From FT MAGAZINE May 26, 2012

The posh-ing of English football

The posh-ing of English football illustration ©Luis Grañena

The national team is becoming middle-class. It hasn’t been so upmarket since public schoolboys disappeared from the side circa 1900

From COMMENT May 25, 2012

Didier Drogba is a case study in mobility

Increasingly, the biggest salaries are outside football’s traditional heartland

From FT MAGAZINE May 19, 2012

How aid got smarter

Academics, donors and some aid agencies have begun measuring what works. Development is becoming a science

An illustration by Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE May 12, 2012

Take the plunge and emigrate

Emigration is probably the quickest way of improving your career prospects, both now and for your lifetime

An illustration depicting French schools ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE May 5, 2012

A nation of pessimists

The French fear change because they have best way of life on earth

From COMMENT May 4, 2012

The FA opts for compromise: a cosmopolitan Englishman

The new England football manager is cultured but lacks relevant qualifications

Players of Accrington Stanley and Fulham ©Reuters From SPECIAL REPORTS May 3, 2012

The businesses that refuse to die

It is not unusual for companies to be consumed by economic crises or other calamities, but football clubs have an extraordinary capacity for survival

Illustration of football fans ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 28, 2012

Why we follow football

Going to a match is one of the comforting rituals that carry you through life. Yet this ritual is poorly understood

Illustration showing an old man on top of the world ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 21, 2012

Why CEOs shouldn’t run the world

Running an economy – let alone a country – is of a different order of complexity to running a firm

illustration of David Cameron as an elite ruler ©Luis Grañena From FT MAGAZINE Apr 14, 2012

Why the old schools still rule

If voters wanted to be led by proletarians, they would elect proletarians. Cameron isn’t in Downing Street by accident

From COMMENT Apr 13, 2012

End football’s cult of Corporate Man

The sport must rememember it is part of the entertainment industry

From FT MAGAZINE Apr 7, 2012

Let’s lose the religious labels

The words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are overused and have become catch-all terms to explain everything

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 30, 2012

#Revolutionwhatrevolution?

How the global addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet and peaceful

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 23, 2012

Reasons to be cheerful. Seriously

Life has ceased to be quite so poor, nasty, brutish and short – although you wouldn’t know it from watching TV news

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 23, 2012

Can this man fix Fifa?

Next week, Mark Pieth will propose radical reforms that could make the ‘football family’ respectable once more. But will Fifa listen?

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 16, 2012

The French media: in bed with power

Nicolas Sarkozy’s links with press barons are almost hilarious, with the entanglements of a Brazilian soap opera

From FT MAGAZINE Mar 9, 2012

Eternal music from a literary quartet

George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell are rarely discussed together, and yet are best understood as a cohort

From FT MAGAZINE Feb 24, 2012

Meet Europe’s new scapegoats

After September 11 the Muslims took a beating. Now it’s the turn of eastern and southern Europeans

From FT MAGAZINE Feb 17, 2012

Why I’m happy to be a parasite

Much of the journalism profession is motivated by a desire to tell stories without concern for the people in them, but someone’s got to do it

From UK Feb 12, 2012

Tackling racism tops football’s agenda

Cameron to hold meeting on discrimination

About Simon

Simon Kuper Simon 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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