Simon Kuper is a British author. He writes about sports "from an anthropologic perspective."
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 has also lived in Stanford, California, and London. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar.
He won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1994 with his book Football Against the Enemy, which was later released in the United States as Soccer Against the Enemy. He has also written for the Observer and Guardian, and is currently a sports columnist for the Financial Times. He lives in France.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 the help of Stefan Syzmanski. He is a known supporter of Liverpool FC, as evidenced in some of his writings.
Kuper also writes in Dutch, and his work frequently appeared in amongst others the Dutch newspaper De Pers, the literary football magazine Hard Gras, and opinion magazine Vrij Nederland.