Simon Kuper

He is British but lives with his wife and three children in Paris. He is the author of several books including Football Against the Enemy (winner of the William Hill prize for Sports Book of the Year 1994), Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (2003), and – as co-author with Stefan Szymanski - Soccernomics (2009). He also writes for magazines in Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland and other countries. He has won several awards for his journalism, ranging from the Manuel Vázquez Montalbán prize for sportswriting in 2008 to the British Society of Magazine Editors’ prize for Columnist of the Year in 2016 and 2020.

His book about FC Barcelona, The Barcelona Complex, will be published in August. He is now working on another on the origins of the current British ruling class at 1980s’ Oxford University. His biography of the British KGB double agent, George Blake, is published in the US in May by The New Press as Spies, Lies, and Exile: The Extraordinary Story of Russian Double Agent George Blake.

Simon Kuper (born in Kampala, Uganda in 1969) was educated at Oxford University and Harvard. He has been working for the Financial Times since 1994, and now writes a general column for the newspaper.