From FT MAGAZINE May 17, 2013

Simon Kuper: What David Moyes and Sir Alex really do

Illustration showing a football manager as a puppet master ©Luis Grañena

A fascination with football managers coexists with romantic misconceptions about what their job actually consists of

Illustration by Luis Grañena depicting the French elite ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE May 10, 2013

Simon Kuper: The French elite

France’s “énarques” weren’t trained to succeed in the world but in central Paris

Sir Alex Ferguson ©Reuters From UK May 8, 2013

Fergie offers managerial lessons for many

Despite his success, Sir Alex never kidded himself that he knew everything

Everton players, including Marouane Fellaini ©Ben Roberts From PURSUITS May 3, 2013

Everton: how the Blues made good

Why do Everton football club keep beating their richer and starrier rivals?

Illustration by Luis Grañena of a man holding a wineglass looking up at an EU flag with stars arranged as a smile ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE May 3, 2013

Simon Kuper: Smile if you’re European

It’s all relative: why it’s not so bad to be European after all

Chicago Bulls' Kirk Hinrich (L) grabs a rebound from Washington Wizards' Jason Collins (R) as Bulls' Joakim Noah looks on during the first half of their NBA basketball game in Chicago, Illinois, April 17, 2013 ©Reuters From COMMENT Apr 30, 2013

Professional sport enters 21st century

The announcement by a US basketball player that he is gay is a landmark that authorities must act on

An illustration of Queen Beatrix and her son Willem-Alexander ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 26, 2013

Simon Kuper: The Beatrix factor

It’s the end of an era as the Dutch monarch - as familiar a presence to many as their own grandmother - steps down to make way for her son

The south stand, the ‘Curva Sud’, hailing its heroes on April 21 2013. Juventus beat AC Milan 1-0 ©Mattia Zoppellaro From FT MAGAZINE Apr 26, 2013

My Juventus

Has Juve – and the whole Italian game – fallen victim to the nation’s problems itself? Andrea Agnelli, president of the legendary football club, offers an answer

An illustration depicting gay marriage ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 19, 2013

Simon Kuper: Preaching to the unconverted

The gay marriage campaign has worked chiefly because it borrows the right’s language of ‘family values’

Anwar Ibrahim ©Illustration by Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 12, 2013

Simon Kuper: A Malaysian story

An audience with Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s opposition leader, who spent six years in solitary confinement, where he read the Bible, Lao Tse and all of Shakespeare

From COMMENT Apr 5, 2013

Football’s little problem on the right wing

Paolo Di Canio is a dedicated follower of fascism – but only on the playing field

From FT MAGAZINE Apr 5, 2013

Pity the poor footballers

These tax-dodging schemes are achingly complex, even if you aren’t a kid who has just left school

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 29, 2013

Poverty: a very poor show

I’ve read columns by prisoners and by people with terminal cancer, but I’ve never seen one by someone living on benefits

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 29, 2013

A life in the sun

As owners are sought for unidentified photographs from Dutch Indonesia’s lost colony, Simon Kuper argues that western colonial nostalgia is finally being challenged by brutal facts

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 22, 2013

How social media improved writing

Texts, blogs, emails and Facebook posts are affecting other kinds of writing – mostly for the good

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 15, 2013

In praise of the outcome-driven life

In the 1980s, the seize-the-day folks started losing ground. Increasingly, it made sense to pursue long-term outcomes

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 8, 2013

Business à la française

A routine meeting or an ‘intellectual orgy’? A new bilingual guide tries to ease the stresses of Anglo-French business relationships

From COMMENT Mar 1, 2013

Stéphane Hessel, courtly campaigner

French resistance hero who inspired a new, global generation of protesters

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 1, 2013

Philip Roth and Zlatan Ibrahimović

A striker’s bestselling autobiography and the legendary novel by a great American writer both tell tales of immigrant life – and the parallels are remarkable, writes Simon Kuper

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 1, 2013

Gay marriage: telling it straight

As gay couples become more integrated, more gay families will enter a hetero world of kids’ playdates and freezing parents at Saturday morning hockey games

ABOUT SIMON

Simon KuperSimon Kuper joined the Financial Times in 1994. He ended up writing the daily currencies column and was driven out by tedium in 1998. He returned in 2002 as a sports columnist and has been there ever since, occasionally allowed out of his sports box to write about books, the Netherlands or other subjects.

Simon was born in Uganda and grew up in London, the Netherlands, the US, Sweden and Jamaica. He studied at Oxford, Harvard and the Technische Universität of West Berlin. His first book, Football Against the Enemy (1994), set him on a path of writing about sport with an anthropologist’s eye. His column in the FT tries to place sport and sportsmen within a country, a time, a society, while also being about sport itself.

E-mail simon.kuper@ft.com

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