"Simon Kuper" (born 1969) is a British author. He writes about sports "from an anthropology/anthropologic perspective."

Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University. He has also lived in South Africa (to escape the Dutch winters), Stanford, California, Berlin and London. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He now lives in Paris with his family.

He won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1994 with his book Football Against the Enemy, which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. He has also written for The Observer and The Guardian, and is currently a sports columnist for the Financial Times.

More Simon Kuper on Wikipedia.

People are enormously disappointed because if there's one country that really expected to be going and has a high opinion of its own qualities, it's Holland.

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In the United States, there's a strong taboo against racism; in England it's only happened in the past 15 years. In Spain and Eastern Europe, there is none of this revulsion among most people. There are few people of color, so a black player on the field is a new thing. In that sense, soccer is seen by racists as the vanguard of the world outside sweeping into town.

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I remember World Cups in 1982 and 1986 when we weren't there and we'd support Belgium or Denmark, ... They had some players who played in Holland and they were a bit like the Dutch.

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