Challenge the Sky

The 24 matches that made history.

That’s what football and history are like: they intertwine, overlap, interchange. And while many matches have gone down in history, many chapters of history have been written with the ink of the football in a hundred-metre field, by twenty-two players; despite wars, revolu-tions, dark periods and great changes.

• In a blend of reality and a pinch of imagination, Marco Cattaneo tells children the history of football and Europe from 1872 to the present, through twenty-four unforgettable matches.
• There’s the passion of Edoardo Bosio, who returned from England in 1877 in love with foot-ball and determined to create the first Italian team, in Turin. And then there’s the genius of Frederick Pentland, the Englishman living in Spain who revolutionised the playing method in the late Twenties, experimenting with “tiqui taca”. The courage and pride of Austrian Matthi-as Sindelar and the Ukrainian players of Start FC who, during the Nazi Occupation, dared to challenge Hitler’s men, paying with their lives. There are the re-matches and results of the fight against racial prejudice, obtained by the multiethnic French national team who won the World Cup in 1998, and by Nelson Mandela, the first to take the World Championship to Africa.
• Events, famous personalities and ordinary people, powerful emotions; more than a century of football and European history.