It would appear that soccer (football) has claws, for the world as we know it is possessed. For many what is in play is seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, delirium, in more or less manageable doses. Although of course, just as the effects of the psychoanalytic tie are hardly containable to the classical fifty minute "hour," nor are these football passions bounded by the standard ninety minutes of any particular game.

This book argues that soccer offers us the possibility of manageable doses of self-elected madness--a madness that is essential for a sane life. For the paradox is that this very madness is simultaneously therapeutic: soccer as an insistent provocation, repeatedly re-inaugurating the reverie or drift, disrupted by those moments of the most intense fracture. Proffering a roller-coaster of intense discomfort, yet always present lies the possibility of almost uncontainable happiness. Simultaneously soccer provides us with our own utterly personal and yet simultaneously collective delusional system: a universe organized around the fixtures.