When faced with the corrosive commercialism, high-level corruption, and sometimes deadly violence that surround soccer, better known as football, it’s hard to blame fans who turn away in disgust. Obscene ticket prices and an unequal division of matches across the host countries of this year’s men’s World Cup aren’t helping. In The Game at the End of the World (Restless Books, 2026), translated wonderfully by Francisco Cantú, Juan Villoro (b. 1956, Mexico City) brings to the beautiful game his thorough and detailed research, noteworthy personal experience as a football reporter and color commentator, and an unfailing sense of which stories are the most compelling and significant for understanding the game, everyone involved in it, and the societies whose cultures and values it reflects and shapes. 

Villoro’s book describes an array of football’s darker moments, ranging from the relentless chicanery involved in selecting World Cup hosts to the shocking but emblematic moment when Henry Kissinger played a role in pressuring Perú to lose a decisive 1978 World Cup match against host country Argentina. Despite its candid look at football’s problems, The Game will probably make fans defy logic and continue following their favorite teams and players or enjoy football for the first time. This inspiration comes from Villoro’s profound insights and supreme prose more than the game he describes and analyzes, which is a topic Villoro has written about extensively over decades. (English-language readers who haven’t already done so will enjoy Villoro’s God Is Round, published in 2016; see WLT, May 2016, 110.) The Game is a fascinating page-turner, a must-read for fans of football in particular and sports in general. In fact, it will enthrall almost any reader because it showcases excellent writing’s rare ability to elucidate connections between individual life stories and emotions and experiences that are continually shared, debated, relived, and recounted across the world.

Villoro expresses serious reservations about football, but not about its relevance.

Villoro expresses serious reservations about football, but not about its relevance. In a section of The Game about how football eventually became a legitimate literary topic, he concludes succinctly and unexpectedly that, “While nothing is more legitimate than hating football, it’s absurd to think that it does not exert real repercussions on social life—and not always for the best.” Known for his humor, Villoro does not play hyperbole solely for laughs, and this conclusion underscores the serious doubts he has about the integrity of the game and, by extension, the world around it. He legitimizes his skepticism in the book’s critical and convincing portrayals of several factors that degrade sport, including: adding advertisements to jerseys; the “loyalty” to one’s city, team, or nation that only millionaire players can afford, when they have the choice; the scarcity of players like Miroslav Klose who would not capitalize on an illegal play; and the infuriating contradictions and effects on play produced by the video-assisted referee, or VAR. On this last topic, Villoro acerbically and perceptively writes, “Football becomes more and more like a video game each day. There is just one final obstacle to remove before its conversion is complete: the players.” His readers will also find common ground in Villoro’s concerns about the penalty-scrounging play-acting that plagues the men’s game, turning it into “a kind of theater that surprises and disappoints in equal measure.”

Villoro compares women’s football favorably to men’s, arguing that the former is where “honesty reigns.” This comparison raises an important question about why Villoro did not include more than one (outstanding) chapter about women’s football or its stars. Notably, however, the longest quotation Villoro includes in The Game is from Marion Reimers, a Mexican broadcaster who has fought to succeed in a male-dominated profession. In reference to his September 2025 interview with Reimers, Villoro writes with genuine humility: “When I listened back to the recording, the only things that were superfluous were my questions.” The next five pages of Villoro’s book consist entirely of Reimer’s words, including these tremendous insights: “it’s important to remember that the eleven women on the field also more or less represent the average daily number of femicides in Mexico”; “when the bubble bursts for men’s football, which it will because it’s unsustainable, the vultures will try to fill the void with the women’s game. Luckily, I see leaders like Spain’s Vero Boquete, whose tireless advocacy for women’s advancement allows us to hope for something else”; and “In a way, the professionalization of sport should be a contraindication.” Reimers makes this final observation in the context of her explanation of how top athletes’ suffering becomes a spectacle, which she sees as less pronounced in women’s sports. Her critique of the human price of professionalization can also serve as a guidepost when reading Villoro’s book, especially in regard to The Game’s attention to the corrupting influence of money and all kinds of politics, from local rivalries to globally powerful men, and the related, immense pressures that players experience.

Villoro’s compassionate chapter about goalkeepers focuses on the death by suicide of the German national team’s Robert Enke in November 2009, not long before the 2010 World Cup, which would have been Enke’s first. Villoro notes that in Germany, “Even though women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression, suicide rates are three times higher among men.” In this context, Villoro describes football as “a profession where results are more important than the pleasure of reaching them, a profession incapable of offering any kind of personal development beyond a player’s obligations on the pitch.” In his own formulation of a contraindication, Villoro continues by surmising that “The world of football seems too powerful and too important to consider individual destinies.” His description of Enke’s plight wholly belies this delusion. Villoro’s writing thus supports a tenet that Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues espoused, which Villoro cites: “Each individual is more important than the Milky Way.”

Villoro does not practice naïve individualism. Instead, he masterfully connects singular experiences with systemic forces beyond any one person’s control. Such stories are the focus of the chapter titled “Stickers in an Infinite Album.” (Women’s stories are missing from this chapter about complicated lives. Hope Solo, who, as Villoro mentions elsewhere in the book, holds a record for her “55-game unbeaten streak,” seems like a natural for these pages.) In this chapter, Villoro’s readers learn about the influence on football of, among other phenomena: narcotrafficking in Colombia, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and Pinochet’s dictatorship. 

Villoro masterfully connects singular experiences with systemic forces beyond any one person’s control.

Villoro is an exceptional writer. He is remarkably adept at balancing clarifying organizational techniques like analogy and parallelism with complex intricacy and paradox. The nearly twenty chapters that comprise The Game are distributed across four sections, each named for the portions of a match’s progression. This analogical structure complements one of the book’s main ideas: regardless of how much the game may be degraded, a single match can say a great deal about football in general and about the world the game belongs to. The more open-ended and nuanced elements of Villoro’s writing, which, logically, appear more at the level of the sentence than in the volume’s overall structure, befit a book that reveres and gives license to hate its main topic. 

The following example shows how Villoro develops his insights by employing unexpected juxtapositions. In a discussion of the pressure referees face and how fans often confuse self-serving indignation with accuracy, he writes: “The most entrenched fantasy in football is the expectation of objectivity from a person whose every action is judged subjectively.” In this concise and fluid sentence, Villoro exposes the truth of fans’ bias against the backdrop of their righteous pronouncements of and opportunistic belief in objectivity, subtly underscoring the deception whose pernicious influence on football he decries throughout the book. It’s reasonable to surmise, nonetheless, that Villoro’s writing about football is so good because he still loves the game and the stories it inspires so much.

University of Maryland