The books below are just a small selection of some of the best football writing from the past few decades. From Hunter Davies’ The Glory Game to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, these books helped define and shape the football writing of today, and put paid to the assumption that football books are low-brow literature.
If you know of a book that’s worthy of the ‘classic’ tag, please tell us about it on the Contact page.
Soccer at War 1939-45, by Jack Rollin (2005)
This is a revised edition of Jack Rollin’s compelling account of the national game during this defining moment in history, when surprisingly enough football continued to be played and watched.
It was first published 20 years ago and recognised as a classic work on football’s history. This edition contains the one of the most comprehensive collections of statistics on football during the wartime period.
Power, Corruption & Pies – Volume Two: The Best Writing from the Second Decade of WSC, foreword by Adrian Chiles (2006)
This anthology takes up the story from 1997 to 2006, the second decade of legendary football fanzine When Saturday Comes.
It was an era when the football bandwagon became a juggernaut, apparently with no-one at the wheel. In spite of rampant commercialisation, the game nonetheless retained its appeal, even among those for whom almost every season is a sequence of disappointments.
The second WSC anthology reflects the big issues of the era, from the rise of the Champions League to the disappearance of old football grounds, with trenchant opinions on a range of topics including the heyday of football boardgames, the calamitous decline of the FA Cup and Delia Smith’s unusual half-time announcements. Throughout its existence WSC has provided a platform for innovative football writing. Widely known authors such as David Conn, Dave Hill and long-standing contributor Harry Pearson all feature in this book. Most of all, WSC gives space to the view of those who know football best: the supporters.
Power, Corruption and Pies: A Decade of the Best Football Writing from When Saturday Comes, edited by Doug Cheeseman, Andy Lyons and Mike Ticher (1997)
If anything was directly responsible for promoting the intelligent side of football literature, it was WSC.
It finally found the high street in 1988, having begun in 1986 as a fanzine only available from specialist outlets. This collection follows on from The First Eleven, which brings together the first 11 issues of WSC.
Power, Corruption and Pies is serious, funny and weird – covering such fans’ concerns as terracing safety and hooliganism as well as anecdotes about Ron Atkinson’s legs. One gets a crushing sense of hindsight, too; the book starts with a ranting editorial from 1988 about the proposed sponsorship of the FA Cup. If only we’d known then that that was just the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, Annelise Jespersen’s article (also from 1988) about the woeful ground safety administration at Tottenham evokes a horrible flashforward to the following year’s tragic events. Hillsborough did not happen out of the blue; it was a tragedy waiting to happen, as most supporters could foresee – WSC was one of the first outlets for fans to bring issues to the attention of a wider audience.
On a lighter note, WSC increased the popularity of writers such as Harry Pearson, whose three-part satirical look at football nostalgia is included in true Monty Python “we used to lick t’road wi’ our tongues” style.
The collection also provides Nick Hornby a platform for defending media criticism of his Fever Pitch, which has been blamed, ridiculously, for both making the game more ‘bourgeois’ and middle-class, while at the same time encouraging lager-louts and ‘new-laddism’.
By 1995, the football magazine market had escalated to gigantic proportions, yet WSC stood out as the intelligent alternative among garish comics with pretty boys like Beckham and Giggs gracing the covers. But this had not reached its peak, as WSC predicted: “If England have done well [in Euro '96] and look to be on course for the 1998 World Cup, expect a media frenzy to dwarf even the obsessive level of coverage devoted to the game in the past year: there’ll be daily newspapers for each League club, and Terry Venables will be in every TV commercial…”. If you think football has gone stark staring bonkers in the past few years, this book is your tonic.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
The Passion and the Fashion: Football Fandom in the New Europe, edited by Steve Redhead (1993)
This book was one of the first to analyse the changing culture of the soccer terrace.
Commentators are now as likely to refer to the carnival or “party” atmosphere at football matches as violence and disorder. This does not mean that “football hooliganism” – as the media labelled it for the past 30 years – has somehow disappeared.
It is manifestly on the rise in countries such as Italy and Holland, and especially in Germany where it has ugly associations with the neo-Nazi right; it may be marginalized in countries like Scotland, and more lately England, but public disorder around professional football has deep historical roots in such heavily masculinised national cultures.
Nevertheless, the football crowd – and moreover, football fandom in general – is undergoing significant change which reflect wider shifts in gender, popular culture, modernity and post-modernity. On the one hand there is a greater degree of active participation, and even democratisation, among fans.
This process is evident in the increase of numbers of women in football, the rise of independent supporters organizations, fan magazines (fanzines), the increasing role for football in other art forms (music, theatre, video, film, television) and the mixing of football – as low, or pop, culture – with “high” arts such as opera and classical music.
A contradictory process is also detectable, however; the redefinition of football for a passive, “respectable” audience sitting in either executive boxes, all-seater stadia or in armchairs at home watching the game on TV.
McIlvanney on Football, by Hugh McIlvanney (1999)
HUGH McIlvanney is one of the best sports journalists to have ever graced the Sunday papers. This book represents a collection of his best football writing, spanning a career of nearly 40 years.
The book, at first glance, does not look all that large, but a second look reveals it to be a dense, 350-page volume of more than 70 articles mainly for The Observer which are arranged thematically, rather than chronologically.
The reader does not have to wait until the end to get to McIlvanney’s views on recent events in football: they are side by side with accounts of famous events such as England’s 1966 World Cup victory. And that article is typical of his writing: although McIlvanney conveys all the essential facts, he makes it into a story that captures the imagination and not just the stats. For example, he begins his 1966 piece with an evocative description of Wembley Stadium and the “bright sunshine and squalls of driving rain”. His description of George Best is also fascinating: his “resilience for so slight a figure and balance …would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple”. McIlvanney certainly knows how to turn a phrase. He is Scottish, so this book is also a history of Scottish football as much as a history of world football. His piece on the death of Celtic manager Jock Stein is especially moving.
He also, in more than one piece, criticises the tabloid press: the reader realises just who the real journalist is and who are the hacks. This is a good book to dip in and out of; and there is hardly an important figure or issue left out. McIlvanney has been at the sharp end of football and he does not mince his words. This is an education in journalism and football, as well as a good read.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
Manslaughter United: A Season With a Prison Football Team, by Chris Hulme (1999)
One of the best things about this interesting book is the deceptive title – at first glance, one thinks that this is just another book about a certain team at the top of the Premier League that wins things occasionally.
But the subtitle reveals a more sinister focus (although, given the ever-growing number of disturbing allegations in the tabloids, the subjects of prison and soccer are maybe not that far apart after all).
The author spent a season with the Kingston Arrows, a prison team which includes nine convicted murderers and two warders. Hulme accomplishes the difficult task of achieving the right tone, somewhere in between dark humour and serious journalism. He offers a real insight into of the mind of the prisoner, and shows how football can relieve boredom and give direction. The book is responsibly written, but not without wit: the point is made that, obviously, all games are at home, and someone says, “I bet they get loads of volunteers when the ball goes over the wall”.
Hulme deliberately leaves it quite a way into the book until he tells the reader just what the characters’ shocking backgrounds are. It is interesting that he describes the footballing qualities of the main players before he tells us what they are actually in for – which forces readers to see the prisoners in an unprejudiced light. Some chapters are written in the first person, with the prisoners themselves telling their own stories. At the very least, Hulme asks the reader to understand why they have offended, if not sympathise with them. The relationship between the prisoners and their warders on and off the pitch is also fascinating: the football pitch symbolises the only arena where all are equal – it is the one piece of grass which makes the prisoner feel he’s free for 90 minutes.
Given the nature of the book, it is perhaps not surprising that the language gets quite blue at times – but it is always very readable. Hulme is observant – at one point he notes that one of the inmates has “clean and neatly trimmed” fingernails – and it is nice touches like these which make this book rise above sensationalism. Instead, it is a really thought-provoking read.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes, by Gary Imlach (2005)
This book, a deserved winner of the 2005 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize, tells of Channel 4 sports presenter Gary Imlach’s quest to find out more about the life of his footballing father Stewart following his death from cancer.
It is a superbly written and incisive tale of the relationship between a father and a son, made all the more poignant because the father is no longer there to speak out. His story is told through newspaper cuttings and grainy photographs, old programmes and dusty pennants – anything that Gary could get his hands on to discover just what kind of man his father was.
The book could just as easily have been about a late rugby player, golfer, or any other type of sportsman, as it is not really the sport that matters. The book is about people, and about a bygone age when footballers were ordinary men, often earning less than those who went to watch them.
But this is not just another excuse for saccharine nostalgia with violins playing in the background – it is an intensely personal and moving homage to the man who represented Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and never received a cap for his efforts, and who worked as a joiner in the off-season to help bring up a young family.
Gary Imlach grew up a privileged insider at Everton when his father moved into coaching – but it was only when he passed away that he realised the photographs and trophies and old boxes of memorabilia stuffed in lofts were all he knew about him. He tells how he began to grow alienated from the game he was born into as he revisits key periods in his father’s career.
Punctuated by illuminating interviews with long-forgotten footballing greats, this book is a fascinating window on a lost era; most importantly, though, it serves as a warning that one never realises what one has until it has gone for ever. A highly recommended tribute to an intriguing character, and one who never stopped battling until the day he died.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
Football in Sun and Shadow, by Eduardo Galeano (1997)
This book is a poetic and eclectic look at the history of world football.
Galeano, who is Uruguayan, takes the reader along in small sections which describe not just the hard facts, but the less well-known folklore and anecdotes behind such elements of the game as the ball, players and various countries’ traditions.
Translated by Mark Fried, the prose is refreshingly ‘un-English’ and free of cliches. Galeano surely lays to rest that old one about football just being 22 men kicking a pig’s bladder about – he recognises its huge significance to popular culture and politics.
Moreover, he makes the important point that the two are inextricably linked, acutely noting: “Official history ignores football. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where it has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity.”
Galeano also shows how various dictators shamelessly used football to promote their regimes; he describes the terrible fate of a Dynamo Kiev team shot by a firing squad – still in their football strip – for daring to beat Hitler’s Germany in 1942. We also hear of the Uruguayan Abdon Porte, who, in 1918, after a loss of form and being dropped from the team, killed himself on the pitch at midnight, “at the centre of the field where he had been loved.”
Where there is sun there is shadow, where there is winning there is losing, where there is happiness there is sadness, where there is adulation there is obscurity. It is a simple theme, but it works perfectly. Every now and then there comes along a gem like this, almost submerged in the tidal wave of cash-in biographies and Fever Pitch imitations. If you are bored of the same old dross, you must read this.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
Only a Game? by Eamon Dunphy and Peter Ball (1976)
Brian Glanville wrote in the preface to the original 1976 edition of this book that “Dunphy’s diary is…infinitely removed from the ‘ghosted’ pap which, with its endless banalities and disingenuousness, has so long been inflicted on us”.
But Only a Game? could also be called ‘ghosted’, as Dunphy collaborated with the journalist Peter Ball for his book. Here, though, the ghost-writer’s intervention is hard to detect – it is clear he has taken a back seat and let Dunphy’s voice tell the story.
The style is raw and loose, often following spoken rather than written forms of speech, and proves that the success of a book written in this way is largely due to the amount of charisma possessed by its subject. Dunphy is passionate, intelligent, observant and brutally frank.
Only a Game? tells of just half a season with the then second division Millwall, who begin the season with high hopes; Dunphy himself says on a number of occasions that he feels they will win promotion. However, the spirit in the camp begins to evaporate into bitter differences of opinion, which inevitably results in poor performances and mid-table mediocrity. Many footballers will empathise with Dunphy’s candid description of his bitter disappointment at being dropped from the squad and then finally leaving the club.
Dunphy also succeeds in convincing sceptics that being a football player, especially in a lower division, is not an easy life. It comes with much less security than many other jobs, and can be cut short through injury and loss of form. He makes a point that today’s footballers could do to bear in mind – that but for their skills on the pitch they would be good for nothing in the real world of work.
Ten years after his book was published Dunphy bemoaned the commercialism creeping into the game, saying: “If I were to write the book again in 1986 I think I would remove the question mark”. Perhaps, though, even if we cannot sympathise with today’s vastly overpaid primadonnas, reading Dunphy’s book will make us realise how much the “good pro” (to whom the book is dedicated), is a normal, hard-working person with responsibilities like those of anyone else; it will also go some way to warning fame and money-hungry parents into pushing their sons into such a career.
The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North-East Football, by Harry Pearson (1994)
The telling words on the front of the 1997 edition of The Far Corner (shown in picture) say: “Forget Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, this is the football book of the new age”.
Bearing in mind that Fever Pitch was published just two years before The Far Corner, it is clear to see that new ages come and go with increasing rapidity these days, not least in football literature. This tale of north-east football from the grass roots to the glamour of the Premiership brilliantly satirises the glut of “devoted fan” books that inevitably followed Hornby’s book.
The Far Corner is a joy from beginning to end, riotously parodying both the football book and the factual book. The ‘index’ has such entries as “Beardsley, Peter – Elvis-like wiggling of” and “Carter, Raich – immaculate cheekbones of” and the preface about the author reads: “He translated the poetry of Enoch Powell into Ancient Greek at the age of eight”.
Pearson’s style sparkles; simile after simile links to football in some way. For example: “Andy and I were sitting in a cafe in Durham drinking cappuccino that was about as strong as a Glenn Hoddle tackle”.
There are many characters in the book, but Pearson does not patronise or sentimentalise them. There are the Len Shackleton-obsessed shopkeeper, Fat Bugger and the infamous Sunderland Skinheed. Such clichés as ‘Northern Wit’, ‘gritty’ and ‘down-to-earth’ could be applied to The Far Corner, but as Pearson himself often discovers, “these clichés…reflect a kind of truth”.
Pearson’s relative detachment, as he visits many clubs in the north-east (from Billingham Sythonia to Newcastle) – and the fact he keeps his own Middlesbrough obsession in the background – is also appealing. Your football reading is not complete without this book in your library.
Left Foot in the Grave, by Garry Nelson (1997)
GARRY Nelson’s diary of the highs and lows of a struggling third division football club sees English professional football through the eyes of Torquay United.
From early season cheer to end of season gloom, the day-to-day problems of players, backroom staff and management are revealed in this critically acclaimed insight into the the beautiful game.
Also recommended: Left Foot Forward: A Year in the Life of a Journeyman Footballer, by Garry Nelson and Anthony Fowles
Left Foot Forward: A Year in the Life of a Journeyman Footballer, by Garry Nelson and Anthony Fowles (1995)
Written in diary format, this book chronicles Charlton Athletic’s mediocre season of 1994/1995.
Though on the front cover it credits Nelson as sole author, it is actually co-authored by Anthony Fowles. But unlike the ever-increasing mass of ghosted biographies cramming the high street shelves, this hardly matters as Left Foot Forward shows absolutely no inconsistencies in style. In fact, Nelson’s personality comes through so strongly it is hard to discern the specific contribution of the co-author. It is perhaps lucky that 1994-1995 was such a poor season for Charlton, as it allows Nelson to explore more than just the often shallow nature of success, and also more than just football. Bad results usually end his diary entries as mere afterthoughts, mirroring their actual importance in Nelson’s life. And that is arguably the subject of the book: Nelson’s family, money, home and travel concerns figure in his story more than the game of football itself. Football is revealed as a tough job with minimal security, without the glamour and high wages so commonly reported in the papers. In this book, as in most great sporting literature, the game is the backdrop, and not the focal point; a personal story is told, raising issues that just happen to connect with football, but could quite easily apply to people plying other trades.
The 1994/1995 season was an eventful one. Fashanu and Grobbelaar were accused of match-fixing, Cantona showed his mastery of the martial arts, Paul Merson revealed his drug addiction, George Graham accepted a bung and English fascists rioted at Landsdowne Road. It was a bumper year for the tabloids.
Nelson assesses these events and the media reaction to them; his discussions are refreshing in their sensible sophistication. One wishes that there were more sane figures like him among today’s hysterical media and football worlds.
Also recommended: Left Foot in the Grave, by Garry Nelson (1997)
Football Against the Enemy, by Simon Kuper (1994)
SIMON Kuper travelled to 22 countries from South Africa to Italy, from Russia to the USA, to examine the way football has shaped them.
At the same time he tried to find out what lies behind each nation’s distinctive style of play from the carefree self expression of the Brazilians to the anxious calculation of the Italians. During his journeys he met an extraordinary range of players, politicians and of course the fans themselves, all of whom revealed in their different ways the unique place football has in the life of the planet.
The Glory Game, by Hunter Davies (1972)
This fly-on-the-wall book about a season in the life of Tottenham Hotspur is widely regarded as a contemporary classic in football literature.
Davies is meticulously observant and unbiased, and his research is impeccable. He shows the same qualities which brought acclaim for his biographies of people as diverse as The Beatles and William Wordsworth. He does not just follow the players – such as Ralph Coates, Alan Mullery and Martin Chivers; but also the travelling hooligans on the ‘Skinhead Special’; the manager Bill Nicholson; the club’s directors; and the fans.
The climax of the book is fittingly reached at the end of the 1971-2 season when Spurs beat Wolves to win the European Cup (the book would have been very different had their season merely tailed off into mediocrity). However, Davies questions the nature of glory throughout; the book does not end in a blaze of celebration and excitement. Davies follows Nicholson’s caution, saying that “Spurs had achieved glory without being particularly glorious”, and ends with the thought that these idolised men would only have been factory workers or builders but, “Thanks to football, they’re special”.Davies is fairly detached, leaving most of his thoughts for the closing summary. Most of the time, he lets his ‘characters’ speak for themselves, letting us decide for ourselves. One skinhead, for example, says that Ipswich is his favourite place, because there’s “More c**t…We always stay the night there and chase their birds”. Similarly, Nicholson’s views about women in the game and some of the players’ inherent racism are barely commented on. One wonders, though, if Davies was to write such a book again in these politically correct times, whether he would be forced to comment.
The Glory Game has stood the test of time admirably; it is still hard to believe a journalist was allowed such freedom behind the scenes. Twenty-seven years have not made any of the revelations redundant; football is still close-lipped about such things as sweeteners (cars, money, etc.) being given to the parents of talented youngsters to induce them to sign for a particular club. The Glory Game does much more than merely satisfy insatiable curiosity; it is an important social document on Britain in the 1970s. The fact that hardly any of the players, outside of their skills on the pitch, are individual, intelligent or even very likeable, prove Davies’ point about the unreal rise to stardom for average people with average attitudes.
Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby (1992)
This is the book that helped sales of football literature hit fever pitch.
Before Nick Hornby wrote his tale of his boyhood obsession with Arsenal, which he never grew out of, football books were largely something to be sneered at. If you were reading about the game it was probably because you were a Sun reader who could not manage sentences with more than three words.
Hornby changed all that – in the late 1990s it became positively trendy to be a football fan, and an explosion of books on the subject followed. Suddenly it was not just OK to have an obsession with a football club – you were square if you didn’t. Step forward Tony Blair (Newcastle), Zoe Ball (Manchester United), David Mellor (Chelsea) … and all the rest of the bandwagon-jumpers. Although Hornby’s book did a lot to help other excellent writers find a niche for their work, it did inspire mountains of dreadful cash-in imitations and provided a platform on which to market all sorts of dross as long as it was somehow connected with football.
The book itself is very readable; Hornby has a real knack for clear, flowing writing that makes the reader want to keep turning the pages. An interesting feature is that there are no chapters – it goes from match to match, just as Hornby did in real life. He says he did not think about time in years, but football seasons.
Where Hornby really succeeds – and what propelled this book into a mega-bestseller – is that he manages to make his obsession engaging even to readers who are not Arsenal fans, or even football fans. The subject is not really important – it is the obsession and its effect on his life, girlfriends and careers that is the real story.
A recommended read – even if just to find out where the whole new age of football writing came from.
The First Eleven, first published in 1992
This collection brings together replica editions of the first 11 issues of When Saturday Comes, the groundbreaking football fanzine which started in 1986.
The first issue was limited to only 100 copies available by mail-order only, and, as WSC co-founding editor Mike Ticher points out, it was “put together with all the meticulous production skills of a chimpanzee wearing boxing gloves”.
But it shows that the burning issues of today are nothing new: on the serious side, an article on a ‘friendly’ match between Chelsea and Rangers discusses the problem of racism and religious fanaticism, and not-so-seriously, the topic of the ever-changing strip is bemoaned: “Come on you blue two-tone hoops with red and white trim and a little emblem on the sleeve and the manufacturer’s logo and the sponsor’s name across the chest and…”.
WSC gave far greater exposure to lower division clubs than other mainstream magazines of the time, and the fanzine’s writers also made the important connection between football and the wider media – while the wider media themselves were doing everything to disown football. To this effect, there is an illuminating interview with the sadly missed and legendary DJ and Liverpool nut John Peel (who also wrote the foreword to this book).
When you compare this with today’s WSC, you are immediately struck by the difference in appearance, but it is clear that the basic stance has not changed all that much: it has gone from being the Private Eye of football fanzines to an altogether more mature football magazine which has equal standing alongside its glossy counterparts. But this does not mean it has compromised itself in any way; it is a natural progression from being young and angry, to being older and wiser – but still as angry. Ticher dryly asserts that WSC “has since been the subject of numerous enthusiastic investigations by undergraduate students in media studies”, but this is true – it has. WSC has become an important part of popular culture history whether it likes it or not.
Review by Sam Hawcroft
