’ - 19th December
 * that Americans can still afford'' - College football doesn’t exist to make universities richer or better. Its job is to give Americans happiness and a sense of belonging - 12th December
 * strategy to get beneath the Messi flowerpot'' - Twice before it has had the world’s best young footballer. Both left town prematurely - 5th December
 * World Cup is no economic boon for South Africa'' - Every big sports tournament tells a story that transcends sport. For South Africans, it’s about the economy. But will the 2010 tournament enrich the nation’s poor - 28th November
 * love of statistics taking over football'' - The search is still on for the best data to evaluate players and the holy grail would be discovering the key to victory - 21st November
 * throw cash around in quest for true love'' - In Abu Dhabi’s sport ‘strategy’, the F1 race is meant to be a tourist ad. Sport must help keep the emirate rich forever - 31st October
 * cooking and triangles for Barca’s victorious youth'' - Many youth academies are ruled by brutes, but Barcelona’s coaches talk like traditional Catholic mothers. In this family, the sons come home for supper, study hard and behave - 24th October
 * hermit kingdom summons the spirit of ’66'' - North Korea’s football players appeared to have dismissed goal-scoring as bourgeois individualism - 17th October
 * Argentina chose ‘ganas’ and ‘pibes’ over winning'' - Maradona was chosen as coach because the football team had to be the nation made flesh - 10th October
 * the fifth age, most are merely average players'' - If humans will soon routinely live to be 100, is there any hope for sporting triumphs after 40? If there is not, asks Simon Kuper, then what is the role of sport in the downhill phase of life? - 3rd October
 * abandons the fantasy that it is a business'' - Clubs are immortal chiefly because creditors dare not pull the plug. The brands are strong enough to cow banks and taxmen. And so clubs can incur debts without fear - 26th September
 * bidders prepare to dash for the finishing line'' - In the past it was easier to predict a winner, as some bids were terrible or incompetently presented - 19th September
 * the long game pays off for FC Barcelona'' - Barcelona’s economic model works in good times and bad: it made profits while winning nothing in 2008, and made profits while winning the Treble last season - 12th September
 * to drink from the poisoned chalice and prosper'' - Fabio Capello has created a new template for England managers. For the benefit of future England managers, here are his secrets - 5th September
 * world war was just not cricket for the British'' - It would be mad to minimise the loss and devastation of that or any other war. But many Britons spent much of it thinking harder about football than fighting - 29th August
 * Federer: his twins could improve his game'' - A father is presumably less likely to be out at 4am expending energy on other causes - 15th August
 * to end our deluded obsession with club managers'' - The fact is that players’ salaries alone almost entirely determine football results - 8th August
 * Edge: Sport pushes at the final frontier'' - The evolution of sport has limits - 1st August
 * Europe’s best football clubs hail from the provinces'' - Almost all of Europe’s best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies - 1st August
 * Google tells us about the global obsession with sport'' - The country that devotes the highest proportion of its searches to David Beckham is Burma - 25th July
 * footballers need support on and off the pitch'' - In recent years a new animal has appeared inside English clubs: the player liaison officer, whose job is to help new players settle - 18th July
 * rise and fall of the British sporting aristocracy'' - The Brits originally did not see the point of playing sports against foreigners. Then, later, they took control - 13th July
 * flawed sportsmen became a thing of the past'' - Modern sport is so demanding that you can’t do it occasionally. You have to live it and nothing else - 11th July
 * scandals likely to lead each stage of the Tour'' - The Tour de France starts on Saturday, but you’d barely notice it. No one is talking about the legendary race, and figures show that doping is finally destroying it - 4th July
 * how to play dad on the sports field'' - Playing or watching sport is how men bond with people they don’t want to talk to - 27th June
 * of dreams and drama take centre stage'' - When Rod Sheard began building sports stadiums in the 1970s, somebody said to him: “What do you need an architect for?” Sports architects get more respect now - 20th June
 * heroes still need to score on the likeability charts'' - Being nice matters, especially for great sportsmen. It is something Cristiano Ronaldo may eventually find out - 13th June
 * mindset keeps South Africa playing ticky-ticky'' - The typical foreign coach lands in South Africa saying that the football players already have great technique but lack discipline. But the fans and players don’t want discipline - 6th June
 * Iniesta shows why technique trumps tenacity'' - In Rome, Andres Iniesta – whom Wayne Rooney calls “the best player in the world at the moment” – seemed to float past United players, his yellow boots barely marking the grass - 30th May
 * to win that elusive French title: Federer’s tip sheet'' - The Swiss has won every grand slam but this one. Simon Kuper says the 27-year-old has few chances left, and so solicited advice from Bjorn Borg, Mats Wilander and Serena Williams - 23rd May
 * could be the best football match in the world, ever'' - According to the theory developed by a German sports writer, the Barcelona and Manchester United game could be more than memorable - 16th May
 * more to life than tennis, says Serena Williams'' - Catching up with her, Simon Kuper finds it’s hard to talk about tennis. These sisters do it on the side. In a sporting world of monomaniacs, they embody the Victorian ideal of the dilettante athlete - 9th May
 * football’s great storyteller honoured in stone'' - The story of Hans Hollander, the Jewish sports broadcaster who died in the Holocaust and has finally received the recognition he deserves, is tragically typical of the Dutch war - 2nd May
 * reluctant to talk up his golfing heroics'' - The Argentinian winner of golf’s Masters is a man who believes more in the precision of his game than in the power of words - 25th April
 * Xavi quietly became Barcelona’s new pass master'' - The Spanish central midfielder, who drives on both of the world’s best football teams, should win the award for Europe’s most under-appreciated footballer - 18th April
 * will not end England’s rule of football'' - In football, if nowhere else, the English still rule and will strongly resist any attempts at regulation dreamt up by Michel Platini, president of the European football association - 11th April
 * finds room for the beautiful game'' - Fifty per cent of Australians are said to be interested in soccer, more than follow either rugby code, and only a fraction behind cricket and Aussie rules - 4th April
 * rebellion of English football’s Muhammad Ali'' - The new film disappoints, but trapped somewhere inside it is a great story: of Brian Clough as the British Ali. Both men charged at their society head-on – and both got hurt - 28th March
 * life'' - Josep “Pep” Guardiola has led Barca to footballing triumph. The next step is sainthood - 21st March
 * parents and fantasies that last for life'' - Being a professional athlete is a normal childhood fantasy. Thanks to overparenting, those children get to live it out - 14th March
 * and greed combine to restore old colonial order'' - It was the same risk appetite driving sport to bold new places that lured investors into emerging markets - 7th March
 * can teach bankers fair play on pay'' - Athletes barely network and are not hired based on which university they got into aged 17 - 28th February
 * mind the soccer, listen to the chatter'' - The highbrow scorn for the game that prevailed before the 1990s is dying as hierarchies of high and low culture collapse - 21st February
 * modest man at Chelsea'' - After Hiddink led Korea to the World Cup semis, his dad just said: ‘Well, that wasn’t bad. Coffee?’ - 14th February
 * pop psychology - bring back superstition'' - If all else fails, try voodoo,” is a rule taught at the more progressive business schools. Now it has reached Mexican soccer fans - 7th February
 * America set for another lavish ritual of unity'' - Super Bowl Sunday, the finale of the American football season, has become an American tribal ritual to rank with Christmas and Thanksgiving - 24th January
 * spies a wilier Federer set to reclaim Melbourne'' - Mats Wilander is the insider’s insider who can explain tennis to outsiders, in rapid-fire speech that makes you wonder if he really is Swedish - 17th January


 * Haunted by the ghosts of apartheid - White South Africans do brilliantly at sport, and the blacks badly. In South Africa, as in the rest of the world, sport favours the rich - 9th January 2009



All articles: 2008

 * Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? - A fantastically erudite account of how and why the British created modern sport - 15th December 2008
 * Teams should think twice before shedding their fat players - Ronaldo, once the greatest footballer on earth, now has the belly of late-phase Elvis Presley. Despite this, Corinthians in his native Brazil have signed him - 12th December 2008
 * India can fight the flab by gorging on other games - As Calcutta fêtes Diego Maradona, it’s another sign that India, sport’s final frontier, has begun playing the world’s games - 5th December 2008
 * Winning book depresses value of writing prize - Marcus Trescothick’s book describes how cricket – like many other modern sports – eats its young, with burn-outs being common - 28th November 2008
 * Chicago can be an Olympic kind of town - With Barack Obama’s election as American president, the Windy City has surged ahead of its rivals to host the 2016 Games - 21st November 2008
 * Dealmaker who sees beyond silverware - Harris, once a poor kid supporting Manchester United, later chief executive of HSBC’s investment bank, has brokered five takeovers in the Premier League - 14th November 2008
 * Maradona’s chance as a national coach - Of course Argentina shouldn’t have let Diego Maradona coach its football team. He won’t last long in the post - 7th November 2008
 * Football cops shun tear gas - Several dozen burly men are gathered in Amsterdam to plan for this season’s matches and new ways of treating fans - 31st October 2008
 * Candidates tackle political football - A politician’s relationship to sport is a window on to his soul. This is particularly true in the US, because Americans have so many sports to choose from - 24th October 2008
 * Notables from the margin - American sport exists largely to tell allegorical stories about America. Dave Zirin overturns them in People’s History of Sports in the United States - 17th October 2008
 * Wags lyrical - It’s strange to think that “Wag” – the acronym for footballers’ wives and girlfriends – entered the Oxford English Dictionary only last year. Already Wags seem as traditionally English a concept as out-of-town supermarkets or chicken vindaloo - 10th October 2008
 * Iceman Borg melteth - The silent tennis player with the 1,000-mile stare now chats and laughs like a cocktail-party guest. Indeed, he regards the young Borg with wonder, as if he were another person - 3rd October 2008
 * Fab four born in soccer’s most fertile week - On September 22 1976 a great footballer was born in Rio. “Do you know who Ronaldo was named after?” his father asked the writer Frans Oosterwijk years later. “After the doctor who closed off his mother’s tubes after his birth. Ha, ha. Doctor Ronaldo, his name was.” - 26th September 2008
 * Anelka’s alternative pose off the pitch - Anelka’s personality has impeded him from reaching the heights his body deserves. The personality also arguably cost his club, Chelsea, last season’s Champions League final - 12th September 2008
 * Spain’s new nationalism - The country’s improbable run of sporting triumphs has revealed a new Spanish nationalism. And sport itself is changing Spain - 5th september 2008
 * A festival of fraternisation that gets too friendly - For athletes, the Olympics really is the festival of international fraternisation it’s cracked up to be - 1st August 2008
 * The eternal games - An impressive quintet of surveys shows how the Olympics have grown so all-consuming that they now eat their competitors and the host cities (book reviews) - 28th July 2008
 * Bird’s Nest allows Beijing to prove its mettle - Jacques Herzog, a thin shaven-headed Swiss architect, sits eating dry brown bread in his group’s offices off a quiet square in Basel. This is his home. It was in kindergarten in Basel that Herzog met his future architectural partner, Pierre de Meuron, and in Basel that they first designed a stadium - 25th July 2008
 * Relief for English cousins as family makes up - On the phone from Munich, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is talking about the “football family”. Rummenigge, once a great German footballer, now chairs the new European Club Association, which represents 103 leading European clubs. “The ECA must be in on all decisions in the football family,” says Rummenigge, who is also chairman of Bayern Munich. “There were big irritations in the past. These irritations are happily over.” - 18th July 2008
 * Sisterly love - As the Williams sisters recalled once on The Oprah Winfrey Show, their father told them when they were children: “Go ahead, pick a tournament you want to win.” Venus, the elder sister by 15 months, chose Wimbledon. Then it was Serena’s turn. “Wimbledon,” she said. Their father Richard ordered Serena to pick another one, but it was already too late - 4th July 2008



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