"The Game Without Limits" can be read by both the initiated and the uninitiated as a wonderful introduction to a global history of football. Christos Sotirakopoulos, a cultivated and critical sports journalist, organizes his stories like a kind of "memories from the past," presenting each story with a specific year as a milestone in his narrative. Thus, the reader realizes with pleasure that this popular sport has a dense historical horizon, a beginning that is lost in time, and an uninterrupted continuity.

At the same time, this fascinating reading of the book takes the reader through the major events of recent history. Indeed, there is no football story in "The Game Without Limits" that is not indirectly or directly involved with "great" history: all class conflicts, every religious, ideological, political, and economic dispute is reflected on the field not in miniature, as one might hastily argue, but rather in all the intensity of the passions that each circumstance fosters. This social/cultural element is captured in the author's stories with emphasis and dramatic effect.

The book has - and could not but have - immense significance for the football enthusiast, the fan who loves not only their team but the sport itself. And this happens primarily because the best moments of world football parade through its pages in slow playback. However, the great significance of these narratives is that the most important figures in football are captured by the skilled sportscaster at the most famous moment of their careers: that magical moment when a goal, a play, an incident on the field or in the stands becomes legend, or more simply, passes definitively and irrevocably into history.

And truly, how many fans know that, for example, the Celtic-Rangers rivalry stems from the fierce religious conflict that has lasted for centuries in Scotland? How many know the historical relationship that connects English football with the Basque Country? How many know that until 1952, India competed in international football tournaments with its players barefoot and that the Indian federation decided on the mandatory use of shoes when, at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, most players suffered frostbite? Finally, who knows that the goal scored by East Germany's national team center forward, Jürgen Sparwasser, in the match against the West German team at the 1974 World Cup saved his life when, six years later, he tried to escape as a political refugee to West Germany?

Ultimately, the delightful book by the multi-award-winning sports journalist and author Christos Sotirakopoulos proves a great truth, the reality on which the world's most popular sport is based: that football is not just 22 people chasing a ball. Compared to any other sport, football excels in mass appeal and participation because, in one way or another, the entire society, the entire era, and history itself are involved in it. That is why in the exciting "The Game Without Limits," the ultimate protagonist is the unsung fan, the very person who, in the everyday life of existence, constitutes the subject of history.