A review of Vasilis Kostakis, Beyond the Final Whistle: Football for a Better World (London: Pluto, 2025).
Maybe I have to reconsider my treatment of new soccer titles by left-wing publishers. I always get excited and am happy to review them, but I’m probably not the right person. It is almost impossible not to draw comparisons to my book Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics, which first came out in 2010. But while the question of what the latest left-wing soccer release contains that Soccer vs. the State doesn’t contain might be relevant for the self-involved author, it is not what most others care about. I try not to let the self-involvement impact my reviews too much, but it’s fair to let readers know that it ain’t that easy. Well, so much for turning the opening paragraph of this review into a long-winded disclaimer.
The left-wing soccer release I’m looking at this time is Beyond the Final Whistle: Football for a Better World, which has just come out with Pluto Press. The author is Vasilis Kostakis, an academic from Greece, now based in Estonia.
I enjoyed Kostakis’s prologue, in which he talks about his footballing past as well as his brother, a promising talent who moved to the Netherlands to pursue a professional career only to be stopped brutally by repeated injuries.
I enjoyed the following introduction a little less, but probably only because it opens with an unsubstantiated claim. Kostakis writes that “this book presents a novel perspective on football by exploring its potential as a catalyst for social change.” Now, I understand the pressure to captivate one’s audience and all, but the premise is simply false. Even in English, there are nowadays dozens of texts (books, magazines, articles) that look at football’s “potential as a catalyst for social change,” and if you add other languages, there are literally hundreds. In the German-speaking world alone, five to ten relevant book titles are published every year.
So, if the perspective is not novel, is there anything else that’s novel in Beyond the Final Whistle? The book is neither a political analysis of soccer nor an activist manifesto. It’s sort of a low-key, high-brow book – easy to read yet catering to an intellectual audience. The main protagonists are predictable: Albert Camus (a goalkeeper in his youth who once said that “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to football”) is joined by the likes of Sócrates (a physician, gifted footballer, and fighter for Brazilian democracy) and Monty Python (the legendary British comedy troupe whose 1972 “philosophy match” between German and Greek thinkers is featured prominently in Beyond the Final Whistle). The book also contains plenty of references to art: soccer as art, soccer and art, and art as art.
With regard to the form, we are looking at an essay – or a collection of essays perhaps, as the twenty-three (usually succinct) sections focus on a variety of things often only marginally connected to soccer: the “new economy,” Ursula Le Guin, and, for whatever reason, the Chicago Bulls (for the uninitiated: that’s basketball, not soccer). Sometimes, one gets the impression that Kostakis is using soccer as a background to write about things he always wanted to write about. Well, fair enough, it’s his book and he can do what he wants. And the writing is by no means bad. Plus, there are parts that contain info that even seasoned left-wing soccer readers might not be familiar with; the section about John Kundereri Moriarty, an aboriginal soccer hero from Australia, probably stands out.
At the end, Kostakis promises a climax, suggesting to answer the question of “How to change the world through football.” He doesn’t, at least not beyond abstract assertions such as soccer contributing to “a new world … founded on solidarity, cooperation, and sharing.” Then again, this is a tough question to answer. Beyond the Final Whistle remains a pleasant and worthwhile read, and the illustrations by Yorgos Konstantinou are fantastic!
Together with friends, Kostakis is trying to carry his hopes further in the Another Football project. Laudable.
Gabriel Kuhn
(April 30, 2025)