Top 12 Books about the Football World Cup you Should Read
Most of the great football writers have contributed to the list of best books you can read about the FIFA men’s football world cup. These are suggestions which you can add to but reading any of these books will give you good memories and pictures of how the FIFA World cup has evolved from inception.
Soccer In Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
This might be the greatest football book ever written. Galeano is a massive football fan and a great poet and those two attributes combines to produce the most unique football book. Its a poetry book about football. In short, beautiful vignettes, he traces the World Cup from its origins as joyful street sport to its transformation into a commercialized spectacle, always mourning something pure that has been lost. No book better captures why the game matters to people who will never make money from it.
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football by David Goldblatt
This is the most comprehensive single-volume history of global football and unsurprisingly its 1,000 pages long. Goldblatt is one of football’s greatest historians and he maps how the World Cup emerged from scattered local traditions into the planet’s largest shared event, treating it as a mirror of industrialization, empire, and class struggle.
The Power and the Glory by Jonathan Wilson
While Goldblatt’s book is history of the world football, of which the World Cup is a very important part, this is one is purely about the Football World Cup. The best chronological account of the World Cup yet written. Wilson is a master of the history and tactics of football and he moves fluently between geopolitical context and tactical analysis — connecting Mussolini’s 1934 propaganda operation to Qatar’s sportswashing, explaining how each era’s politics shaped the football played on the pitch.
Mundiales: A South American History of the World Cup by Mark Biram & Tim Vickery
Most of the books are written from a European lens. This one is an exception. This is the story of the World Cup told from the other side of the Atlantic. Vickery and Biram mine deep South American archives to argue that the continent didn’t just win trophies — it invented the tournament’s soul, its drama, and its mythology. An essential counterbalance to a century of Eurocentric football writing.
World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments by Simon Kuper
Simon Kuper has attended every World Cup since Italia ’90 as a journalist and an anthropologist. This book is a collection of field notes covering these 9 World Cups — wry, sharp, funny, and full of uncomfortable truths about FIFA, host nations, fans and players and the circus that surrounds the football. Funny and disillusioned in equal measure, it is the most honest book about what attending a World Cup actually feels like. If you wanted to read just one book about the World Cup, I will recommend this one.
One Night in Turin by Pete Davies
While Kuper goes wide and covers 9 World Cups, Davies goes deep with one team ( England ) at the 1990 World Cup. He had unique access inside the England camp for Italia ’90 and used that fly on the wall opportunity to produce a book something the sport had never seen — unfiltered, unglamorous and completely real. A time capsule of the last World Cup before satellite money changed everything, it captures Gazza’s tears, the dressing-room dynamics, and a nation briefly united around a game.
Answered Prayers: England and the 1966 World Cup by Duncan Hamilton
Duncan Hamilton is possibly my favourite sports writer and you should read all his books. His writing is beautiful and genuinely moving. This is another masterpiece from him about the most important sporting moment in his country’s history. He watched England beat West Germany as an eight-year-old boy, then rewatched the final during Covid lockdown and finally understood what Ramsey and his players never did — what came next. The result is a 30-year portrait of English football’s greatest achievement and its slow, painful unravelling: the blazered FA, the players taken for granted, the manager shamefully discarded. It reads in 400 pages like a novel; it lands like a tragedy.
1970 — The Greatest Show on Earth by Andrew Downie
For every football romantic, Mexico 1970 is the greatest World Cup of all time. Andrew Downie’s book is sourced almost completely from players’ testimonies and is possibly the only such book — an oral account of the World Cup. The players share wonderful stories and the book does justice to this beautiful World Cup.
Blood on the Crossbar: The Dictatorship’s World Cup by Rhys Richards
If you thought Qatar or Russia was bad, read about Argentina in 1978. This was a World Cup staged by a military dictatorship as a propaganda exercise, with torture centres operating blocks from the stadium. Richards exposes this in forensic detail — a chilling investigation into sportswashing at its most brutal, and human resilience at its most extraordinary.
The Beautiful Team: In Search of Pelé and the 1970 Brazilians by Garry Jenkins
This book is about the 11 members of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup winning squad — considered by many to be the greatest World Cup team ever. In this, decades after the 1970 World Cup, Jenkins tracks down the surviving members of Brazil’s mythic squad and creates beautifully evocative, human portraits of these ageing legends. Their greatness and youth has been eaten away by age but the legend stays on forever. A masterpiece of sports archaeology that strips away nostalgia to find something more moving underneath.
1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield
While the 1970 Brazilian side are the greatest winners, the 1982 team are the sports’ most beloved losers. Even more so than the 1974 Dutch side and the 1954 Hungarians. Telê Santana’s Brazil played football so beautiful that losing in the second round left a deeper mark on history than most winners’ medals ever will. They remain football’s greatest what if — how would have teams played football had the great entertainers won. We all know how it changed when they lost. Horsfield’s book is requeim to Santana and his beautiful team and bold philosophy.
The Match: The Story of Italy v Brazil by Piero Trellini
This book is an Italian’s passionate counter to the argument that Italy were the devils who were plain lucky in slaying the beautiful team in 1982. And trust me, it makes a great case for it. Piero Trellini spent decades researching that single afternoon — Italy 3, Brazil 2, Spain 1982. The result reads like a thriller — Paolo Rossi’s extraordinary redemption arc and a manager’s trust in his team and his precise tactical adjustments that ended Brazil’s era of football art.
