Is This the Strangest Soccer Novel Ever Written?

This piece was published in collaboration with Golden Goal, a literary magazine about the intersection of politics, culture and sport at the 2026 World Cup. To read more, visit their website: goldengoal.world.

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Over the years, writers from around the world have tried their hands at using soccer as a backdrop for memorable fiction. Tonally speaking, they cover a vast terrain, including J.L. Carr’s comic How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup and Leonard Gribble’s whodunit The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. Some will cut more deeply for soccer fans of a literary bent; others can be savored no matter what your feelings about the beautiful game might be. David Peace’s modernist Red or Dead, about the life of the legendary Liverpool coach Bill Shankly, left me frequently breathless despite having little emotional investment in the ups and downs of Liverpool.

If that novel—a work of precisely composed prose in which Peace uses repetition and the sheer bulk of its more than 800 pages to take the reader into Shankly’s inner life and the meticulous rhythms of his squad’s play—represents one pole of how to make a great soccer novel, standing opposite it is Carlos Labbé’s 2015 The Murmuration, translated into English by Will Vanderhyden. I feel comfortable declaring that The Murmuration is the strangest novel ever written about the game of soccer. The bulk of the novel uses a real event as its setting: the 1962 World Cup semi-final between Chile and Brazil. That part of it, at least, will be familiar to longtime soccer enthusiasts. Where things get a little weirder comes when Labbé introduces psychic powers into the mix.

The Murmuration is divided into three sections, the longest of which involves a detailed account of the aforementioned  semifinal, which took place 15 years before Labbé’s birth in Chile, the first and only time that nation hosted the tournament. The first section, “Classes,” takes place on a train and describes a conversation between two people: “the commentator” and “the director.” There’s a noir quality to it, with the director—one of several on the board of the Chilean national team—described in language that evokes a femme fatale and the commentator evoking a kind of weathered, faded dignity; eventually, Labbé reveals that the commentator’s principles have kept him from seeking work in television. The two see eye to eye on both their love of soccer and their concerns about where the sport is headed.

A man and a woman meeting late at night, surrounded by mystery; it’s a familiar scenario. They are en route to Santiago for the World Cup’s opening ceremonies, and the director has an offer to make the commentator; again, you might expect you know where this is going. And yes, she would like for him to return to broadcasting—in part because his voice can make collectives of living creatures behave in a certain way. The commentator demonstrates this on the train, as he directs a swarm of fireflies to take on the appearances of different objects, including a horse, a tree, and a burning bush.

It’s here that one aspect of the book’s English title comes into play: a murmuration is the name for a particular group of birds moving in a complex pattern across the sky. (Its original title, La parvá, means “a flock of birds,” according to this review.) But a murmuration is also a sound that a massive crowd can make—and it doesn’t get more massive than the tens of thousands gathered in a stadium to watch the World Cup.

Sometimes the voice seems to represent the Chilean national team; at others it acts as a reflection of the nation itself.

As the director explains, her hope is that the commentator’s work can create a sense of Chilean national identity—as she phrases it, “to bring them to the brink of collective ecstasy, to the edge of national climax, to the point of full and mass blossoming of a proud, fervent, indefinable, worker-driven, class-proof identity.”

The second of the novel’s three parts, titled “Murmurations,” occupies the majority of the book. While the first and third parts are told in the third person, “Murmurations” is recounted in a kind of shifting first person plural. Sometimes the voice seems to represent the Chilean national team; at others it acts as a reflection of the nation itself. Sometimes the view is narrower; here the voice belongs more clearly to the commentator, and sometimes the perspective breaks away to recount a series of strange events taking place in the directors’ box, where the woman we encountered earlier carries out a series of tasks on her own.

What Labbé conveys through his prose here is the ways that soccer, at this highest of levels, can create a kind of collective experience for both players and spectators. This narrative voice has a personality, which often takes the form of vitriol directed at the infamous Peruvian-born official Yamasaki Maldonado. There’s a stunning level of detail on display here—literally every touch of the ball seems to have been reflected in the prose:

…they’ll be looking for a new triangle, we’ll think, when they deliver a different kind of ball to their forward, Amarildo. We still won’t see you but will be able to to step up with Raúl Sánchez and steal the ball anyway, initiating a different trajectory, but not before referee Yamasaki Maldonado, unsuspected neighbor, will call what to his blind eyes was a foul committed previously by Nilton Santos on Honorinho.

It’s worth noting that, despite this maximalist quality, this still only gets the reader to the end of the match’s first half.  At that point, Brazil—the defending champions who would go on to win the tournament—leads 2-1 on a pair of goals by Garrincha. Here, though, there’s still hope that Chile could advance to the final. A look at the historical record, however, proves that was not the case: ultimately, Brazil advanced on a 4-2 win.

The way in which Labbé explores the overlap of sports and national identities is not the only way in which The Murmuration anticipates the next few decades’ worth of history. Early in the novel, the commentator explains his fears over where the sport is headed:

Now, with this World Cup, they’re trying to eliminate the team, just as they’re doing with the syndicates, the fishing collectives, the agricultural cooperatives, the small-scale mining organizations, the workers’ groups, the literary movements, the student unions. Now, the profile of the player, the star, is all that’ll matter …

If this sounds prescient, it’s because Labbé is writing about these events from a vantage point of several decades later. Reading The Murmuration in the wake of the announcement and implosion of the Super League, Bayern Munich’s executives calling for a dramatic shift in the ownership of Bundesliga clubs, and Inter Miami becoming one of the top-selling jerseys worldwide makes this passage of fictional dialogue read like something closer to prophecy.

In the case of the tournament that’s the backdrop for The Murmuration, it’s telling that Pelé—arguably the prototype for the modern soccer superstar—was a mainstay for Brazil’s national team. (An injury earlier in the tournament kept him out of the semifinal featured here.) It’s one of several ways that this tournament can be seen as a herald for bigger changes to come. As for Chile, the 1962 World Cup is a bittersweet place to leave the country’s national team: their third-place finish in that tournament was the highest they’ve finished in it to date.