Tim Vickery

At the heart of the national team game, I still think that there's a purity there.

So yeah, I'm very, very much looking forward to it, despite everything.

Yes.

Um, it's, uh, well, thank you very much.

Uh, it was, I never really wanted to, to, to do a book.

Um, but this was, this ended up being, being fun to write.

It's co-written, myself and Mark Beerum.

And that makes all the difference, I think, because South America is so vast, um,

And quite often, the Portuguese half of it, which is Brazil, doesn't know much about the Spanish half of it, which is the nine other footballing countries.

So I'm obviously Brazil-based.

Mark is an academic.

with a lot of ties to Colombia and Ecuador.

He knows Argentina and Uruguay very well.

So having those two voices, I think, has helped us tell the story.

And it's a story that I think needs to be told.

Very, very few people are aware of just the role that South America played in getting the World Cup up and running.

Were it not for South America, I don't think we would have had a World Cup until the mid-1950s.

The continent also has the country that's won it the most times.

And it has the current champions as well.

And it's just where it means more.