Games Without Frontiers - Softcover

A successful attempt to think through the nature of football's significance [...] What Kennedy is ultimately doing is attempting to reassert the human within the industrial machine that is modern football and, at the same time, to challenge the damaging connotations of proper football that so undermines parts of the British game. It's a difficult move to make, but Kennedy's writing is funny and sharp enough to make the theories underpinning his arguments appear simple to grasp. ---- Ian Maleney- Irish Times

Kennedy [...] treats football with the kind of serious analysis it deserves but rarely gets.--Philip Kleinfeld - Vice

It comes from a football fan and a seasoned football follower who has engaged with the game on many levels, perhaps most importantly on the terraces. The book approaches the relationship between football and theory with a genuine appreciation for both and, perhaps more importantly than anything else, shows that football is far from stupid, never innocent and nowhere near mindless [...] better than any football writing I have encountered in my own life as that unusual mix of football fan and philosopher ---- Alfie Bown - Review 31

Games Without Frontiers is a rich exploration of football in its broadest sense - not as merely a set of match results, statistics and tactical approaches but as a living social entity. -- Dan Howdon - When Saturday Comes

A New Year must-read [...] read it before January's out and the rest of the sporting year will, I can assure you, make a heap more sense ---- Mark Perryman - Morning Star

Football, we're told frequently, is in a state of crisis. A microcosm of late capitalism's free-for-all, it has become almost dystopian in its commodification, and its working-class constituency have become thoroughly alienated from the sport they grew up believing was a birthright. Games Without Frontiers seeks to interrogate this perspective by forcing us to think about what we mean when we say 'football'. Along the way, it skewers media cliches about footballers and fans, considers the sport's implications for radical politics and aesthetics, and situates the 'working-man's game' in relation to twenty-first century discussions of political authenticity. Written half as a travelogue, this book seeks to protect football from some of its would-be saviours without ever losing sight of what it means to have a fan's investment in the game.