Simon Kuper
Financial Times columnist on politics, society and football, at the paper from 1994; author of Soccernomics (2009), Chums (2022) and Impossible City (2024), and a British-French writer who lives in Paris.
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 5 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
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Loved Goalkeepers Are Different
As a teenager I must have read it five or eight times, and I've subsequently met other people who've had that experience too. It was a book about what you always dreamed of, of being a professional footballer, but it was rendered with grittiness and accuracy and it just has the pace of a really good novel.
fivebooks.com 30 Sept 2016
Recommends Only A Game?
This is a cult book among those of us who like reading about football. It came out in the 1970s when really no one was publishing books about football.
fivebooks.com 30 Sept 2016
Recommends Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer
This is about Holland and Dutch football and what makes it special. I grew up in Holland, so I have a particular tie to this book.
fivebooks.com 30 Sept 2016
What others say about Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer →
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Recommends All Played Out
Pete Davies really started off English football literature, and when I was going around London publishers in 1991, trying to sell them my first football book, people said to me, 'Oh yes, we know football books sell, because Pete Davies wrote this very good book called All Played Out.'
fivebooks.com 30 Sept 2016
Loved Fever Pitch
It's not depressing! It's very funny and was also almost the book that started this all off.
fivebooks.com 30 Sept 2016
Where they publish
Blog Simon Kuper at the Financial Times Weekly column on politics, society and football
Link verified 31 Oct 2026.
x.com @KuperSimon Posts on politics, Paris and football
Link verified 31 Oct 2026.
Bluesky @simonkuper.bsky.social Posts on politics, Paris and football
Link verified 31 Oct 2026.
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