It was at this juncture that “Fever Pitch,” Nick Hornby’s memoir about his obsessive support for Arsenal, was published, just in time to attract a large, educated readership newly interested in the game. Hornby accepted the post-Hillsborough reforms, reasoning that “the end of terrace culture” would not mean “the end of noise and atmosphere and all the things that make football memorable.” Yet his book also served as a rebuke to a new kind of soccer engagement. He identified himself as “an Arsenal fan first and a football fan second,” and wrote with detachment verging on contempt about “the middle-class football fans” who admire the “cerebral attributes” of certain players. Some people might applaud the virtuosity of opposition players, or lose themselves in “the patterns and rhythms of football without caring about the score,” but that wasn’t fandom. Arsenal’s particular style of play “is beside the point for most of us,” he wrote. “I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don’t go for entertainment.” Nonetheless, football was becoming subsumed into the entertainment industry. “Fever Pitch” soon became a movie, with Colin Firth in the Hornby role.

When I first got into soccer, as a child, in the early nineties, it looked as if I were doomed to be one of those people who, in Roy Hattersley’s phrase, inherit “their fathers’ frustrations.” Initially, it didn’t seem as if the frustration would be too great: in 1992, my dad’s team, Leeds United, won the First Division, just before it became the Premier League. But the next season Manchester United emerged as the dominant side, destroying the competition week after week. A reporter and Manchester United fan named Jim White sensed that history was being made, and decided to write a book about the team’s progress. White was a family friend, so when the team played Leeds he took me along.

In his book, “Are You Watching, Liverpool?” (1995), White wrote about my eight-year-old self, expressing surprise that I enjoyed the game even though Leeds lost: “I looked at him and saw the picture of awed excitement his face had become and said that I thought he wasn’t really a Leeds fan.” He’d noticed how much I loved a song the Manchester fans sang in praise of one of their players, and suggested that my avowed support of Leeds was just a way of sparing my father’s feelings. It didn’t occur to him that I was developing an appetite for the sport per se—that I’d have considered it ungrateful to dismiss the winning side’s attacking flair simply because my father happened to have come from a different northern city. My dispassionate leanings were vindicated a couple of months later, when the U.S. hosted the World Cup. England had failed to qualify, but how much did that really matter, when you had Italy, Holland, Brazil? Like Liebling in Finland, I was free to admire the legerdepied.

The Heysel Stadium disaster, May, 1985. Before the start of the European Cup Final—between Liverpool and the Turin team Juventus, at the Heysel Stadium, in Brussels—a charge of Liverpool fans caused a wall to collapse, killing thirty-nine people, most of them Juventus supporters. In the aftermath, English clubs were banned from European competitions for five years. Photograph by Gianni Foggia / AP / REX / Shutterstock

TV certainly played a role in forging my untribal attitude. Like most families, we didn’t have Murdoch’s satellite package, but we still caught highlights of Premiership games on the BBC’s weekly roundup “Match of the Day,” and, for the first time, it was easy to watch soccer being played outside the British Isles. After Gazza went to play for an Italian club, Channel 4, a terrestrial station, acquired the broadcast rights for matches from the Italian Serie A, which had many of the best players. The game itself was becoming more fluid and watchable—the safe but boring play of passing the ball back to the hands of one’s own goalkeeper had been outlawed—and the presentation of the game on TV was growing in sophistication: more cameras, more pundits, more replays, and other studio gimmicks, all serving to heighten the drama of games and rivalries. The top clubs, flush with TV money, signed expensive foreign stars in ever greater numbers. (Today, almost seventy per cent of the players in England’s Premier League come from abroad.)

In his book, Jim White deplored the ongoing process of “commercialization.” But he seems not to have anticipated the long-term impact of consumerism on the traditional habits of fandom. The “importation” of players wasn’t unprecedented, but television and the game’s embrace of capitalism were always bound to erode its local foundations. Within a few years, White was lamenting the fact that his beloved Manchester United had become the team of choice for soccer moms in California.

Globalizing impulses helped bring about a flourishing of neutralism. In “Soccer in Sun and Shadow,” an influential collection of reflections and vignettes which appeared in English in 1997, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano defined himself as “a beggar for good soccer.” When it occurs, he wrote, “I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.” The game replaced the team as the subject of fandom, the source of pleasure and pain, the ethos to live by.

A number of recent books, timed for the World Cup, adopt a similar approach and add a playful pop-philosophical veneer. Laurent Dubois, a historian at Duke, where he teaches a course in “soccer politics,” presents his book “The Language of the Game” (Basic) as a “love letter” or “offering” to football, which he defines as “probably the most universal language on the planet” and “the most tantric of sports.” In “What We Think About When We Think About Soccer” (Penguin), the British philosopher Simon Critchley attempts to provide “a phenomenology of the beautiful game . . . a poetics of football experience,” and advocates a position that he defines variously as “absolute distance,” “aesthetic distance,” and “a kind of self-forgetfulness.”

Both books tend toward the gnomic. For Dubois, the face of the French player Lilian Thuram, after scoring, confronts us with a fundamental question: “What, exactly, is a goal?” Critchley, riffing on Thomas Nagel’s famous thought experiment about the unknowability of a bat’s perspective, asks, “What is it like to be a ball?” Dubois and Critchley share a favorite modern player, the scintillating French midfielder Zinedine Zidane. Graceful yet dynamic, combusting even in repose, Zidane is best known for acts of virtuosity and extremity: a move known as the roulette, in which he pulled the ball backward with the sole of his right foot, performed a swift pirouette, and dribbled off in the other direction; an explosive, out-of-nowhere volley that produced Real Madrid’s winning goal, against Bayer Leverkusen, in the 2002 Champions League Final; and, most notorious, in the 2006 World Cup Final, a head-butt on the Italian defender Marco Materazzi, his final action as a player.

Zidane has attracted an unusual amount of attention from writers, and the task of rendering his presence on the page elicits some strenuous effects. In an essay on the 2002 volley, “Fallen from the Sky,” Javier Marías proclaimed that “the gift became flesh, and then verb.” Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his pamphlet “Zidane’s Melancholy,” invoked Zeno’s paradox to question whether Zidane’s head could actually have reached Materazzi’s chest. More recently, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote that Zidane’s “every move” at the 2006 World Cup was “a joy to behold”—even the head-butt was “entirely rational”—and Tom McCarthy mused that Zinedine Zidane’s head was ineluctably drawn to the double “Z” in his antagonist’s surname, calling the head-butt “perhaps the most decisive rite typography has been accorded in our era.” Such poetic flights, for all their idiosyncrasy, constitute a more or less natural response to the way we watch soccer today. Feats that last a split second, once they are endlessly replayed in slow motion from a dozen camera angles, acquire an aestheticized, even mythic quality.

The Hungarian goalkeeper Gyula Grosics jumps to make a save in a game against England, in London, in November, 1953. Hungary, the leading side in the world at the time, won 6–3, the first time England lost to a non-British side on its home turf. The defeat punctured a long-standing British assumption of superiority, leading to a review of antiquated tactics and training methods, and to a new openness to innovations from abroad. Photograph from Colorsport / REX / Shutterstock

But media saturation has also given rise to an opposite, if no less fetishistic, way of thinking about soccer—a focus on tactical analysis and data crunching, whereby the inherently fluid rhythm of the game is dissected into statistically surveyable chunks. On TV, the close reading of match data, such as the percentage of match time each team has the ball, or a player’s number of “assists”—a term borrowed from American commentary—adds texture to a game in which the main event, a goal, is notably rare.