David Goldblatt, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award delivers a lecture entitled “The Game at the End of the World: Football in the Twenty First Century".
30th November 2016, 19:45, Great Hall, Durham Castle
Football’s global ascent appears more vertiginous than ever. In the last decade alone the Chinese politburo has decreed national and footballing development synonomous, Qatar has made the game the very centre of its foreign and domestic economic policy, and when Russia hosts the 2018 World Cup three of the BRICS will have hosted the last three World Cups - the world's most popular concentrated and collective moments. From Ukraine and Turkey to Egypt and Tunisia, football ultras have emerged as the spearhead of progressive and popular uprisings, while across Eastern and central Europe they increasingly provide the street muscle of neo-fascist and activist movements. Why? In the The Game at the End World David Goldblatt explores how the making and meanings of global football no longer merely reflect the course of globalisation, but have become an element in shaping its trajectories.
David Goldblatt was born in London in 1965, and now lives in Bristol, the Bermuda Triangle of football success.
In 2015 he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for The Game of Our Lives:The Meaning and Making of English Football and the Sports Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards for his article for The Guardian Long Read, The prison where murderers play for Manchester United.
His most recent book is The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, published in 2016 by Macmillan in the UK and WW Norton in the US. His most recent teaching post was as Visiting Professor at Pitzer College, Los Angeles.
