Kicks, Spits, and Headers

Kicks, Spits, and Headers documents two years of football by a self-proclaimed accidental footballer. Coming of age during the student and worker revolt of the 1960s-1970s, the Italian ''hot autumn,'' Paolo Sollier brought these countercultural energies and Marxist politics on to the football pitch, inadvertently becoming an icon along the way. Here he describes, in lucid and humorous prose, the challenges of trying make sense of and balance the tensions and contradictions between being a professional footballer and a political militant.