Born in London in 1965, David Goldblatt has dabbled with careers in medicine, politics and academia and wrote a lot of stuff about the environmental politics and the history of globalization before finally making the connections between politics and play, sport and history. In 2002 he published the World Football Yearbook a 700-page graphic atlas and encyclopaedia of global football. In 2006 he published The Ball is Round: a global history of football (Penguin 2006). He is also the author of How to Watch the Olympics

More recently he has reported for BBC Radio 4 and World Service on the politics of football in Israel, the economics of baseball in the Dominican Republic and the rise of Senegalese wrestling. He wrote the Sporting Life column in Prospect magazine and has taught at the University of Bristol and in secondary and primary schools in the city.