Jorge Tovar – författare

Throughout the history of football, new leagues have periodically emerged offering high salaries to lure foreign stars — the United States, Japan, and China being prominent examples. Less well known, however, is the case of Colombia. The Colombian professional football league was a brief but remarkable experiment that attracted top South American and European players in the early 1950s, commonly referred to as El Dorado.Drawing on a wide array of archival material and other primary sources, this book explores how a small, economically underdeveloped country with no established football tradition managed to finance such a high-profile "pirate" league while confronting the international football establishment. It examines the economic and social conditions that made it possible to field world-class players such as Alfredo Di Stéfano and Charlie Mitten, and explicitly addresses the domestic and international circumstances that allowed so powerful a league to emerge so far from football's traditional centers of power.The book also traces the collapse of the league and its lasting ramifications for the history of football in the region. It will be of great interest to readers in sports economics, sports history, economic history, and Latin American studies.

This book analyzes the 2018 and 2019 men's and women's World Cups to understand how the use of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) affected each tournament. Unlike goal technology, where the decision is entirely left to the machine's algorithm, the VAR still has a human component, making it prone to errors and controversies. Building on the theories of justice, the book quantitatively reviews event-level data while using a historical perspective to depict a novel approach to the effects of VAR in major soccer tournaments. The six chapters examine the use of VAR, discuss when it was not used (but maybe should have been used), and explore how the World Cup evolved with the new technology. Combining the VAR events of 2018 and 2019 with comparable situations from past World Cups guides the reader into debating the meaning of justice and the potential of ever achieving fairness in soccer.