• Damola Durosomo

Focusing on sports allegiance to Nigeria, offered a break from pondering over all of its social ills.

• Gianpaolo Baiocchi

In 1982, Reinaldo, a striker prone to making black power salutes, was left out out of Brazil's World Cup squad.

• Ron Krabill
• Danny Hoffman

Watching the World Cup with a young Nigerian professional footballer in Seattle, U.S.

• Lindsey Green-Simms
• Brenna Munro

Uzodinma Iweala’s new novel about a closeted gay Nigerian comes out as we're witnessing a burgeoning African—and specifically Nigerian—literary attention to same-sex sexuality.

• Heleen Debeuckelaere

The success of Belgium's national football team as a key site for political struggles over identity, race and immigration.

• Philip Janzen

Soccer came to Ghana with “a Jamaican educationist." That's the popular version. It's not entirely correct.

• Zain R Mian

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: colonial and neocolonial rule cannot survive without the work that prisons perform.

• Kangsen Feka Wakai

At Italia 1990, Cameroon pulled off the greatest upsets in football in the history of the World Cup--against Maradona's Argentina.

• Steven Friedman

One of the weirder displays of Pan-Africanism descended on Johannesburg’s Soccer City on the evening of July 2, 2010.

• Alex Hochuli

Brazilians have a complicated relationship to the Seleção, clouded by political crises, the parliamentary coup and the decline of a national style.

• Sean Henry Jacobs
• Sebastian Abbot

Two of Africa's standout talents at Russia 2018--Moussa Wague and Francis Uzoho--were shaped by a football academy in Qatar. A new book tells that story.

• Matthew J. Smith

In Jamaica, which is always in need of healthy distraction, football is king and everyone at heart is a Brazilian.

• Todd Cleveland

Watching the World Cup in Finland and Estonia. Sample: "Finns just aren’t very good at, nor are they voracious consumers of the game." As for Estonians, read on.

• Bhakti Shringarpure

The friendship of the poets Syl Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare is the subject of the road movie documentary, "The Poets."

• Lina Benabdallah

In the 1970s, Algiers served as refuge to African Americans who confronted US racism with force and had to flee the country. Some Panthers hijacked planes.

• Ron Krabill
• Danny Hoffman

Collecting football stories that highlight the world – the African world, in this case – and making the Seattle game global in the process.

• Jesica Paola Kessler

Argentina crashed out of the 2018 World Cup. It's not Messi's fault.

• Will Youmans

The author relives his greatest World Cup moment.

• Davy Lane

Despite what happened at the 2010 World Cup, Africans have more in common with Uruguayans.

• Simon Adetona Akindes

Even VAR could not save the Africans who withered away in the first round of Russia 2018.