Africa Is a Country | 03.04.2026 05:00
There are few things that have been so consistently political as football. This is true of the sport’s early folk origins, in which village-wide kick-abouts became an excuse to destroy fences threatening to enclose common agricultural land. It is true of the mid-nineteenth century, when—expunged of its plebeian elements and codified along a clear set of universal rules—football turned into a tool to enlist future members of Britain’s ruling class in the project of empire and initiate them to the amateur athletic cult of the Victorian gentleman.
