In professor David Goldblatt’s classroom at Pitzer College, a football match is more than 90 minutes on the pitch. Through his courses, ranging from “The Olympics: History and Politics” to “Soccer and Society: Fascism, Communism and Democracy,” students learn to see sport not just as entertainment, but as a window into the forces shaping the world around them.
Goldblatt is one of the leading scholars on football — or for philistine Americans, “soccer” — and a renowned author of many books, most famously “The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer.” He brings an expansive level of experience to his classes, both as a diehard fan of the Tottenham Hotspurs and as a storied academic.
For Goldblatt, his academic fascination with football and sport in general began where it did for so many fans: at a stadium.
“When we got [to the stadium], I came out, and I looked at the gathering crowd, and I’m in the middle of a PhD in sociology, and the scales fell from my eyes,” Goldblatt said. “Structure and agency, performative identities, invented traditions, hidden rules and norms, social occupation of space. This is unbelievable, and every sociological neuron in my brain exploded.”
“Structure and agency, performative identities, invented traditions, hidden rules and norms, social occupation of space,” David Goldblatt said. “This is unbelievable, and every sociological neuron in my brain exploded.”
That moment quickly turned into something more. Goldblatt, having seen the lack of academic attention surrounding the game, set out to develop an ambitious “atlas of football” with diagrams, bar charts, maps of cities with fan bases and old stadiums in the late 1990s.
“I ended up selling the idea to a big publishing company, and two years later, we published the ‘World Football Yearbook,’” Goldblatt said. “That was sort of my training. Once I published that, I quit academia, because at that point, I was now ready to take the next step, which was to write the global history.”
The moment of realization that inspired “The Ball is Round” is exactly what Goldblatt now chases in his classes at Pitzer College, helping other students see the same hidden scene behind the game.
“In my football classes, I always tell that story of the scales falling from my eyes, and I explain how we’re going to put on a whole bunch of different spectacles, anthropological, geographical, historic, and football’s going to look different at the end of this,” Goldblatt said. “It’s about giving folks the tools conceptually to tackle this stuff, but also just to help the same scales fall from people’s eyes. I find that once the scales are gone, all the students bring knowledge and skills from many other disciplines they’re studying.”
For Pranav Singhvi CM ’27, this new way of looking at sports is exactly what Goldblatt has brought out in his class, “Soccer and Society: Fascism, Communism and Democracy.”
“I’ve started to think football is a political movement,” Singhvi said. “[This class] is starting to make me think about what goes behind the scenes, how parties play out, how the money is involved and how different shareholders or parties benefit from the game.”
That transformation is central to Goldblatt’s teaching philosophy. He is less concerned with the details of who won what and more focused on giving students tools to think critically. In his classroom, sport becomes a gateway into broader political and economic questions.
“What I hope my students come away with from my courses is not so much the details of who, what, when and why, but a different kind of vision on these things,” Goldblatt said. “In the 21st century, it’s just really more difficult not to see. The global sports industry is 2% of global GDP. In my classes, the thing I think about is how to think about the interconnections between the wider world.”
Goldblatt points to the growing influence of money in the game, driven by organizations like the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), as something that detracts from the experience, even though it has become part of modern football. Phillipe Krasnov PO ’29 felt this exact barrier when trying to buy tickets for the upcoming World Cup.
“At the end of the day, I think it is really disheartening that the World Cup has come to this. I think the beauty of football is its accessibility, so it’s sad to see these barriers prevent so many fans from seeing this amazing event,” Krasnov said.
At the same time, Goldblatt resists reducing sport to politics and economics alone. Beneath the billion-dollar valuations and global spectacles, he emphasizes the more pure, fundamental component of sport: play.
“In the end, cut all the bullshit,” Goldblatt said. “Sport. These are people playing, having fun. That is a very, very, very, very important thing. Part of what it is to be a human being is to play in the widest sense.”
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