Mark Biram – författare

Mundiales is a sweeping history of the World Cup told exclusively from a South American perspective. From Uruguay’s Olympic triumphs in 1924 and 1928 to the canonisation of Lionel Messi in Qatar, Tim Vickery and Mark Biram reframe football’s greatest spectacle around the continent that gave it myth, tragedy and glory. This book blends footballing drama with political context and cultural identity, showing how South America not only hosted and won the World Cup but also went a long way (perhaps more than any other continent) towards shaping it into the epic it is today. Drawing on decades of immersion and lived experience, together with research using Spanish and Portuguese sources, Mundiales offers fresh perspectives previously unseen in the English language. It is a story of artistry and grit, of style and symbolism, of nations finding themselves through the game. With vivid storytelling and sharp analysis, this is the definitive account of South America’s enduring love affair with the World Cup.

Viva Colombia: A Social History of Colombian Football tells the story through 15 distinct episodes and 15 national team players.The book covers everything from the joie de vivre of the Colombian style - personified by Carlos Valderrama - to the travails of Colombian society illustrated by the tragic murder of Andrés Escobar in the aftermath of Colombia's 1994 group-stage exit. The narrative examines how personal stories interlink with the wider history of the nation.Despite many complexities, Colombia is often reduced to a series of off-beam stereotypes which exoticise, eroticise or misrepresent it. This book offers a timely corrective, telling the story through the eyes of a number of its key historical protagonists.From Colombia's first World Cup appearance in 1962 through to the present day, we discover what some of the most emblematic players to wear the shirt tell us about the Colombian nation.

The first women’s football book on Latin America centring the perspectives of players brings rare interview material that cuts through the clichés to uncover the lived reality of women footballers. It includes the first large-scale survey of South American women footballers’ views into dialogue with institutional and media perspectives.The early chapters consider the backdrop Latin American women footballers operate in, a media and institutional panorama that privileges a heteronormative athletic femininity whilst ensuring women’s football is never portrayed as anything other than an inferior version of the hegemonic (men’s) game.Following this, drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in which 33 semi-structured interviews were carried out with players and institutional figures, this pioneering book foregrounds the lived reality of women’s football in three strategic locations. Firstly, three months were spent in the Amazon region of Brazil where Esporte Clube Iranduba provides a fascinating alternative model for the growth of women’s football. This is contrasted with Santos FC, where women’s football tends to be constantly overshadowed by the presence of banal patriarchy, and finally with another fleeting glimpse of how another model is possible at Atlético Huila of Colombia, the surprise winner of the women’s Copa Libertadores in 2018.