When Monty Python staged the Philosophers’ Football Match in the 1970s, it was a less-than-thrilling spectacle as the great minds of Greece and Germany walked around the field, pondering their next move, debating with each other and arguing with Confucius, the referee. The short black-and-white film came to a thrilling close, however, when Socrates saw a chance to score a goal for the Greek side.
Now, with the benefits of the internet and AI imagery, Michael Brian Lee, a transformational coach and expert on creativity and innovation, has created a book that brings to life 56 great minds and reimagines them as football players. The teams competing in the World Innovators Cup are Africa, America (North and South), Asia and Europe, and they take in a diversity of players from across history, from Archimedes to Shaka Zulu, Marie Curie and Fela Kuti.
Lee, a former Johannesburg journalist living in the US, explained that the book, a mixture of non-fiction and fiction, is a puzzle and a taster for more exploration.
“Each innovator takes the field with a position, nickname, life term, signature move, short bio, match reference and fictional story. Fiction, in general, takes up less room than non-fiction. There is not enough space on these pages to provide enough facts in the biography for you to get all the jokes. So feel free to do your own research.”
Lee said the idea for the book came to him after he designed a series of trading cards and posted them on LinkedIn.
Each entry has the following:
- The bio: the real biography of the innovator, 100% true;
- The signature move: a fictional move the innovator makes in their fictional football career;
- National match: a real match from the World Cup, Women’s World Cup, Youth Championships and the Olympics, related to the country of the innovator’s origin; and
- Their story. “This is an entirely fictional account of their soccer career and how it fits into the match we have chosen to highlight,” said Lee.
He has done a vast amount of research and taken care to include and thereby write into history obscure personalities we should know more about but don’t. For example, Korean literacy champion King Sejong; Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, an Iraqi mathematician who coined the word “algorithm”; and Lise Meitner, a Swedish physicist who co-discovered nuclear fission, though her partner Otto Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize. There is also David Unaipon, the first Aboriginal author to be published, and Murasaki Shikibu, whose Tale of Genji in 1008 is the first recorded novel.
The full-colour illustrations are excellent, making the book pleasant on the eye and a source of thought-provoking possibilities and downright fun.
Personally, I’m a history buff who has never wondered what kind of soccer player Shakespeare or Credo Mutwa would make, so I enjoyed the “100% true” biographical bits most. But I can see how a soccer fan could enjoy imagining each character bringing to bear their particular strengths in playing “the beautiful game”.
You have Tesla and Edison jostling for electric position; Franklin inventing lightning-fast strategy, rushing past Ada Lovelace; and Fela Kuti disrupting the system while referees Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama keep the score. A challenge for the imagination.
“I’m not a huge football fan, though I am a World Cup fan. I rarely watch football outside of the World Cup. Same with history. I’m less of a history nut than a quirkiness nut. I love funky and funny stories — modern or historical — and history has some real humdingers, dozens of which are in this book," says Lee.
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