'Digging Deep': The lost Jewish football greats who once shaped European soccer - review

ByAMALIA HESSJULY 18, 2026 22:03As soccer captures the world’s imagination once again during the World Cup, and thousands of Jewish athletes have gathered in Israel for the Maccabiah Games, David Bolchover’s Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats arrives with impeccable timing. While today’s headlines celebrate the next Messi or Mbappé, Bolchover asks a far more haunting question: Who was the greatest Jewish soccer player of all? It is a question few can answer – not because the talent never existed but because history conspired to erase it.Before the Holocaust, Jewish superstar players were at the heart of the European game. So, too, were the visionary Jewish coaches reinventing tactics, the Jewish trailblazers who professionalized the sport, and the elite Jewish referees trusted with the biggest matches. Watching over it all in packed stadiums were celebrated Jewish sports writers and passionate and raucous Jewish fans.Bolchover’s love affair with soccer began early. Growing up in Manchester, he was just six when his father took him to his first Manchester United match at Old Trafford in 1973.With United trailing Chelsea 2-0 in the closing minutes, his father decided to leave early to beat the traffic. The final score was 2-2. “I still haven’t got over it,” Bolchover recalls with characteristic humor.''Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats.'' (credit: David Bolchover)Like countless soccer fans, he has spent years imagining his all-time starting XI (theoretical roster made up of the greatest players in a sport’s history). But whereas most supporters choose their team on talent or statistics, Bolchover’s selection serves a far more profound purpose. His symbolic XI comprises extraordinary Jewish soccer players whose lives – and careers – were cut short by the Holocaust. It is a team assembled not to win trophies but to restore memory. For Bolchover, Digging Deep is as much an act of historical recovery as it is a sports book. Rather than dwelling solely on the Holocaust, he reconstructs a lost sporting civilization in which Jewish players, coaches, referees, and administrators helped shape modern European soccer before Nazism extinguished their lives and, for decades, their memory.Untold stories of Jewish soccer greats Drawing on years of painstaking research, Bolchover pieces together the untold stories of 11 Jewish soccer greats – icons one moment, marked for extermination the next.He puts the spotlight on five Hungarians, three Poles, two Austrians, and a German – each a remarkable Jewish soccer player celebrated as a national hero in their own country before the rise of Nazism stripped them of their rights, their careers, and ultimately their lives. Setting exhilarating sporting triumphs against the gathering darkness of 20th-century Europe, it restores these forgotten men to their rightful place in the soccer pantheon.As the Maccabiah celebrates the enduring vitality of Jewish athletes, and as billions watch soccer’s greatest tournament unfold, Bolchover offers a poignant reminder that Jewish soccer players once stood at the very heart of the European game. His achievement is not simply to tell 11 forgotten stories; it is to restore them to soccer’s collective memory.Oliver Brown, the chief sports writer for The Telegraph, called the book “meticulously researched and elegantly crafted.”“Digging Deep serves both as a profoundly moving tribute and as a salutary reminder – at this dangerous moment of rising antisemitism – to keep the memory of these murdered Jewish players alive.” The 'Airplane!' 'famous Jewish sports legends' jokeAs Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust (CST) and a foremost expert on antisemitism, observes while writing about Digging Deep: “Not only is the Jewish football world gone, but we don’t even notice that it is missing. The writers of the joke in Airplane! about Jewish sports legends being all but nonexistent didn’t know it, but their quip was an unintended tribute to the efficiency of the Holocaust in wiping out not just Jewish life but any future knowledge of that life.”Digging Deep is more than just a book. It gives back to the world a chapter of Jewish and soccer history that should never have been lost, reclaiming a place in history for a generation of Jewish soccer players whose stories were all but erased.Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing GreatsBy David BolchoverBiteback Publishing384 pages; $30Follow us on Google