Simon Kuper was educated at Oxford University and Harvard. He writes a weekly column for the Financial Times. He is British but lives with his wife and three children in Paris. His books include Soccer Against the Enemy (1994), Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (2003), and – as co-author with Stefan Szymanski - Soccernomics (2009). The Happy Traitor, his biography of the British-KGB double agent George Blake, appeared in February 2021. His next book, about FC Barcelona, is published in August.