Simon Kuper Keynote Speaker

Simon Kuper is a leading columnist and speaker on urban life, globalisation, Europe and football.  He has been writing for the Financial Times for nearly 30 years. His column in the weekend magazine has won multiple awards and is read by tens of thousands of people around the world.

Although he is now best known for his analyses of modern life, from the future of offices to Brexit, Simon is also well-known for his insights into sport – whether the topic is sports stars, the sports business, or the interactions between sport, politics, economics and culture. His expertise into sports people and athletes allows him to draw leadership and wider lessons, for use in the business sphere.

His book “Barca”, written with inside access to FC Barcelona, was published in Summer 2021 in the UK, US and several other countries. It won the Sunday Times award for Football Book of the Year. Previously, his book ‘Football Against the Enemy’ (1994), which won the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year that year, focused on how different cultures shape the way different nations played the game. A collection of his profiles of footballers and football managers, ‘The Football Men’, appeared in 2011. His book “Soccernomics” (2012), co-authored with Stefan Szymanski, examines how insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business can help us understand success and failure in football. It is much read by owners and executives of football clubs. In 2022, “Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK” was published, examining how a small group of Oxford-educated Conservatives came to dominate British politics.

His latest book, “World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments” (2025), looks back on the World Cups he has attended since 1990 to chart how the tournament became a truly global spectacle and how it has shaped the modern world.

He is also the author of “The Happy Traitor”, a biography of the British KGB double agent George Blake, published in 2021.

As well as being a prolific writer, Simon Kuper often appears on television as a sport and cultural commentator. An expert in urbanisation and modern cities, Simon shares his views on what the future will look like.

Simon now writes on a wide variety of topics, from observations on city life, to global politics and demographics. His articles are peppered with humour and insightful anthropological observations. This has been only enhanced by his nomadic lifestyle, having lived in a number of different countries and speaking several languages. He now lives in Paris.