Hi.  Thanks for stopping by.  Whatever brought you here, I am glad you came.  Please feel free to say hello.

I am Alistair, from England but living in California now.  I have been lucky enough to live and work in lots of places.  Over the last eight years England, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, Japan, Costa Rica and now the US have been my home, while also visiting many other places around the world. Through all my moving around, there has been one constant, the game of football.

Everywhere I have been it has always been possible to start a conversation about football.  Just wearing a football shirt is often enough.  A football fan is never alone.  This blog is my attempt to repay football for what it has given to me.

The title of this blog is of course taken from the beautiful book written by Eduardo Galeano, ‘Soccer in Sun and Shadow’ to give it its name in English.  I cannot recommend this book enough.

I write football stories, particularly stories from the places where football and politics converge.

I have an MA in International Relations, completed in 2011. My thesis research area was the WTO and sustainable development (or lack thereof). My interests include IPE, European history, international trade, IR theory and issues around globalisation and development.

If I can, I will attempt to link IPE and football together.

I also permit myself the occasional rant about my first love, Liverpool FC, on this blog.

A note about the content on this blog:  All the written material is created by me unless otherwise stated.  All quotes used will be provided with a reference and/or a link to the original.  The photographs are all either taken by me, or taken from other blogs and will be credited if the place I got it from states where they got it from. Every effort has been made to credit the original copyright owner, often this is not possible due to the wide dispersion of uncredited material across the internet.  If you believe I have used a photo without giving the correct acknowledgement of its source when the source is possible to determine, I am happy to give credit or remove the photo.