Sergio V. Jodar’s World Cup book reaches beyond Spain’s campaign

“El Mundial de todos. Anticrónicas de la segunda estrella de España”, Sergio V. Jodar’s latest book, offers much more than an account of Spain’s second World Cup triumph. Jodar was not accredited for the competition held in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Following it from afar, he captured its day-to-day life in 40 notes, one for each day of the tournament, collected in the book published by Libros de Ruta. Jodar did not take part in the competition, but the quality of his writing, the book’s presentation suggests, could have earned him the tournament’s revelation award.

Spain features on the cover, but the book’s pages reach well beyond the national team. “They are not texts solely about the Spanish national team, even though it is the protagonist on the cover. There are texts about practically every team: this is a World Cup diary, not a diary of the Spanish national team,” Sergio V. Jodar explains. The book combines coverage of the tournament with its author’s distinctive voice.

Jodar describes his chronicles as occupying a space between reporting and literature. He says he focuses less on the bare sequence of events in a match than on what it evokes for him, citing his writing about Messi as “almost more personal than football-focused”. “They sit halfway between one thing and the other. I don’t step outside the bounds of reality, but I do try to bring those two worlds together,” he says.

The approach follows a path that had already led him to write “Moneda al aire”, a novel with football as its central thread that also features a World Cup. When he began working on this new book, Jodar was more focused on novels unrelated to football than on continuing to write about the game. Yet “El Mundial de todos” remains infused with its author’s literary sensibility.