The Matters of Life, Death, and More: Writing on Soccer

As the world’s eyes turn to the World Cup every four years, Aleksandar Hemon's The Matters of Life, Death, and More reminds us of a sad fact: “an average life seldom contains more than twenty World Cups—our games are tragically numbered.”

We need to pay attention, to absorb the joy, the skill, the agony, the triumph, the beauty—everything that soccer is. And soccer is, of course, everything.

In these pages, Hemon revisits memories of his first World Cup (1974), for which his then homeland, ...