The book deals with the history of football in concentration camps and is the result of remarkable research conducted by the author on football and how it served as a source of life or a cause of death for the prisoners.

“In the hellish pits of unspeakable terror, the sound of the makeshift football symbolized the voice of hope. Prisoners who found themselves on the brink of Hades, due to the twisted whim of a superpower that was shedding blood across the world, clung to anything that could offer them a spark of light at the end of the shadowy tunnel.

From the deadly concentration camps of the Nazi Reich to the enslaved fields of Austria, from the Olympics of fascist propaganda to the World Cups of Mussolinian manipulation, from the tear-jerking ghettos of Czechoslovakia to the blood-soaked ravines of Ukraine, the football of the condemned became a vehicle of survival and a skylight to an incomprehensible and hazy future.

The flames of War consumed Europe, leaving behind 60 million victims. The first of these, the most vulnerable, was innocence, the joy of carefree play. Those lucky enough to owe their lives to a deft dribble against the conqueror remember the dead and, just before they depart, pass on to younger generations the horror of futile hatred. An entire continent has mourned for decades the legacy of an incomprehensible offside.”