1) Have you written books about football before?
Yes, in 2002 I published the World Football Yearbook - also published in Dutch - which was a 600 page graphic atlas of the history, culture and statistical records of global football.

2) Why did you want to write a world-wide, nearly comprehensive history of football?
Strange as it may seem, I have been looking for my chance to write a global history for over twenty years - and spent a lot of time in the 1990s studying global history and globalization -Once I had made the yearbook it seemed obvious to put the two things together - football is the most extraordinary subject for comparing cultures, era's and societies. It also engages and perplexed me that a game, a sport should be the most global phenomenon - this is a fact that just screamed out for investigation.

3 ) Was it meant to become a book of almost a thousand pages from the beginning?
It covers the history of the modern world and so we always thought that it would be at least 6-700 pages -it was only in the final six months of writing that it really dawned how big it was going to be - frankly it could have been a lot longer.

4) Are there any writers of books on football that have inspired you?
Eduardo Galeano's Football In Sun and Shadow was both a big influence and a challenge - to write the book that the official history world had always ignored. I also liked the way he wrote, part myth , part fact, part prose, part poem - with a dash and a passion that most football writing in Britain would never dare go near. Simon Kuper's Football against the enemy was an early influence and education, Eamon Dunphy's Only a game is perhaps the only honest and only decently written footballer's biography ever - Hugh McIllvanney's writings on football were a pleasure.

5) Which period in the book is your favourite period?
The moments of football madness across the world when cultures first encountered the game and having digested the idea of kicking a ball - went crazy over playing and watching it.

6) May we expect more books about football from you?
No. After this what does one do for an encore?

7) Are you still able to become excited about present-day football?
Yes and no. I particularly like a cold saturday afternoon watching Bristol Rovers and Bristol City - and anyone who watched Argentina at their best during the world cup just had to marvel at football no?

8) Does ‘The Ball is Round’ belong in the history section of bookshops? Unquestionably.

9) Why do historians pay so little attention to football in your view? Elitism, cowardice, narrowness of vision, peer pressure, ignorance.

10) What is the football moment that you think back to with the greatest pleasure?
Playing football and keeping goal with a bunch of swedish kids in a marshy field near Gothenberg, watching Partisan Belgrades fans theatrically set light to the Maracana when 3-0 down aginst Red Star in 2003, Zidane's Champions League final volley - an out of body experience for me.

De E.N.V.B. stelde tien vragen aan David Goldblatt, auteur van het indrukwekkende The ball is Round: A Global History of Football.