Memoir Paints World’s Biggest Game as Great Connector—Our Book Review

“To play is to be put into relationship with a range of interesting people—and to potentially learn how to live better.”

Tim Bascom, a writer and essayist who spent his childhood as a missionary in East Africa, applies a charismatic and deeply humanistic perspective to this story about soccer as a life companion. With the 2026 World Cup arriving at a moment of global division, his argument that football bridges the widest cultural distances feels urgent and encouraging. The book alternates between his favorite lived football experiences and short trivia excerpts on the game, mirroring how football is equally personal and universal. Now 64 and still playing twice a week in the US state of Kansas, Bascom approaches each essay from inside his lifelong relationship with football. From playing in the fields of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a child, to organizing a pickup match of bishops at Canterbury, England, to watching the 2022 World Cup final in his Kansas basement and pogo-jumping with his brother after goals, soccer created a way of belonging in places where he always felt like an outsider. Bascom writes with a deliberate ordinariness, often employing casual language. His choice of simple moments, such as pickup with locals, over grandeur moments like meeting superstars signals to readers that this game (and book) has room for them. In adopting this tone, he suggests that there is no correct way to experience this game—it simultaneously belongs to everyone and no one. Bascom’s choice to include 28 short chapters that mix anecdote and fact is excellent; the essays function as dispatches that invite readers into new worlds, replicating the very experience he describes. Each essay drops the reader into a new world, just as the game dropped him into new communities, yet pulls them out before they can take it for granted. When read together, they paint a larger portrait of football as a universal language of belonging. Ultimately, Bascom’s cross-cultural experiences position him to offer a compelling reorientation to how we consider this sport and recognize the seemingly small things that connect us to each other. He urges us to realize that perhaps what matters most about this game is not the spectacle it creates but its universal ability to become a way of life. While soccer may be Bascom’s vessel this time, it reminds us that culture is made precisely in the most ordinary shared experiences, especially those without prior shared history.