With the World Cup taking place on the African continent this year Steve Bloomfield analyses why the game plays such an important role in today’s Africa and why they are turning out such a huge amount of world class players. A great book for setting the scene for this year's World Cup.
Football inspires competition and inflames passions nowhere as strongly as in Africa. Take the player born and raised in Congo who scored the winning goal for Rwanda against the country of his birth and promptly had his house burnt down for his trouble. Or the Kenyan football chant 'Oliech! Odinga! Obama!', which celebrates the country's star striker, its popular prime minister and its most famous adopted son. Meanwhile, the influence of African football continues to spread rapidly through Europe. Today, no Premiership team is complete without a major African star - Drogba, Essien, Toure, Adebayor, and Kanu. Countless African players are now enriching English football and becoming household names.
Steve Bloomfield was the Independent''s Africa Correspondent for the past two years, reporting from more than 20 countries in Africa. Now freelance he contributes regularly to Newsweek, Monocle and others and has published articles in GQ, Newsweek, the Melbourne Age and the Sunday Herald.
