'Football is a pleasure that hurts'

This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those who lived for football and those who died for it, Eduardo Galeano celebrates the glory of a game that - however much the rich and powerful try to control it - still retains its magic.

'The Uruguayan whose writing got right to the heart of football ... readers were never in doubt of the warmth of the blood running through his veins' Guardian

'Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia' When Saturday Comes

'Stands out like Pele on a field of second-stringers' New Yorker

Eduardo Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist and writer, widely held to be one of Latin America's most distinguished and admired literary figures. Born in Montevideo in 1940 to a modest middle-class Catholic family, Galeano published his first work - a political cartoon - in El Sol newspaper aged just fifteen. He went on to work for various weekly newspapers and magazines, and in 1971 he published his first book, the bestselling Open Veins of Latin America. Following his brief imprisonment during the Uruguayan military coup of 1973, Galeano fled the country: he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. His work - including the celebrated Memory of Fire trilogy - has been translated into twenty-eight languages, and during his liftetime Galeano's achievements as a writer were recognised with many literary prizes, including the hugely prestigious Casa de las Americas award. He died in 2015.