Simon Kuper

Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.

Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.