June 15, soccer fans in Changsha, Hunan Province stay up late to watch the Columbia-Greece game at the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Photo: CFP

Born at Midnight Photo: Liao Danlin/GT

Without a doubt, the summer of 2014 belongs to the FIFA World Cup. For most soccer fans or even half-fans, this June and July should be full of overnight excitement and numerous bottles of beer as well as the company of friends. Even the most hard-working employees like to squeeze in time to enjoy the party.

Writer and cultural critic Leung Man-tao once said that the only time he gives up reading before going to bed every evening was for the World Cup.

While, the feeling and recollections of sitting in front of a black and white television as a youngster is a memory shared by millions of soccer lovers in China, there are always people who not only love to watch games but also like to record their experiences of being an ordinary soccer fan and the process of getting to know everything there is about the sport. 

Let's talk sports

Zhang Xiaozhou is one of these writers. In addition to writing about things such as music and literature, to him the most important topic by far is soccer.

Last month, he published a new book Born at Midnight in which he gathers a selection of his writings about soccer over the past few years to share his thoughts and opinions about this much loved sport. Up-dated reviews of these earlier works can be found at the end of most of his articles.

A fan of Club Barcelona, the name of the book was inspired by Hemingway's bullfight-related Death in the Afternoon. "During those countless Beijing midnights, Barcelona was my sun," Zhang explained.

Drawing a brain map of a Chinese soccer fan's mind; players, clubs, national teams, Zhang's book covers his observations about almost everything soccer-related. However, his writing is not limited to the sport - leftwing politics, the German National Anthem, as well as Milosz's ABC's - all these topics are written about with a poetic heart.

"The way he writes about soccer is very different from other people because he is so artistic," Leung described the writer's style on his TV show Eight Minute Readings.

This rather romantic style can be found throughout his writings. "Tragedy can be an addiction. It's the hole after you lost a tooth that you can't help sticking your tongue in; it's the glass of an alcoholic that he can't help refilling," Zhang writes at the beginning of "England's Aesthetics of Tragedy."

In another article, he also shares his understanding of so-called left-wing soccer, a concept brought up by César Luis Menotti in an interview with German magazine Kicker.

"No matter how significantly the fire of your desire to win burns, you always need to transcend winning or losing in your heart. An ugly triumph is sometimes worse than a beautiful failure," Zhang writes in this article that was originally the preface he wrote for the Chinese version of Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow in 2010.

For him soccer has acted as a constant throughout his life. He feels this is true for others as well, as he has found that in a world where almost everything changes everyday, people use soccer as a type of group ceremony to continuously confirm traditional values such as loyalty, encouragement and solidarity. 

Forgetting the motherland

Soccer has always been a hot topic in China. It is a sport that has been discussed, studied, interpreted and criticized but never ignored.

There is hardly anything else that can compare to the effect this World Cup has had in China, keeping people up overnight night after night. An affect many find hard to understand, because this year's games have nothing to do with team China.

One of the more interesting news stories this year has been how Chinese reporters have been constantly mistaken as Korean or Japanese in Brazil. "What's the game have to do with you guys?" or "Why did you come here?" are questions often asked of Chinese journalists in Brazil.

One answer is that for Chinese fans, soccer is probably one of the most effective tools to lead the country towards globalization. Everyone has their "second nationality" during the World Cup. All the players have Chinese nicknames and fans refer to them just like they would some guy in their neighborhood.

Zhang said that he feels that it was team Brazil during the 1982 World Cup that first made so many Chinese put aside their "nationalism." 

"During that repressed period, the streets were filled with an atmosphere that smelled of gunpowder and blood. Boys gathered together to fight or gamble; until soccer arrived along with the black and white television," he wrote.

Although some people, such as former Chinese soccer team coach Zhu Guanghu have said that people should watch the World Cup so that future Chinese soccer teams can earn their way out of the country, most people laugh at the thought of watching the Cup for this reason. This is because true fans throughout the nation know that the games aren't just about China; when it comes to the World Cup everyone is a citizen of the world.  

A bit of everything

Some say that soccer critics are probably the most knowledgeable people in the world since they don't just need to understand the history of the sport, they must also understand economics, politics and probably a little bit of everything else.

Nevertheless, this particular game has never been only for experts, and people from all walks of life enjoy the sport. Chinese poet Yin Lichun once wrote a poem for the German soccer team, while writer Liu Xinwu took the qualifying match between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong team during the 1986 World Cup as the subject his literary work 5•19 a Full-length Shot. 

Books about soccer cover a wide range of genres. They can be about the beauty of failure, an institutional analysis, or even cover economic theory.

Gao Li's book Learning General Knowledge from Soccer is an example of one such book. In the book Gao outlines how the playing styles of different national teams relate to that country's geographical characteristics. England enjoys a temperate marine climate which leads to their rough invasion strategies, whereas a few South American teams or those near the equator are more likely to adapt a different strategy, moving less in order to remain energetic under the tropical heat.

In the end soccer is more than just a sport for some people. As publishing house Imaginist describes in the introduction to Zhang's new book, "The soccer field is like a crazy spinning roulette where people deposit their passion, desire, life, money and country." It truly is a sport that can encapsulate the many different facets of life itself.