Born and raised in Rome, Italy, I caught the history and football viruses early on in life. I moved to the USA in the mid-80s, and played high school and college soccer. My experience as a sports coach in a black school outside Cape Town inspired me to write "Laduma! Soccer, Politics, and Society in South Africa," the first scholarly history of the game in that country. I spent 2010 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa -- and got to watch 9 World Cup games! On the digital scholarship front, I co-host the the "Africa Past and Present" podcast with Peter Limb (http://afripod.aodl.org), blog at http://www.footballiscominghome.info and am co-founder of the Football Scholars Forum (http://footballscholars.org).