Background
Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University.
Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to Leiden in the Netherlands as a child, where his father, Adam Kuper, was a lecturer in anthropology at Leiden University.
He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar.
He writes about sports "from an anthropologic perspective."
He has also lived in South Africa (to escape the Dutch winters), Stanford, California, Berlin and London. He now lives in Paris with his family. He has also written for The Observer and The Guardian, and is currently a sports columnist for the Financial Times.
In 2003 he published his book Ajax, The Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War.
He co-authored the 2009 book Soccernomics with Stefan Szymanski. Kuper usually writes about football, discussing the culture that surrounds it — such as the Old Firm rivalry — as well as the on-field play.
He has written on cricket occasionally, with articles on cricket in the Netherlands and cricket in apartheid South Africa. Kuper also writes in Dutch, and his work frequently appeared in publications including the Dutch newspaper De Personnel, the literary football magazine Hard Gras, and opinion magazine Vrij Nederland.