Post by QPR Report on Dec 15, 2008 9:02:19 GMT
Complements of Four Four Two
NOT Included: "Shooting to the Top" by Rodney Marsh or "Stan The Man" by Stan Bowles
But at #39 "The Mavericks"
Four Four Two - Top 50 Football Books
Top 50 football books: Monday 08 December 2008 Stuck for a book this Christmas?
Don't buy a cash-in autobiography just because you know the player. FourFourTwo assembled a panel of experts – including several writers – to vote on the best 50 football books of all time, and over the course of this week we'll name them all. Starting with a fashionable tome...
50 The Fashion Of Football
Paolo Hewitt & Mark Baxter 2004
From Best to Beckham, Hewitt and Baxter take an off-beat look at the rocky relationship between footballers and fashion. Detractors suggest that the book is simply too chaotic a mix, but Hewitt counters: “The point is that the relationship is ad hoc, always shifting, so we were fine with the book being that way.”
The turning point arrived in 1961 with the abolition of the maximum wage. From then on, players were free to demand higher wages, and blow it all on clothes, the more preposterously expensive the better.
However, for all the positives here, one question remains unanswered – why didn’t the fashion police swoop on John Barnes for the sartorial crimes he committed on Five?
49 Out Of His Skin: The John Barnes Phenomenon
Dave Hill 1989
“It needed to be asked,” explains Dave Hill. “Why, before Barnes arrived at Anfield, had no black players established themselves at Liverpool or Everton?”
Hill’s study into bigotry in the city was a disturbing insight into the frightening level of racism among former players (Tommy Smith’s use of the ‘n’ word was at almost Manning-esque levels), fans and locals in a city which derived much of its wealth from the slave trade.
Two decades on, levels of consciousness about racism are higher and clubs have anti-racist policies. “At least clubs are aware of the problem these days – it used to be acceptable to ignore it,” Hill adds. Out Of His Skin is an uncomfortable reminder of how things used to be in a less enlightened age.
48 Steaming In Colin Ward 1989“I hope there’s no hoolie porn in the top 50,” sighed one of the FFT panel who argued over this Top 50. “They’re not about football. These people came close to destroying football in the ’80s.”
The most controversial choice in the top 50, Steaming In describes the terrace violence of the 1970s and ’80s. Ward, who followed Arsenal, Chelsea and England during that time, argued that he was an observer of violence – not a participant. Occasionally, he appears rather shocked by the scenes of carnage, although it didn’t stop him “observing” more of the same throughout the book.
Upon Steaming In’s release in 1989, The Guardian suggested it was “shocking in content” and “should be read in Government circles”. Apparently then-Sports Minister Colin Moynihan did just that, Ward’s book prompting an increase in security at games.
In the longer term, it sparked the “Kick-lit” genre, with former hoolies now telling – and selling – their tales by the bucket-load. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
47 The Beautiful Game: A Journey Through Latin American Football
Chris Taylor 1998
There's now a rash of books examining football in specific corners of the globe, but Taylor’s was among the first and finest; a well-constructed guide to the lunacy of football in the continent that has won nine World Cups, from its origins among British visitors to the turf wars that continue to beset ex-pats on Clapham Common. While readers may find the material on Argentina and Brazil familiar, that’s a testimony to the book’s success; even so, it means Taylor’s departures from the beaten track are the most striking. Easy to see why the FT hailed it the best footy book of 1998.
46 Steak... Diana Ross: Diary Of A Football Nobody
David McVay 2003
The memoirs of the former Notts County defender are a candid and hilarious account of what it was like to play for a small outfit in the ’70s. As the scenery shifts from Elland Road to Halifax’s run-down Shay, McVay recounts boozy tales (pissing in a pal’s wardrobe), bust-ups and the unique style of boss Jimmy Sirrell.
McVay dissects what it’s like to play in a team which is never likely to hit the heights, and has an acute awareness of his own limitations. The cover sets the tone: as a blizzard rages around him, the author appears frozen by rigor mortis. Life in the stiffs has never been so much fun.
45 Back Home: The Story Of England In The 1970 World Cup
Jeff Dawson 2001
The sights (Jairzinho bounding around after scoring Brazil’s winner against England), the sounds (blaring car horns outside the Guadalajara Hilton which kept England’s players awake on the eve of that game) and the smells (the consequences of Gordon Banks’s dose of Montezuma’s Revenge still linger) of Mexico 70 are masterfully brought to life in Jeff Dawson’s book.
England had a stronger squad than they’d had in 1966, only to throw it away in 30 crazy minutes against West Germany. Extensive interviews with surviving squad members, and Dawson’s own detective work into the “Bogota bracelet” incident (Government documents released under the 30-year rule prove Bobby Moore’s incarceration by the Colombian authorities had diplomatic ramifications) makes this the definitive guide to an England World Cup campaign. All those years of hurt start here.
44 The Way It Was Stanley Matthews 2000
In the normal run of things, a ghosted autobiography by an old pro is likely to be the dullest read in football. These, though, are the long-awaited and posthumously-published memoirs of Sir Stanley Matthews, arguably the greatest and certainly the best-loved of all English players (his funeral in Stoke was attended by more than 100,000 fans) – and they’re beautiful.
Working with Les Scott, Matthews finished the book mere weeks before his death. Intelligent, articulate and often moving, the book provides insight into a graceful man and the very different football world in which he lived. The technical details are a revelation, and his lack of bitterness towards the men who ran the game is striking.
43 Barça: A People’s Passion Jimmy Burns 1999
Skip the pompous foreword and accept that the prose style can be as stuffy as the house style of the FT (where the author worked), and you’ll reap the rewards.
Burns’ history of a club, 100 years of Catalan pride and some of the game’s most fascinating personalities (Cruyff, Maradona, Rinus Michels, Romario et al) is carefully researched, well-observed, and packed with fascinating stories.
Barça may now be synonymous with the likes of Cruyff and Ronaldinho, but Burns gives a fair share of the limelight to those who have played vital cameo roles in the drama.
Personalities like Patrick O’Connell, the former Man United star who hung on as the coach even after his president had been shot by Franco loyalists, and Vic Buckingham, the English coach who restored Barça’s self-respect, despite reminding players of Henry Higgins, Rex Harrison’s character in My Fair Lady.
42 The Billy The Fish Football Yearbook
Viz Comics 1999
Football is, among other things, a narrative: a never-ending story we tell ourselves to know who we are. For generations, British boys’ football stories did a parallel job, carrying Edwardian ideas of manliness deep into our age and shaping our fondest fantasies about the game.
As this ancient tradition staggered onto its last legs with Roy of the Rovers, the sublime, surreal, hilarious Viz character Billy the Fish filled the gap, simultaneously murdering the genre and breathing new life into it.
Viz represented a kind of very late comedy insurrection against Edwardian values. All references to sex, bottoms and drunkenness, which had been systematically banned from comic reading matter for more than a century, erupted into rude, hyper-sexualised, politically incorrect characters.
In this definitive collection, goalkeeper Billy Thomson (half-human, half-halibut) defies criminals, aliens, bomb plots and kidnappers, with the help of team-mates such as Shakin’ Stevens, Brown Fox and invisible striker Johnny X. Having no legs, arms or body doesn’t stop him being a wizard between the sticks. “What a save!” cheer the crowd. “He just got his fin to it in the nick of time! A breathtaking display of ‘aquabatics’ by the man/fish maestro!” A very British comedy masterpiece.
41 Left Foot Forward
Garry Nelson 1995
The blurb called it “the first book to communicate what it is really like to be a footballer...” In fact, Eamon Dunphy’s Only A Game? had done that 20 years before, but nobody had done it well since.
Bridging the eras, the two writers share money worries, an obsession with age, and job insecurity. And football definitely is a job. After a game on Boxing Day, he writes: “The slightly later setting-off time of 8.30 couldn’t offset the tiresomeness of having to earn a crust entertaining 10,000 holiday-makers.”
The book breaks the rule of English football that you never say anything nasty about anyone and there’s also great detail on how some managers make money from transfers. Nelson doesn’t quite achieve Dunphy-esque honesty about himself, though, and jokes about team-mates’ weight problems and grey hair are Shoot-esque.
40 Walking On Water
Brian Clough 2002
There are some familiar tunes in Walking on Water. Cloughie rants about the directors who incensed him over the years, and provides sharp insights into the successful sides he built at Nottingham Forest and Derby County during the 1970s.
But many of the lines are delivered with a degree of mournfulness. Ol’ Big ’Ead expresses regret about his homophobia towards the late Justin Fashanu, and he is open and candid about his own alcoholism.
Perhaps the biggest sea-change lies in his attitude towards former assistant Peter Taylor, to whom the book is dedicated. The Forest manager missed Taylor both professionally and personally in his later years at Forest, and the guilt he felt after Taylor’s death in 1990 (the pair didn’t speak for the last eight years of Taylor’s life) hastened his own physical decline.
In the loudly moneyed Premiership era, the pair’s monumental achievements at two provincial clubs will never be repeated. An irresistible tale.
39 The Mavericks
Rob Steen 1994
Amid a backdrop of brutality, the fancy-dans of the title (subtitled "English Football When Flair Wore Flares") followed the trail blazed by English football’s first tabloid star – George Best. Interviews with the likes of Frank Worthington, Stan Bowles and Alan Hudson tease out the subtle differences between each player, and touch upon the two factors shared by all of them: outrageous talent and a tendency to self-destruct.
Bizarrely, the most telling anecdote in the book concerns the least articulate member of the group – Charlie George. When England boss Don Revie substituted him after only an hour of his England debut, he offered the gutted Derby star an olive branch. He could go for a bath, or join him on the bench.
George declined both options. “F*ck you,” came the response, as Revie’s olive branch was summarily dispatched where the sun don’t shine.
If you still remain baffled as to why England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups, this goes a long way to solving the mystery.
38 The Story Of The World Cup
Brian Glanville 1980
The man Patrick Barclay called “that eternal galactico of the press box”, Glanville is the wisest, most knowledgeable and incisive writer football has known. For half a century, he’s blazed a trail with courage, wit and intelligence.
From his forward-thinking 1955 condemnation of blinkered, outmoded attitudes in the English game in Soccer Nemesis to prescient warnings about the Premiership and the bloated Champions League, his passionate and original voice has been unique and authoritative. All football writers are in his debt.
This, the great man’s definitive, eye-witness history of the World Cup, is written in his distinctive, inimitable style, peppered with terrific anecdotes, lordly myth-busting and penetrating insights into tactics and personalities. No wonder he is revered around the world.
As leading Dutch sports writer Auke Kok puts it: “We’ve had some good writers – but we’ve never had a Glanville.”
37 Ajax Barcelona Cruyff: The ABC Of An Obstinate Maestro
Frits Barend & Henk Van Dorp 1999
Cruyff embodies all that is quirky and captivating about Dutch football. ABC pulls together articles and interviews which the authors, respected Dutch journalists, conducted with Cruyff over 35 years.
His obstinacy (“If I’d wanted you to understand, I’d have explained it better”) and aloofness (Interviewer: “I don’t understand a word”; Cruyff: “Yes but I’m only suitable for the people at the top. For the people who really understand these things”) is apparent throughout.
But David Winner, who translated ABC into English, notes: “It’s a bit of a misnomer to think that all Dutch footballers are like Cruyff. He’s deliberately elliptical in interviews, and has this habit of referring to himself as ‘you’. He seeks to be incomprehensible, it seems.” Cruyff argues: “It’s the way I talk, so why not put it in the book?”.
Too Dutch for the Dutch? The mind boggles.
36 The Football Grounds of England and Wales
Simon Inglis 1983
Football’s answer to architectural guru Nikolaus Pevsner, Simon Inglis single-handedly made us appreciate our extraordinarily rich sporting architectural heritage.
As an architectural history student in the 1970s, Inglis spent weekends cycling around the cities of Britain, checking out cathedrals and football grounds, an eccentric obsession triggered by his boyhood love of Aston Villa’s old Trinity Road stand.
There was plenty to read on religious buildings, but nothing on cathedrals of football. Years later, as a freelance journalist, he decided to follow his passion and chronicle the history and design of every one of Britain’s 92 league grounds.
In snobbish architectural circles, he may as well have written about road haulage depots. “People forget how unfashionable and unglamorous football was back then,” explains Inglis. “When I told architectural people what I was doing they’d say ‘How quaint’.”
Some of the people running the game were even worse. “Football was an industry run by people who had no idea what it was. They knew very little. It never even occurred to them that a football ground could be important or culturally valuable,” he adds.
At best, Inglis assumed, The Football Grounds of England and Wales work would moulder on a few library shelves. Instead, when it appeared in 1983, it struck a resounding chord. “I got long emotional letters from football fans pouring their hearts out about their affection for their home ground and how important it was in their lives – how they felt they were no longer alone.”
After the 1985 Bradford fire disaster, he expected the real experts on stadium design to stand up and be counted – and then realised he was the only one around, a position he has since cemented with two decades of advice to government bodies on the subject and numerous books including the splendid Engineering Archie, a biography of prolific stadium designer Archibald Leitch.
Inglis also turned out to be something of a footballing Roman Vishniac, documenting a world on the eve of its destruction. Within a decade, the Hillsborough disaster and the Taylor Report would end the culture of the terraces. “My one regret is that I didn’t take more photographs,” he says. “But at the time I wasn’t sure many people would be interested.”
35 Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football
Phil Ball 2001
Ball is lucky to have published Morbo before the post-Beckham flood of books on Real Madrid (including two of his own), when there was very little in English on football in Spain. Like Alex Bellos and David Winner, Ball wrote well, was funny, and knew more about his chosen country than just its football.
The bulk of his book is stories of morbo, a Spanish word that means something like needle or rivalry. It is, in effect, a guide to Spanish life. Ball lives in San Sebastian, played beach football with legendary winger Lopez Ufarte, and knew someone who taught Luis Arconada English.
It’s the perfect mix of the personal and the national, Ball’s own life illuminating the book. It will survive after most of the Madrid books have turned out to be ephemeral.
34 England v Argentina: World Cups and Other Small Wars
David Downing 2003
England’s hostility to Germany – explored in Downing’s first book on rivalry – is readily explicable; the roots of England’s tensions with Argentina are less so.
From the earliest tours by English clubs to South America through Rattin and Maradona to Beckham and Simeone, Downing examines the spats that resulted in mutual loathing, concluding that the two nations’ value systems are incompatible. One favours physicality and honesty, the other trickery and cunning.
Downing’s best moment is his myth-shattering analysis of the 1966 quarter-final, after which Alf Ramsey called Argentina “animals”. In fact, it was England who committed more fouls.
33 Kicking And Screaming
Rogan Taylor & Andrew Ward 1995
This is the only all-encompassing oral history of football in the 20th Century, pulling together all the strands which make up football’s fabric. The testimonies, which formed the basis of an award-winning BBC TV series, range from Zillwood March’s comments on football in 1900 to West Ham United supporters revealing the strength of feeling against the club’s bond scheme proposal in the 1990s.
Fans who packed the terraces in the ’30s talk of “hotlegs” and Bestie speaks about life in the ’60s. Whether it’s Sir Tom Finney’s “jumpers for goalposts”, Len Shackleton admitting to receiving £25 backhanders in the 1940s or Ian Wright discussing astronomical wages in the 1990s, this is an indispensable guide to how football was dragged – kicking and screaming – towards the 21st Century.
32 The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: The Robin Friday Story
Paolo Hewitt & Paul McGuigan 1998
Drinking binges, drug-fuelled rages, disappearing acts, jail sentences, an outrageous talent squandered, and a shockingly early death amid suspicious circumstances: meet Reading and Cardiff ’70s cult hero Robin Friday – football’s Keith Moon.
The idea for the book came during Oasis’s 1996 US tour. The then Oasis bassist Paul ‘Guigsy’ McGuigan and music journalist Paolo Hewitt stumbled upon a Goal article printed in memory of Friday, who’d recently died at the age of 38.
Inspired to unearth more about him, they headed for Berkshire when the tour ended. “Guys on the Reading Evening Post put us in touch with his family and team-mates, and the stories just started flooding in,” recalls Hewitt.
The Friday legend is perpetuated by the fact that so little footage of him remains. He spent his entire career in the lower leagues, and despite extensive research, Hewitt unearthed only a few grainy images of him in action.
But team-mates vouch for Friday’s unorthodox brand of genius. He set the tone after his Reading debut in 1973. When asked if he was satisfied with his debut goal, he replied: “Yeah, I could have back-heeled it in actually, but I thought that might be taking the p*ss a bit.”
“Guigsy always said that George Best was football’s first pop star, and that Robin Friday was its first rock star,” Hewitt comments. In true rock ‘n’ roll fashion, Friday turned up to away games armed only with his boots, and would go AWOL until the following weekend’s ‘gig’.
Off the field, Friday emerges as a rebel in other ways. Hailing from a white working-class estate, he married a black girl at 16, fought running battles with National Front activists, and grew his hair long. Controversial referee Clive Thomas reckoned Friday’s outrageous 35-yard scissors-kick against Tranmere was “the most amazing goal ever”. It’s certainly the greatest you never saw.
31 El Macca: Four Years With Real Madrid
Steve McManaman & Sarah Edworthy 2004
Often criticised during his fitful England displays, Macca’s style seems at odds with the work ethic which English fans expect from players. Yet the languid Scouser, who scored Madrid’s second goal in their 2000 Champions League win over Valencia, was also our most successful export in a long while.
“He was clever enough to be adaptable, and to understand that his approach work would enable the likes of Figo and Raul to express themselves,” says co-writer Sarah Edworthy.
This book is more than simply hagiography of his time in Madrid. It recounts how he was used as a diplomat to soothe tempers in the dressing room and how he and wife Victoria adapted to life in Spain. A far more quirky and insightful account of life among the galacticos than Becks, Owen or, er, Woodgate are likely to provide.
30 Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life
Alex Bellos 2002
The format was familiar: by the time Futebol appeared, in 2002, we’d already enjoyed excellent books on football in one country by David Winner (Holland) and Phil Ball (Spain), with several others in the pipeline. Yet nobody had tackled the ultimate football country since the American sociologist Janet Lever wrote the obscure but wonderful Soccer Madness in 1983.
What makes Futebol special is its legwork – Alex Bellos is a Stakhanovite. In dangerous countries like Brazil, there are foreign correspondents who never leave town, and barely even their neighbourhood, except to go to the airport for the flight home. But Bellos travels around Brazil as if it were Luxembourg.
Not only does he speak to everyone – the man who designed Brazil’s yellow-blue-white strip, the man who scored the winner against Brazil in the 1950 final, beauty queens, priests – but he also goes everywhere and does everything.
He visits three Brazilians who are playing for a club in a village of 1,000 people in the Faroe Islands. He appears in the Sao Paulo carnival for the samba school of Corinthians’ hard-core fans, wearing purple feathers. Futebol’s hundreds of interviews, facts, drawings, photographs and even maps will spare researchers trouble for generations to come.
There are problems. When Bellos wrote this, he was Brazil correspondent for The Guardian, and like many daily journalists he has trouble structuring a book. At times it descends into a parade of cameo football obsessives.
Secondly, he is shorter on theory than on fact. This is something of a relief after the many half-baked football-as-national-character arguments, but since Bellos knows so much, and seems so comfortable with Brazil’s history, language and music (like all good football books, Futebol is about much more than football), we want more of his insights.
However, it’s an irreplaceable book.
29 Managing My Life
Alex Ferguson 1999
After his side won the treble in 1999, publishing houses fought the mother of all bidding wars for the rights to publish Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography.
Hodder Headline’s successful £1.1 million bid was met with ridicule. How could they possibly make that back in sales, asked ‘those in the know?’ “Explosive” extracts in the Telegraph and The Sun – including criticism of his former assistant Brian Kidd – were met with consternation in some quarters.
But all publicity is good publicity – the book sold in bucketloads, and HH had the last laugh. Michael Crick’s book on Fergie [see No.15 tomorrow] presents a far more rounded view of the Scot: the bullying episodes and the United boss’s rocky relationship with several journalists are entirely absent from Managing My Life.
But if you want to know why United dominated football in the ’90s, this book goes a long way to providing the answers.
28 White Angels
Jon Carlin 2004
In 2004, too many trees were felled by publishers wanting to tell us what we already knew about El Becks and Real Madrid. This is the best of them, elevated by Carlin’s astonishing access and his talent.
Carlin offers a lovingly detailed portrait of the club and the galacticos experiment, which soon looks passé as sides like Porto win with teamwork, not individuality.
At times, it feels like a well-written, intelligent hagiography of Florentino Perez. Directors even joke that they could win with a fan playing. Such hubris is rewarded with defeat by Monaco and Morientes – a reject deemed insufficiently galactical, giving a valuable insight into what happens when a club believes its own hype.
27 Ajax, The Dutch, The War
Simon Kuper 2003
Ajax, The Dutch, The War offers a kind of secret history of Dutch football and Holland.
Kuper may or may not have been inspired by Brilliant Orange, which includes a chapter identifying Ajax as ‘The Jewish Club’. But where David Winner’s tale is inspiring and captivating, Kuper’s book is full of anger, disillusionment and pain as he confronts the myth that the Dutch resisted the Nazi death machine, finding, as he digs into football history, d**ning evidence of collaboration and conformity.
Sparta Rotterdam, for example, expelled Jewish members (while refunding their membership fees) yet agonised over the size of the lettering on its ‘Forbidden for Jews’ sign.
The uneasiness lingers on with Ajax officially denying it ever was a Jewish club, although, as Kuper painstakingly establishes, the club once drew heavily on Jewish support and owes its most glorious years to Jewish returnees.
A troubling, meticulous masterpiece.
26 Keane
Roy Keane & Eamonn Dunphy 2002
Keane’s unflinching description of the retribution he meted out to Alf Inge Haaland (who accused him of faking his cruciate injury in 1996) during a 2001 Manchester derby nearly resulted in a messy court case. The offending “Take that you c**t” section was removed from the paperback.
Keane’s torrent of abuse at Ireland boss Mick McCarthy, and subsequent walk-out on the eve of the finals, is recorded in all its gore, as are scathing criticisms of former Republic boss Jack Charlton.
In a FFT interview, Charlton claimed that co-writer Eamon Dunphy was simply using Keane to settle old scores with him. “Not true at all,” argues Dunphy. “Do you really think that Roy would allow anyone to speak for him? The language and style of the book simply reflects the way in which he has always played the game.”
25 Tackling My Demons
Stan Collymore 2004
Just as young Stanley isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s fair to say that Tackling My Demons isn’t everyone’s idea of a great read.
Clashes with managers and team-mates at Aston Villa, Liverpool and Forest, the assault on Ulrika Jonsson in 1998, an early retirement, and the recent “dogging” revelations have seen Collymore (all too frequently) in the news for the wrong reasons, and TV presenter Kirsty Gallagher labelled him “desperate and sad” after he disclosed intimate details of their relationship in the book.
Collymore emerges as a deeply troubled man, and cites John Gregory’s criticism of him as evidence of how he remains persecuted. Others claim that Collymore just messes up all the time; the dogging revelations that destroy his burgeoning Five Live career being the most recent example.
You may love or loathe Stan, but he is living proof that money can’t buy personal happiness.
24 A Season With Verona
Tim Parks 2002
Fan-lit is much-maligned, and often rightly so. After Nick Hornby wrote Fever Pitch, legions of fans felt the urge to commit their tales of wet midweek nights in Grimsby to paper, but none had his wit, insight or narrative ability.
This is the only other book about a fan’s experience in the Top 50, and if the format – tracing the 2000-01 Serie A season – is familiar, its ambition in exploring masculine identity and Italian character sets it apart.
One passage mocking football’s role in the Catholic jubilee was so controversial that some in the church wanted the book burned.
Parks is a unique example of an established writer turning to football, and he admits he was surprised by the reaction of the literary establishment. His German hardback publisher, for instance, refused even to read it, a decision she regretted when the paperback was well received.
“If I had written about elephants, plenty of non-elephant lovers would’ve read it, if only because they trust me as a writer,” he says. “Football is an insuperable obstacle for some people.”
Yet it was partly football’s odd position, as an obsession treated by many with suspicion or disdain, which prompted this book. “It developed from being aware that I was embarrassed to admit my enthusiasm for the game and a growing interest in that embarrassment, a desire to understand what lay behind it.”
His concept of the fan is different to Hornby’s. “I reacted against his presentation of the fan as a man wounded by psychological problems. His is a description where fandom is simultaneously made endearing and subtly disparaged by the idea that fans suffer from arrested development. This hides all that is intelligent about fandom for experiencing certain emotions without being destroyed by them.”
Quite.
23 Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain 1945
David Downing 1999
When Dynamo arrived in London in November 1945, British football still reigned supreme. In the 33 days that followed, the Russians served notice of the decline that was to come, winning twice and being unlucky to draw their other two games.
This meticulously researched book captures the spirit of a controversial tour, when the USSR, although still an ally, was viewed with grave suspicion.
As cultures clashed, Dynamo seemed in perpetual dispute with the FA, clubs, refs and the press, and were even accused of fielding an extra man in a fog-bound game at Ibrox.
Crowds, desperate for top-class sport after six years of war, came in their droves, yet for all their delight in Dynamo’s brilliance, British football stood by its traditional approach, offering a metaphor for the empire.
22 Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football
David Winner 2005
A classic, if only for its finding that modern football was invented in Victorian public schools to keep boys from masturbating, the idea being that if boys were expending energy in teams, they couldn’t be alone engaging in “self-pollution.”
The book takes the familiar idea of studying football culture in one country, and applies it to England itself, as if it were a foreign land.
Winner seizes on the rich and bizarre popular culture that has accreted around the English game – Roy of the Rovers, The Italian Job, Neasden FC in Private Eye, etc – and mines these artefacts for truths about England.
Funny and illuminating, the book’s one problem is that it was researched mostly in libraries, so it lacks the weird first-person encounters that made Brilliant Orange [see No.4 on Friday] so good.
21 The Football Man
Arthur Hopcraft 1968
When this was first published in 1968, managers were sacked too quickly for too little cause, the game was complaining about bad publicity and violence among players was a cause of national concern.
There’s much in this oft-quoted study of British football to reinforce the cliché that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but there are revealing differences.
Agents are barely mentioned, while professional referees are a pipe dream. This enduring great owes much to Hopcraft’s obvious, anxious love for the game, the candour he inspires in his interviewees (Bobby Charlton and Don Revie among them) and his descriptive powers.
Of one amateur game he notes: “Escaped poodles frisk among players’ legs, lads with Rolling Stones haircuts collide with static veterans like gollywogs flung against a nursery wall.”
20 Dynamo: Defending the Honour of Kiev
Andy Dougan 2001
If the story is good enough, the rest will follow.
Ignore the clunking dramatisation of the opening chapter: once Dougan switches to journalistic narrative, history takes over. This is a book of remarkable research, cutting through the myths that obscured what happened when Dynamo Kyiv played the Luftwaffe in 1942.
Communist myth had the SS shooting at the Ukrainians during the game, with survivors shot at the final whistle; the truth was rather more prosaic, but no less tragic. A team based around several Dynamo players working at the same bakery did beat a team representing the Luftwaffe, and afterwards all 11 were rounded up for interrogation.
Dougan shows how one died under torture, three were executed and one disappeared, and in rescuing their tale from propaganda does Ukrainian football a great service.
19 Football: The Golden Age
John Tennent 2001
Nostalgia can be a cloying thing – did that ‘golden age’ include rationing and outside toilets? – but not in this tremendous photographic collection.
As with his companion volumes of old rugby and motor racing snaps, John Tennent has uncovered a monochrome goldmine. Featuring pictures of everything from boys playing in the streets to pools winners and Bobby Charlton with hair, the era of dubbin and Victory Cigarettes emerges astonishingly fresh.
Sir Bobby with hair. No, really...
Always beautiful and often funny, the images reveal a game played predominantly amid mud, mist and trenchcoats, evoking a largely vanished world that still haunts our imagination.
It’s hard to imagine a better use of archive pictures.
18 Addicted
Tony Adams 1998
"For an autobiography to work," explains writer Eamon Dunphy, "the subject has to be willing to discuss his faults. The footballer must show himself to be real and flawed."
Addicted was the first such autobiography. Adams talks with breathtaking honesty about the two addictions which have dominated his life – football and alcohol. His career encompassed both the "win or lose, we will booze" culture of the ’80s and the mineral water/steamed broccoli of Arsene’s Arsenal.
His harrowing account of his descent into alcoholism (including bed-wetting and clothes-soiling) drew criticism from those with weaker constitutions.
The majority were simply dumbfounded by what they read, and concurred with Wenger’s comment: "Tony, I’m amazed you’re still actually with us."
"Could you not have got me a slightly smaller copy..."
17 The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble through North-East Football
Harry Pearson 1994
For exiles from that 50-mile strip from Ashington in the north to Teesside in the south, The Far Corner cannot be read without a lump in the throat. It’s hard to imagine anything else could be so evocative of the North-East.
Football, of course, is the perfect medium for exploring the spirit of the region, that "far-off mythical place where the people were called ‘folk,’ the beer was called ‘ale,’ the men were called ‘lads’ and the lads were called ‘Jackie’."
Harry Pearson, himself a returned exile, manipulates the whiff of batter, leek-growing contests and the shopkeeper with the Shackleton obsession to produce a work that is moving, cynical, romantic, tragic and sentimental.
Most of all, though, it is hilarious – in that peculiarly North-Eastern mode that is both abrasive and affectionate.
16 The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football
David Conn 2004
The lament for football’s lost golden age and the belief that commercial interests have sullied the game are as old as football itself – Willy Meisl, for instance, in his 1960 book Soccer Revolution, argues that the liberalisation of the offside law in 1925, which played to the popular demand for more goals, was the beginning of the end.
However, Conn’s is a heartfelt account of the increasingly rapid changes of the past couple of decades. "It is deeply frustrating," he writes, "seeing the national game revel in a boom, which could take it so far, yet drive itself so needlessly into dysfunction and failure."
Conn is no nostalgic who believes the ’80s were a golden period – to him Wimbledon’s FA Cup triumph in 1988 was not a wonderful fairy-tale,
but a victory for thuggery – but he is appalled by the descent of the game into rampant, barely regulated commercialism.
"I think the end of the sharing of gate receipts in 1983 was the first break," he says. "When I talk about the soul, I mean the part of football that is more than business. The soul is the passion and the loyalty of fans, but it is also the joy to be found in playing the game. As other collective institutions disappear, football clubs are becoming an increasingly central part of people’s identity, and that’s why we see these heroic struggles to save clubs when they are threatened."
Books on the business of football can be unreadably dry, but The Beautiful Game? is passionate and bleakly humorous. Quite aside from the depth of the research, what sets Conn’s book above Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams, a mystifying winner of the William Hill’s Sports Book of the Year Award, is the sense that he really cares.
Broken Dreams was riddled with errors, both of fact and of spirit; Conn, simply by noting, for instance, that fans know intuitively why Notts County matter, taps into a depth of tradition of which Bower has no grasp.
Bower just says football is in a very bad way; Conn tells us why it is worth putting right.
15 The Boss: The Many Sides Of Alex Ferguson
Michael Crick 2002
Having debunked the myths surrounding leading Tories Jeffrey Archer and Michael Heseltine, Newsnight reporter Michael Crick wrote an instant best-seller on the United boss.
The "hairdryer" treatment, his dealings with agents, Fergie’s often fractious relationship with journalists – Crick proved that the Scot is a man of many contradictions.
The fear Fergie invokes in others was never better illustrated than when the Manchester Evening News refused to grant Crick access to its United clippings files on the grounds that it might incur the boss’s wrath.
The entire episode led the author to question whether he’d been transported to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
One of Crick’s other revelations is that Fergie enjoys singing along in the car to Sinatra songs, including My Way. Fitting indeed.
"And now, the end is near..."
14 Only a Game?
Eamon Dunphy 1976
A book that answers the greatest question: what’s it really like to be a professional footballer? Nobody had done it before.
Only a Game? has the perfect narrative structure: Dunphy takes us from absurd pre-season hopes, through quarrels in the team, to being dropped and finally leaving Millwall after eight years.
His diary for November 10 1973, a 2-0 victory over Cardiff City for which he was not picked: "I couldn’t go and sit in the stand hoping for them to get beaten. It is too small-minded for words. So I watched the racing on telly instead. What is terrible is that it is only November."
Dunphy is honest about himself, emotionally literate in describing his team-mates (who come to life like characters in a good novel), and revealing of the insecurity with which footballers live.
You get the sense that the life is not only unglamorous, but not much fun.
13 Niall Quinn: The Autobiography
Niall Quinn & Tom Humphries 2002
There’s definitely something about Irish players and their autobiographies.
Quinn’s book might not be as controversial as those of some of his compatriots, but it is nonetheless a candid insight into a man generally recognised as one of the nicest in football.
More than that, it is a real book, written in a simple, dryly amusing, almost lyrical style that, even if it wasn’t, could have been written by Quinn and yet still qualifies as proper writing.
He was helped by having the 2002 World Cup and the rumpus surrounding Roy Keane’s departure from the squad as a starting point, but by the end that is just one issue among many.
Football happens to have been Quinn’s life, but his autobiography is just as much about regret, about moving on and about remaining a decent man in a world that is profoundly indecent.
"The players are totally behind me. Isn't that right Niall..."
12 The Miracle Of Castel Di Sangro
Joe McGinniss 1999
This hilarious, compelling, often misunderstood book proves Americans can write about soccer.
McGinniss, who made his name writing about American politics and his fortune penning true crime bestsellers, details the rise of Castel di Sangro, from a town of 5,000 people, to Serie B.
But this is as much The Sopranos as Field of Dreams. A season of joy, tragedy, hilarity and courage draws to a shabby close with the team throwing a game as a player reminds the author: "Remember, we are the land of Dante but also of Machiavelli."
The comic highlight is the press conference where the club’s new African ‘signing’ from Leicester City announces he’s planning to sleep with all the players’ wives – a deal that proves to be a hoax.
Odd as that sounds, it’s not the strangest incident in this book.
11 The Glory Game
Hunter Davies 1973
"There is no way that a writer these days could possibly do what I did in The Glory Game," explains Hunter Davies. "He or she wouldn’t be able to get past the minefield of agents, lawyers and officials."
In 1973, Davies was granted unprecedented access to Spurs boss Bill Nicholson and his 19-man first-team pool. With no official contract behind him, he admits to "worming my way in" at White Hart Lane, and convincing all those concerned that an "inside story" book charting Spurs’ season would be a worthwhile project.
"I’d originally been told that as a club, Spurs would be completely unapproachable, and that Nicholson would be dour and difficult. He was completely cooperative though, and when I informed the players that I would keep 50 percent of the royalties and split the other half equally between them, they were happy too. It wasn’t a huge amount of money though!"
The Glory Game defines the fly-on-the-wall sports book. Although Nicholson later claimed that he’d occasionally felt inhibited by Davies’ presence (particularly when chastising Martin Chivers), the Spurs players and staff were remarkably candid in confiding their hopes and fears.
Aside from the frequent references to flares, Triumph Stags, and Nicholson’s hatred of men with long hair, Davies’ book simply doesn’t date. "The tensions, the personality clashes, the fear of losing one’s place in the team, the monotony of training, triumph and despair, concern over injuries, old players fading... all these factors will remain constants in team sports for as long as they’re played," argues Davies.
Printed in five different languages, and a big seller in the USA, The Glory Game is rightly regarded as a classic. And remember that in an era of media trained stars and Fort Knox-style security at big clubs, there will never be a remake.
"This had better be going in that book of yours, Davies..."
10 Puskas on Puskas: the life and times of a footballing legend
Rogan Taylor & Klara Jamrich 1998
A warm, intelligent and revealing biography which fuses history and politics with the study of genius to produce a unique portrait of the great Hungarian, Ferenc Puskas.
A labour of love, it was born of Taylor’s urge to know his boyhood hero. One early fruit of this was an unmade film script with Stalin dying in the opening scene with the word “Puskas!” on his lips. In 1993, researching the TV series Kicking and Screaming [see No.33], Taylor met Puskas and persuaded him to tell the story of his unparalleled career, first with Hungary and later as kingpin (with Di Stefano) of the great Real Madrid.
Some of the most mesmerising passages deal with the star’s status as the only free man in the vast prison camp of Stalinist Hungary in the early-’50s. Tragically, Taylor’s Hungarian co-author Klara Jamrich has since died of Cancer at the age of 35.
Di Stefano scores three and Puskas four in 7-3 win vs Eintracht Frankfurt
9 Football In Sun And Shadow
Eduardo Galeano 1997
American sportswriter George Plimpton said the smaller the ball, the greater the literature.
He hadn’t read this remarkable, poetic, episodic history by a left-wing Uruguayan writer who once asked “Why is football like God? Each inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.” The book consists of short stories on a theme – a famous game, a spectacular goal, a great player – written in a lyrical style which could quickly grate yet somehow doesn’t.
Some episodes, like the tale of Brazil’s greatest goalscorer – Artur Friedenreich, not Pele – read like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realist fiction.
Unlike many authors who dwell on Albert Camus’ goalkeeping for spurious intellectual credibility, Galeano gives it a twist: Camus, he insists, liked to keep goal because that way his shoes didn’t wear out so fast.
8 Tor!
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger 2003
Few football cultures inspire as many clichés as Germany’s: ruthless, defensive, boringly efficient. Such labels are proved hopelessly inaccurate by this book.
In Hesse-Lichtenberger’s capable hands, the history of German football seems more entertaining, unpredictable and scandal-infested than England’s. Part of the attraction is that when German players insult each other – and they do so incessantly – their jibes are a cut above the “not fit to tie my bootlaces” routines which pass for abuse in UK footy media.
While British mavericks have usually been confined to the margins, Germany’s social misfits and rebels – from Franz Beckenbauer to Gunter Netzer and Lothar Matthaus – have often taken centre stage. And the startling chapter on East German football says more in a few pages about totalitarian football than most books on the subject.
7 Full Time
Tony Cascarino & Paul Kimmage 2000
Initially, it seemed Paul Kimmage would struggle to find a publisher for Full Time: “I’d spent a lot of time with Tony and had already got four chapters done before Simon and Schuster agreed to publish it,” he explains. Famously, one publisher said: “Tony Cascarino? He’s not exactly David Beckham, is he?”
“I could see what they meant,” confesses Kimmage. “Tony hadn’t played in England for a few years. But I always had the gut feeling that the book would be successful because Tony was prepared to be totally honest, which is the key to a project like this. And having been a professional cyclist for four years, I could identify with his fears as his football career drew to a close, and real life began.”
"I thought we were supposed to be posing with David Beckham..."
Full Time works on two levels. On the one hand, there are the testosterone-fuelled stories of dressing-room banter, numerous references to Jack Charlton’s potty mouth, and Glenn Hoddle’s suspect humour. But it also transcends football issues. Cascarino’s troubled relationship with his father and his painful separation from his wife and sons are themes which run throughout the story.
Then there is the doubting inner voice – “Come off it Cas, you won’t f***ing score. You shot it years ago” – which plagues him each time he bears down on goal. “Tony didn’t need to confess to that,” says Kimmage. “But it’s about trust between author and subject. The writer can only push the buttons, the player is the one who must unburden themselves.”
Since its publication in 2000, Cascarino has adapted well to “real life” and enjoys a fulfilling media career. “But for every Cascarino,” explains Kimmage, “there are two players who can’t adapt at all. The money makes little difference at all.” Gazza would doubtless concur.
6 Keeper Of Dreams
Ronald Reng 2003
A riveting memoir, Reng’s book tells the strange and fascinating tale of Lars Leese, a goalkeeper plucked from the German minor leagues (and computer software industry) to play for Barnsley in the Premier League but soon returns to obscurity in Germany
The culture shock is immense: Leese puzzles over tactics, watches his team-mates rogering strippers on stage at the Christmas party and tries to handle the claustrophobic hysteria of a small Yorkshire town desperate to bask in football glory. He commits one early, unforgivable sin on the pitch: throwing the ball to a team-mate.
To correct this ‘mistake’, the coach stands on the flank near the halfway line to show Leese where he must always kick the ball to. Among the many delights is the revelation that German keepers shout “Leo!” if they’re going to kick the ball in the air so defenders know to duck.
5 A Strange Kind Of Glory
Eamon Dunphy 1974
Just the title reveals that this biography of Sir Matt Busby is no ordinary football book.
“I called it A Strange Kind of Glory because that’s what it was,” explains Dunphy. “Here is a man who created all this legendary magnificence, the first modern football manager, who made Manchester United into more than just an ordinary club and yet was ultimately powerless, ending up in a semi-detached house in Chorlton.”
Dunphy was inspired by admiration for the man and by his service at United as youth and reserve-team player from 1960 to 1965. He knew that the real story of how one man conceptualised much of modern football had never been properly told and, financed by the profit from his U2 biography The Unforgettable Fire, spent months in Manchester and Scotland researching his biography.
“Busby was a great man,” he says. “Even great players – like Bobby Charlton and Denis Law – were in awe of him and professional footballers don’t do awe. He was the first manager to lay down how a club should be run, how players should behave, how the game should be played. And he had vision – he took United into Europe, advocated floodlit football and was one of the first managers to take a risk on young players, throwing youngsters like George Best into the team.”
But he was, Dunphy concedes, “ruthless beneath the charm – when Fulham paid Johnny Haynes £100 a week in 1961, he gave stars like Bobby Charlton a fiver so they were on £25 a week.”
The book traces the corrupt and corrupting rise of professional football to put Busby into context. Dunphy makes you feel as if you are inside the club: with Busby and Jimmy Murphy on the training ground; watching the Busby Babes and the 1968 European Cup-winning side emerge; and eavesdropping as players bicker and, in the early-1960s, wonder if Busby has lost it.
In its own way, this book – the best biography of a football manager ever written – is as much of an achievement as winning the European Cup.
Sir Matt keeps watchful eye over Old Trafford
4 Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius Of Dutch Football
David Winner 2000
“I wanted to be provocative. I wanted it to be quirky and unusual and to ensure it looked at football in a different way,” explains Brilliant Orange’s cover designer Will Webb.
This book, which takes an idiosyncratic look at the enigma that is Dutch football, leapt off the shelves by virtue of the ball of Edam and Astroturf on the front framed by, well, brilliant orange. “Like a football, but not quite. Like grass, but not quite. David’s book proves that Dutch football is rather different; the cover is in keeping with the content,” adds Webb.
Winner interviews quirky former stars like Rep and Rensenbrink, but also offers a unique insight into the psyche of the Dutch, and goes some way to explaining why the team underachieves in big matches. Winner confesses to being “fascinated by the correlation between football and space, and football and architecture”.
Not your average football book. Not your average football team.
3 All Played Out: Full Story Of Italia 90
Pete Davies 1990
This riveting, passionately-written inside story of the England team and its fans during Italia 90 made ‘football literature’ mean more than daft ghosted biographies.
“There had been good football books before,” recalls Davies, “but they were rare, and there’d been bugger all in the 1980s. I wanted football to have a proper place in popular culture; I thought someone should say ‘Not all of us are lunatics. We have legitimate emotional reasons for watching this game, which is incredibly important culturally and matters to everyone in the world.’”
Even more remarkable than winning the trust of England boss Bobby Robson and his players was persuading a major publisher to take a gamble on a genre that didn’t yet exist. Davies then wrote the book in just eight weeks after the World Cup to hit the Christmas market.
“I’m 45, but it’s still incredibly vivid to me,” he once said. “I’ll never forget being in Turin.”
2 Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby 1993
A completely original book. Hornby didn’t start the new wave of football writing – Pete Davies did – but he was the first British writer to examine the apparently unremarkable experience of being a fan.
Following the theory of fandom as therapy, Hornby describes how he used Arsenal to escape from his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and so on. He treats his fandom as a problem, as something not entirely healthy.
This set him apart from the previous notion of fandom as a hobby, and from his imitators who wrote cutesy accounts of watching bad football in the rain without any of Hornby’s honesty about their own lives.
It helps that Fever Pitch is hilarious and beautifully written and that it offers a social history of Britain from the 1960s through the early-1990s. Its only flaw is its formlessness: it’s a book to dip in rather than to read through.
"And it's up for grabs now..."
1 Football Against The Enemy
Simon Kuper 1994
“I had mixed feelings when I began work on the book,” confesses Simon Kuper. “I felt that the whole thing might be too big for me, and I was concerned about what friends would say when they read it. Yet I also had a sort of blind confidence in my writing ability. An established author probably wouldn’t have taken on such a project. It’s the sort of thing that a young writer needed to do.”
With a small(ish) £5,000 budget, the 22-year-old set off on a Palinesque jaunt which saw him visit 22 countries in a crazy nine-month period – “I’d go around Europe for three months, using mainly Inter Rail tickets, then come home to London and wash my clothes, fly to Cameroon, come home and then fly off to South Africa.”
His aim? “To investigate precisely how politics and football intertwined throughout the world. It was a subject that always fascinated me, and I was conscious that such a book hadn’t been written before.”
In the course of his epic adventure, he interviewed an eclectic mix of players and officials, including an Argentine general with unique views on the way the game should be played, a Berliner who’d suffered persecution at the hands of the Stasi simply because he supported his local team, and most bizarrely, Cameroon star Roger Milla, who had made headlines with his attempts to organise a tournament for pygmy tribes.
Kuper planned the trip carefully, but the actual interviewing process was distinctly ad hoc. “In the pre-internet age, it could be difficult. I’d arrive in Argentina, speak to someone in basic Spanish, and arrange to meet the friend of a friend. At first, I had a vague idea of meeting up with people in bars, but I quickly realised that I needed to be far more proactive in speaking to people. Sometimes I just got lucky, and bumped into people in airport queues – like a Dynamo Kiev official who spoke perfect English.”
Groundbreaking though Kuper’s book is, he denies that it was responsible for the mushrooming of more insightful football literature. “Nick Hornby and Pete Davies created the idea in publishers’ minds that football books could be good and sell, not me. Maybe I did influence some authors to carry out studies on football in other countries, but the process of excellent books being published was already under way.”
Saturation football coverage and internet access means that fans are far more cosmopolitan in their outlooks than ever before. However, Football Against The Enemy remains the only book to take a definitive sweep on world football, and explain how political and cultural issues influence the game across the globe.
For that reason, it deserves its title as the Number One football book.
fourfourtwo.com/blogs/fourfourtwoview/archive/2008/12/12/top-50-books-finale-puskas-politics-amp-palinesque-jaunts.aspx
NOT Included: "Shooting to the Top" by Rodney Marsh or "Stan The Man" by Stan Bowles
But at #39 "The Mavericks" Four Four Two - Top 50 Football Books
Top 50 football books: Monday 08 December 2008 Stuck for a book this Christmas?
Don't buy a cash-in autobiography just because you know the player. FourFourTwo assembled a panel of experts – including several writers – to vote on the best 50 football books of all time, and over the course of this week we'll name them all. Starting with a fashionable tome...
50 The Fashion Of Football
Paolo Hewitt & Mark Baxter 2004
From Best to Beckham, Hewitt and Baxter take an off-beat look at the rocky relationship between footballers and fashion. Detractors suggest that the book is simply too chaotic a mix, but Hewitt counters: “The point is that the relationship is ad hoc, always shifting, so we were fine with the book being that way.”
The turning point arrived in 1961 with the abolition of the maximum wage. From then on, players were free to demand higher wages, and blow it all on clothes, the more preposterously expensive the better.
However, for all the positives here, one question remains unanswered – why didn’t the fashion police swoop on John Barnes for the sartorial crimes he committed on Five?
49 Out Of His Skin: The John Barnes Phenomenon
Dave Hill 1989
“It needed to be asked,” explains Dave Hill. “Why, before Barnes arrived at Anfield, had no black players established themselves at Liverpool or Everton?”
Hill’s study into bigotry in the city was a disturbing insight into the frightening level of racism among former players (Tommy Smith’s use of the ‘n’ word was at almost Manning-esque levels), fans and locals in a city which derived much of its wealth from the slave trade.
Two decades on, levels of consciousness about racism are higher and clubs have anti-racist policies. “At least clubs are aware of the problem these days – it used to be acceptable to ignore it,” Hill adds. Out Of His Skin is an uncomfortable reminder of how things used to be in a less enlightened age.
48 Steaming In Colin Ward 1989“I hope there’s no hoolie porn in the top 50,” sighed one of the FFT panel who argued over this Top 50. “They’re not about football. These people came close to destroying football in the ’80s.”
The most controversial choice in the top 50, Steaming In describes the terrace violence of the 1970s and ’80s. Ward, who followed Arsenal, Chelsea and England during that time, argued that he was an observer of violence – not a participant. Occasionally, he appears rather shocked by the scenes of carnage, although it didn’t stop him “observing” more of the same throughout the book.
Upon Steaming In’s release in 1989, The Guardian suggested it was “shocking in content” and “should be read in Government circles”. Apparently then-Sports Minister Colin Moynihan did just that, Ward’s book prompting an increase in security at games.
In the longer term, it sparked the “Kick-lit” genre, with former hoolies now telling – and selling – their tales by the bucket-load. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
47 The Beautiful Game: A Journey Through Latin American Football
Chris Taylor 1998
There's now a rash of books examining football in specific corners of the globe, but Taylor’s was among the first and finest; a well-constructed guide to the lunacy of football in the continent that has won nine World Cups, from its origins among British visitors to the turf wars that continue to beset ex-pats on Clapham Common. While readers may find the material on Argentina and Brazil familiar, that’s a testimony to the book’s success; even so, it means Taylor’s departures from the beaten track are the most striking. Easy to see why the FT hailed it the best footy book of 1998.
46 Steak... Diana Ross: Diary Of A Football Nobody
David McVay 2003
The memoirs of the former Notts County defender are a candid and hilarious account of what it was like to play for a small outfit in the ’70s. As the scenery shifts from Elland Road to Halifax’s run-down Shay, McVay recounts boozy tales (pissing in a pal’s wardrobe), bust-ups and the unique style of boss Jimmy Sirrell.
McVay dissects what it’s like to play in a team which is never likely to hit the heights, and has an acute awareness of his own limitations. The cover sets the tone: as a blizzard rages around him, the author appears frozen by rigor mortis. Life in the stiffs has never been so much fun.
45 Back Home: The Story Of England In The 1970 World Cup
Jeff Dawson 2001
The sights (Jairzinho bounding around after scoring Brazil’s winner against England), the sounds (blaring car horns outside the Guadalajara Hilton which kept England’s players awake on the eve of that game) and the smells (the consequences of Gordon Banks’s dose of Montezuma’s Revenge still linger) of Mexico 70 are masterfully brought to life in Jeff Dawson’s book.
England had a stronger squad than they’d had in 1966, only to throw it away in 30 crazy minutes against West Germany. Extensive interviews with surviving squad members, and Dawson’s own detective work into the “Bogota bracelet” incident (Government documents released under the 30-year rule prove Bobby Moore’s incarceration by the Colombian authorities had diplomatic ramifications) makes this the definitive guide to an England World Cup campaign. All those years of hurt start here.
44 The Way It Was Stanley Matthews 2000
In the normal run of things, a ghosted autobiography by an old pro is likely to be the dullest read in football. These, though, are the long-awaited and posthumously-published memoirs of Sir Stanley Matthews, arguably the greatest and certainly the best-loved of all English players (his funeral in Stoke was attended by more than 100,000 fans) – and they’re beautiful.
Working with Les Scott, Matthews finished the book mere weeks before his death. Intelligent, articulate and often moving, the book provides insight into a graceful man and the very different football world in which he lived. The technical details are a revelation, and his lack of bitterness towards the men who ran the game is striking.
43 Barça: A People’s Passion Jimmy Burns 1999
Skip the pompous foreword and accept that the prose style can be as stuffy as the house style of the FT (where the author worked), and you’ll reap the rewards.
Burns’ history of a club, 100 years of Catalan pride and some of the game’s most fascinating personalities (Cruyff, Maradona, Rinus Michels, Romario et al) is carefully researched, well-observed, and packed with fascinating stories.
Barça may now be synonymous with the likes of Cruyff and Ronaldinho, but Burns gives a fair share of the limelight to those who have played vital cameo roles in the drama.
Personalities like Patrick O’Connell, the former Man United star who hung on as the coach even after his president had been shot by Franco loyalists, and Vic Buckingham, the English coach who restored Barça’s self-respect, despite reminding players of Henry Higgins, Rex Harrison’s character in My Fair Lady.
42 The Billy The Fish Football Yearbook
Viz Comics 1999
Football is, among other things, a narrative: a never-ending story we tell ourselves to know who we are. For generations, British boys’ football stories did a parallel job, carrying Edwardian ideas of manliness deep into our age and shaping our fondest fantasies about the game.
As this ancient tradition staggered onto its last legs with Roy of the Rovers, the sublime, surreal, hilarious Viz character Billy the Fish filled the gap, simultaneously murdering the genre and breathing new life into it.
Viz represented a kind of very late comedy insurrection against Edwardian values. All references to sex, bottoms and drunkenness, which had been systematically banned from comic reading matter for more than a century, erupted into rude, hyper-sexualised, politically incorrect characters.
In this definitive collection, goalkeeper Billy Thomson (half-human, half-halibut) defies criminals, aliens, bomb plots and kidnappers, with the help of team-mates such as Shakin’ Stevens, Brown Fox and invisible striker Johnny X. Having no legs, arms or body doesn’t stop him being a wizard between the sticks. “What a save!” cheer the crowd. “He just got his fin to it in the nick of time! A breathtaking display of ‘aquabatics’ by the man/fish maestro!” A very British comedy masterpiece.
41 Left Foot Forward
Garry Nelson 1995
The blurb called it “the first book to communicate what it is really like to be a footballer...” In fact, Eamon Dunphy’s Only A Game? had done that 20 years before, but nobody had done it well since.
Bridging the eras, the two writers share money worries, an obsession with age, and job insecurity. And football definitely is a job. After a game on Boxing Day, he writes: “The slightly later setting-off time of 8.30 couldn’t offset the tiresomeness of having to earn a crust entertaining 10,000 holiday-makers.”
The book breaks the rule of English football that you never say anything nasty about anyone and there’s also great detail on how some managers make money from transfers. Nelson doesn’t quite achieve Dunphy-esque honesty about himself, though, and jokes about team-mates’ weight problems and grey hair are Shoot-esque.
40 Walking On Water
Brian Clough 2002
There are some familiar tunes in Walking on Water. Cloughie rants about the directors who incensed him over the years, and provides sharp insights into the successful sides he built at Nottingham Forest and Derby County during the 1970s.
But many of the lines are delivered with a degree of mournfulness. Ol’ Big ’Ead expresses regret about his homophobia towards the late Justin Fashanu, and he is open and candid about his own alcoholism.
Perhaps the biggest sea-change lies in his attitude towards former assistant Peter Taylor, to whom the book is dedicated. The Forest manager missed Taylor both professionally and personally in his later years at Forest, and the guilt he felt after Taylor’s death in 1990 (the pair didn’t speak for the last eight years of Taylor’s life) hastened his own physical decline.
In the loudly moneyed Premiership era, the pair’s monumental achievements at two provincial clubs will never be repeated. An irresistible tale.
39 The Mavericks
Rob Steen 1994
Amid a backdrop of brutality, the fancy-dans of the title (subtitled "English Football When Flair Wore Flares") followed the trail blazed by English football’s first tabloid star – George Best. Interviews with the likes of Frank Worthington, Stan Bowles and Alan Hudson tease out the subtle differences between each player, and touch upon the two factors shared by all of them: outrageous talent and a tendency to self-destruct.
Bizarrely, the most telling anecdote in the book concerns the least articulate member of the group – Charlie George. When England boss Don Revie substituted him after only an hour of his England debut, he offered the gutted Derby star an olive branch. He could go for a bath, or join him on the bench.
George declined both options. “F*ck you,” came the response, as Revie’s olive branch was summarily dispatched where the sun don’t shine.
If you still remain baffled as to why England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups, this goes a long way to solving the mystery.
38 The Story Of The World Cup
Brian Glanville 1980
The man Patrick Barclay called “that eternal galactico of the press box”, Glanville is the wisest, most knowledgeable and incisive writer football has known. For half a century, he’s blazed a trail with courage, wit and intelligence.
From his forward-thinking 1955 condemnation of blinkered, outmoded attitudes in the English game in Soccer Nemesis to prescient warnings about the Premiership and the bloated Champions League, his passionate and original voice has been unique and authoritative. All football writers are in his debt.
This, the great man’s definitive, eye-witness history of the World Cup, is written in his distinctive, inimitable style, peppered with terrific anecdotes, lordly myth-busting and penetrating insights into tactics and personalities. No wonder he is revered around the world.
As leading Dutch sports writer Auke Kok puts it: “We’ve had some good writers – but we’ve never had a Glanville.”
37 Ajax Barcelona Cruyff: The ABC Of An Obstinate Maestro
Frits Barend & Henk Van Dorp 1999
Cruyff embodies all that is quirky and captivating about Dutch football. ABC pulls together articles and interviews which the authors, respected Dutch journalists, conducted with Cruyff over 35 years.
His obstinacy (“If I’d wanted you to understand, I’d have explained it better”) and aloofness (Interviewer: “I don’t understand a word”; Cruyff: “Yes but I’m only suitable for the people at the top. For the people who really understand these things”) is apparent throughout.
But David Winner, who translated ABC into English, notes: “It’s a bit of a misnomer to think that all Dutch footballers are like Cruyff. He’s deliberately elliptical in interviews, and has this habit of referring to himself as ‘you’. He seeks to be incomprehensible, it seems.” Cruyff argues: “It’s the way I talk, so why not put it in the book?”.
Too Dutch for the Dutch? The mind boggles.
36 The Football Grounds of England and Wales
Simon Inglis 1983
Football’s answer to architectural guru Nikolaus Pevsner, Simon Inglis single-handedly made us appreciate our extraordinarily rich sporting architectural heritage.
As an architectural history student in the 1970s, Inglis spent weekends cycling around the cities of Britain, checking out cathedrals and football grounds, an eccentric obsession triggered by his boyhood love of Aston Villa’s old Trinity Road stand.
There was plenty to read on religious buildings, but nothing on cathedrals of football. Years later, as a freelance journalist, he decided to follow his passion and chronicle the history and design of every one of Britain’s 92 league grounds.
In snobbish architectural circles, he may as well have written about road haulage depots. “People forget how unfashionable and unglamorous football was back then,” explains Inglis. “When I told architectural people what I was doing they’d say ‘How quaint’.”
Some of the people running the game were even worse. “Football was an industry run by people who had no idea what it was. They knew very little. It never even occurred to them that a football ground could be important or culturally valuable,” he adds.
At best, Inglis assumed, The Football Grounds of England and Wales work would moulder on a few library shelves. Instead, when it appeared in 1983, it struck a resounding chord. “I got long emotional letters from football fans pouring their hearts out about their affection for their home ground and how important it was in their lives – how they felt they were no longer alone.”
After the 1985 Bradford fire disaster, he expected the real experts on stadium design to stand up and be counted – and then realised he was the only one around, a position he has since cemented with two decades of advice to government bodies on the subject and numerous books including the splendid Engineering Archie, a biography of prolific stadium designer Archibald Leitch.
Inglis also turned out to be something of a footballing Roman Vishniac, documenting a world on the eve of its destruction. Within a decade, the Hillsborough disaster and the Taylor Report would end the culture of the terraces. “My one regret is that I didn’t take more photographs,” he says. “But at the time I wasn’t sure many people would be interested.”
35 Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football
Phil Ball 2001
Ball is lucky to have published Morbo before the post-Beckham flood of books on Real Madrid (including two of his own), when there was very little in English on football in Spain. Like Alex Bellos and David Winner, Ball wrote well, was funny, and knew more about his chosen country than just its football.
The bulk of his book is stories of morbo, a Spanish word that means something like needle or rivalry. It is, in effect, a guide to Spanish life. Ball lives in San Sebastian, played beach football with legendary winger Lopez Ufarte, and knew someone who taught Luis Arconada English.
It’s the perfect mix of the personal and the national, Ball’s own life illuminating the book. It will survive after most of the Madrid books have turned out to be ephemeral.
34 England v Argentina: World Cups and Other Small Wars
David Downing 2003
England’s hostility to Germany – explored in Downing’s first book on rivalry – is readily explicable; the roots of England’s tensions with Argentina are less so.
From the earliest tours by English clubs to South America through Rattin and Maradona to Beckham and Simeone, Downing examines the spats that resulted in mutual loathing, concluding that the two nations’ value systems are incompatible. One favours physicality and honesty, the other trickery and cunning.
Downing’s best moment is his myth-shattering analysis of the 1966 quarter-final, after which Alf Ramsey called Argentina “animals”. In fact, it was England who committed more fouls.
33 Kicking And Screaming
Rogan Taylor & Andrew Ward 1995
This is the only all-encompassing oral history of football in the 20th Century, pulling together all the strands which make up football’s fabric. The testimonies, which formed the basis of an award-winning BBC TV series, range from Zillwood March’s comments on football in 1900 to West Ham United supporters revealing the strength of feeling against the club’s bond scheme proposal in the 1990s.
Fans who packed the terraces in the ’30s talk of “hotlegs” and Bestie speaks about life in the ’60s. Whether it’s Sir Tom Finney’s “jumpers for goalposts”, Len Shackleton admitting to receiving £25 backhanders in the 1940s or Ian Wright discussing astronomical wages in the 1990s, this is an indispensable guide to how football was dragged – kicking and screaming – towards the 21st Century.
32 The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw: The Robin Friday Story
Paolo Hewitt & Paul McGuigan 1998
Drinking binges, drug-fuelled rages, disappearing acts, jail sentences, an outrageous talent squandered, and a shockingly early death amid suspicious circumstances: meet Reading and Cardiff ’70s cult hero Robin Friday – football’s Keith Moon.
The idea for the book came during Oasis’s 1996 US tour. The then Oasis bassist Paul ‘Guigsy’ McGuigan and music journalist Paolo Hewitt stumbled upon a Goal article printed in memory of Friday, who’d recently died at the age of 38.
Inspired to unearth more about him, they headed for Berkshire when the tour ended. “Guys on the Reading Evening Post put us in touch with his family and team-mates, and the stories just started flooding in,” recalls Hewitt.
The Friday legend is perpetuated by the fact that so little footage of him remains. He spent his entire career in the lower leagues, and despite extensive research, Hewitt unearthed only a few grainy images of him in action.
But team-mates vouch for Friday’s unorthodox brand of genius. He set the tone after his Reading debut in 1973. When asked if he was satisfied with his debut goal, he replied: “Yeah, I could have back-heeled it in actually, but I thought that might be taking the p*ss a bit.”
“Guigsy always said that George Best was football’s first pop star, and that Robin Friday was its first rock star,” Hewitt comments. In true rock ‘n’ roll fashion, Friday turned up to away games armed only with his boots, and would go AWOL until the following weekend’s ‘gig’.
Off the field, Friday emerges as a rebel in other ways. Hailing from a white working-class estate, he married a black girl at 16, fought running battles with National Front activists, and grew his hair long. Controversial referee Clive Thomas reckoned Friday’s outrageous 35-yard scissors-kick against Tranmere was “the most amazing goal ever”. It’s certainly the greatest you never saw.
31 El Macca: Four Years With Real Madrid
Steve McManaman & Sarah Edworthy 2004
Often criticised during his fitful England displays, Macca’s style seems at odds with the work ethic which English fans expect from players. Yet the languid Scouser, who scored Madrid’s second goal in their 2000 Champions League win over Valencia, was also our most successful export in a long while.
“He was clever enough to be adaptable, and to understand that his approach work would enable the likes of Figo and Raul to express themselves,” says co-writer Sarah Edworthy.
This book is more than simply hagiography of his time in Madrid. It recounts how he was used as a diplomat to soothe tempers in the dressing room and how he and wife Victoria adapted to life in Spain. A far more quirky and insightful account of life among the galacticos than Becks, Owen or, er, Woodgate are likely to provide.
30 Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life
Alex Bellos 2002
The format was familiar: by the time Futebol appeared, in 2002, we’d already enjoyed excellent books on football in one country by David Winner (Holland) and Phil Ball (Spain), with several others in the pipeline. Yet nobody had tackled the ultimate football country since the American sociologist Janet Lever wrote the obscure but wonderful Soccer Madness in 1983.
What makes Futebol special is its legwork – Alex Bellos is a Stakhanovite. In dangerous countries like Brazil, there are foreign correspondents who never leave town, and barely even their neighbourhood, except to go to the airport for the flight home. But Bellos travels around Brazil as if it were Luxembourg.
Not only does he speak to everyone – the man who designed Brazil’s yellow-blue-white strip, the man who scored the winner against Brazil in the 1950 final, beauty queens, priests – but he also goes everywhere and does everything.
He visits three Brazilians who are playing for a club in a village of 1,000 people in the Faroe Islands. He appears in the Sao Paulo carnival for the samba school of Corinthians’ hard-core fans, wearing purple feathers. Futebol’s hundreds of interviews, facts, drawings, photographs and even maps will spare researchers trouble for generations to come.
There are problems. When Bellos wrote this, he was Brazil correspondent for The Guardian, and like many daily journalists he has trouble structuring a book. At times it descends into a parade of cameo football obsessives.
Secondly, he is shorter on theory than on fact. This is something of a relief after the many half-baked football-as-national-character arguments, but since Bellos knows so much, and seems so comfortable with Brazil’s history, language and music (like all good football books, Futebol is about much more than football), we want more of his insights.
However, it’s an irreplaceable book.
29 Managing My Life
Alex Ferguson 1999
After his side won the treble in 1999, publishing houses fought the mother of all bidding wars for the rights to publish Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography.
Hodder Headline’s successful £1.1 million bid was met with ridicule. How could they possibly make that back in sales, asked ‘those in the know?’ “Explosive” extracts in the Telegraph and The Sun – including criticism of his former assistant Brian Kidd – were met with consternation in some quarters.
But all publicity is good publicity – the book sold in bucketloads, and HH had the last laugh. Michael Crick’s book on Fergie [see No.15 tomorrow] presents a far more rounded view of the Scot: the bullying episodes and the United boss’s rocky relationship with several journalists are entirely absent from Managing My Life.
But if you want to know why United dominated football in the ’90s, this book goes a long way to providing the answers.
28 White Angels
Jon Carlin 2004
In 2004, too many trees were felled by publishers wanting to tell us what we already knew about El Becks and Real Madrid. This is the best of them, elevated by Carlin’s astonishing access and his talent.
Carlin offers a lovingly detailed portrait of the club and the galacticos experiment, which soon looks passé as sides like Porto win with teamwork, not individuality.
At times, it feels like a well-written, intelligent hagiography of Florentino Perez. Directors even joke that they could win with a fan playing. Such hubris is rewarded with defeat by Monaco and Morientes – a reject deemed insufficiently galactical, giving a valuable insight into what happens when a club believes its own hype.
27 Ajax, The Dutch, The War
Simon Kuper 2003
Ajax, The Dutch, The War offers a kind of secret history of Dutch football and Holland.
Kuper may or may not have been inspired by Brilliant Orange, which includes a chapter identifying Ajax as ‘The Jewish Club’. But where David Winner’s tale is inspiring and captivating, Kuper’s book is full of anger, disillusionment and pain as he confronts the myth that the Dutch resisted the Nazi death machine, finding, as he digs into football history, d**ning evidence of collaboration and conformity.
Sparta Rotterdam, for example, expelled Jewish members (while refunding their membership fees) yet agonised over the size of the lettering on its ‘Forbidden for Jews’ sign.
The uneasiness lingers on with Ajax officially denying it ever was a Jewish club, although, as Kuper painstakingly establishes, the club once drew heavily on Jewish support and owes its most glorious years to Jewish returnees.
A troubling, meticulous masterpiece.
26 Keane
Roy Keane & Eamonn Dunphy 2002
Keane’s unflinching description of the retribution he meted out to Alf Inge Haaland (who accused him of faking his cruciate injury in 1996) during a 2001 Manchester derby nearly resulted in a messy court case. The offending “Take that you c**t” section was removed from the paperback.
Keane’s torrent of abuse at Ireland boss Mick McCarthy, and subsequent walk-out on the eve of the finals, is recorded in all its gore, as are scathing criticisms of former Republic boss Jack Charlton.
In a FFT interview, Charlton claimed that co-writer Eamon Dunphy was simply using Keane to settle old scores with him. “Not true at all,” argues Dunphy. “Do you really think that Roy would allow anyone to speak for him? The language and style of the book simply reflects the way in which he has always played the game.”
25 Tackling My Demons
Stan Collymore 2004
Just as young Stanley isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s fair to say that Tackling My Demons isn’t everyone’s idea of a great read.
Clashes with managers and team-mates at Aston Villa, Liverpool and Forest, the assault on Ulrika Jonsson in 1998, an early retirement, and the recent “dogging” revelations have seen Collymore (all too frequently) in the news for the wrong reasons, and TV presenter Kirsty Gallagher labelled him “desperate and sad” after he disclosed intimate details of their relationship in the book.
Collymore emerges as a deeply troubled man, and cites John Gregory’s criticism of him as evidence of how he remains persecuted. Others claim that Collymore just messes up all the time; the dogging revelations that destroy his burgeoning Five Live career being the most recent example.
You may love or loathe Stan, but he is living proof that money can’t buy personal happiness.
24 A Season With Verona
Tim Parks 2002
Fan-lit is much-maligned, and often rightly so. After Nick Hornby wrote Fever Pitch, legions of fans felt the urge to commit their tales of wet midweek nights in Grimsby to paper, but none had his wit, insight or narrative ability.
This is the only other book about a fan’s experience in the Top 50, and if the format – tracing the 2000-01 Serie A season – is familiar, its ambition in exploring masculine identity and Italian character sets it apart.
One passage mocking football’s role in the Catholic jubilee was so controversial that some in the church wanted the book burned.
Parks is a unique example of an established writer turning to football, and he admits he was surprised by the reaction of the literary establishment. His German hardback publisher, for instance, refused even to read it, a decision she regretted when the paperback was well received.
“If I had written about elephants, plenty of non-elephant lovers would’ve read it, if only because they trust me as a writer,” he says. “Football is an insuperable obstacle for some people.”
Yet it was partly football’s odd position, as an obsession treated by many with suspicion or disdain, which prompted this book. “It developed from being aware that I was embarrassed to admit my enthusiasm for the game and a growing interest in that embarrassment, a desire to understand what lay behind it.”
His concept of the fan is different to Hornby’s. “I reacted against his presentation of the fan as a man wounded by psychological problems. His is a description where fandom is simultaneously made endearing and subtly disparaged by the idea that fans suffer from arrested development. This hides all that is intelligent about fandom for experiencing certain emotions without being destroyed by them.”
Quite.
23 Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain 1945
David Downing 1999
When Dynamo arrived in London in November 1945, British football still reigned supreme. In the 33 days that followed, the Russians served notice of the decline that was to come, winning twice and being unlucky to draw their other two games.
This meticulously researched book captures the spirit of a controversial tour, when the USSR, although still an ally, was viewed with grave suspicion.
As cultures clashed, Dynamo seemed in perpetual dispute with the FA, clubs, refs and the press, and were even accused of fielding an extra man in a fog-bound game at Ibrox.
Crowds, desperate for top-class sport after six years of war, came in their droves, yet for all their delight in Dynamo’s brilliance, British football stood by its traditional approach, offering a metaphor for the empire.
22 Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football
David Winner 2005
A classic, if only for its finding that modern football was invented in Victorian public schools to keep boys from masturbating, the idea being that if boys were expending energy in teams, they couldn’t be alone engaging in “self-pollution.”
The book takes the familiar idea of studying football culture in one country, and applies it to England itself, as if it were a foreign land.
Winner seizes on the rich and bizarre popular culture that has accreted around the English game – Roy of the Rovers, The Italian Job, Neasden FC in Private Eye, etc – and mines these artefacts for truths about England.
Funny and illuminating, the book’s one problem is that it was researched mostly in libraries, so it lacks the weird first-person encounters that made Brilliant Orange [see No.4 on Friday] so good.
21 The Football Man
Arthur Hopcraft 1968
When this was first published in 1968, managers were sacked too quickly for too little cause, the game was complaining about bad publicity and violence among players was a cause of national concern.
There’s much in this oft-quoted study of British football to reinforce the cliché that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but there are revealing differences.
Agents are barely mentioned, while professional referees are a pipe dream. This enduring great owes much to Hopcraft’s obvious, anxious love for the game, the candour he inspires in his interviewees (Bobby Charlton and Don Revie among them) and his descriptive powers.
Of one amateur game he notes: “Escaped poodles frisk among players’ legs, lads with Rolling Stones haircuts collide with static veterans like gollywogs flung against a nursery wall.”
20 Dynamo: Defending the Honour of Kiev
Andy Dougan 2001
If the story is good enough, the rest will follow.
Ignore the clunking dramatisation of the opening chapter: once Dougan switches to journalistic narrative, history takes over. This is a book of remarkable research, cutting through the myths that obscured what happened when Dynamo Kyiv played the Luftwaffe in 1942.
Communist myth had the SS shooting at the Ukrainians during the game, with survivors shot at the final whistle; the truth was rather more prosaic, but no less tragic. A team based around several Dynamo players working at the same bakery did beat a team representing the Luftwaffe, and afterwards all 11 were rounded up for interrogation.
Dougan shows how one died under torture, three were executed and one disappeared, and in rescuing their tale from propaganda does Ukrainian football a great service.
19 Football: The Golden Age
John Tennent 2001
Nostalgia can be a cloying thing – did that ‘golden age’ include rationing and outside toilets? – but not in this tremendous photographic collection.
As with his companion volumes of old rugby and motor racing snaps, John Tennent has uncovered a monochrome goldmine. Featuring pictures of everything from boys playing in the streets to pools winners and Bobby Charlton with hair, the era of dubbin and Victory Cigarettes emerges astonishingly fresh.
Sir Bobby with hair. No, really...
Always beautiful and often funny, the images reveal a game played predominantly amid mud, mist and trenchcoats, evoking a largely vanished world that still haunts our imagination.
It’s hard to imagine a better use of archive pictures.
18 Addicted
Tony Adams 1998
"For an autobiography to work," explains writer Eamon Dunphy, "the subject has to be willing to discuss his faults. The footballer must show himself to be real and flawed."
Addicted was the first such autobiography. Adams talks with breathtaking honesty about the two addictions which have dominated his life – football and alcohol. His career encompassed both the "win or lose, we will booze" culture of the ’80s and the mineral water/steamed broccoli of Arsene’s Arsenal.
His harrowing account of his descent into alcoholism (including bed-wetting and clothes-soiling) drew criticism from those with weaker constitutions.
The majority were simply dumbfounded by what they read, and concurred with Wenger’s comment: "Tony, I’m amazed you’re still actually with us."
"Could you not have got me a slightly smaller copy..."
17 The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble through North-East Football
Harry Pearson 1994
For exiles from that 50-mile strip from Ashington in the north to Teesside in the south, The Far Corner cannot be read without a lump in the throat. It’s hard to imagine anything else could be so evocative of the North-East.
Football, of course, is the perfect medium for exploring the spirit of the region, that "far-off mythical place where the people were called ‘folk,’ the beer was called ‘ale,’ the men were called ‘lads’ and the lads were called ‘Jackie’."
Harry Pearson, himself a returned exile, manipulates the whiff of batter, leek-growing contests and the shopkeeper with the Shackleton obsession to produce a work that is moving, cynical, romantic, tragic and sentimental.
Most of all, though, it is hilarious – in that peculiarly North-Eastern mode that is both abrasive and affectionate.
16 The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football
David Conn 2004
The lament for football’s lost golden age and the belief that commercial interests have sullied the game are as old as football itself – Willy Meisl, for instance, in his 1960 book Soccer Revolution, argues that the liberalisation of the offside law in 1925, which played to the popular demand for more goals, was the beginning of the end.
However, Conn’s is a heartfelt account of the increasingly rapid changes of the past couple of decades. "It is deeply frustrating," he writes, "seeing the national game revel in a boom, which could take it so far, yet drive itself so needlessly into dysfunction and failure."
Conn is no nostalgic who believes the ’80s were a golden period – to him Wimbledon’s FA Cup triumph in 1988 was not a wonderful fairy-tale,
but a victory for thuggery – but he is appalled by the descent of the game into rampant, barely regulated commercialism.
"I think the end of the sharing of gate receipts in 1983 was the first break," he says. "When I talk about the soul, I mean the part of football that is more than business. The soul is the passion and the loyalty of fans, but it is also the joy to be found in playing the game. As other collective institutions disappear, football clubs are becoming an increasingly central part of people’s identity, and that’s why we see these heroic struggles to save clubs when they are threatened."
Books on the business of football can be unreadably dry, but The Beautiful Game? is passionate and bleakly humorous. Quite aside from the depth of the research, what sets Conn’s book above Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams, a mystifying winner of the William Hill’s Sports Book of the Year Award, is the sense that he really cares.
Broken Dreams was riddled with errors, both of fact and of spirit; Conn, simply by noting, for instance, that fans know intuitively why Notts County matter, taps into a depth of tradition of which Bower has no grasp.
Bower just says football is in a very bad way; Conn tells us why it is worth putting right.
15 The Boss: The Many Sides Of Alex Ferguson
Michael Crick 2002
Having debunked the myths surrounding leading Tories Jeffrey Archer and Michael Heseltine, Newsnight reporter Michael Crick wrote an instant best-seller on the United boss.
The "hairdryer" treatment, his dealings with agents, Fergie’s often fractious relationship with journalists – Crick proved that the Scot is a man of many contradictions.
The fear Fergie invokes in others was never better illustrated than when the Manchester Evening News refused to grant Crick access to its United clippings files on the grounds that it might incur the boss’s wrath.
The entire episode led the author to question whether he’d been transported to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
One of Crick’s other revelations is that Fergie enjoys singing along in the car to Sinatra songs, including My Way. Fitting indeed.
"And now, the end is near..."
14 Only a Game?
Eamon Dunphy 1976
A book that answers the greatest question: what’s it really like to be a professional footballer? Nobody had done it before.
Only a Game? has the perfect narrative structure: Dunphy takes us from absurd pre-season hopes, through quarrels in the team, to being dropped and finally leaving Millwall after eight years.
His diary for November 10 1973, a 2-0 victory over Cardiff City for which he was not picked: "I couldn’t go and sit in the stand hoping for them to get beaten. It is too small-minded for words. So I watched the racing on telly instead. What is terrible is that it is only November."
Dunphy is honest about himself, emotionally literate in describing his team-mates (who come to life like characters in a good novel), and revealing of the insecurity with which footballers live.
You get the sense that the life is not only unglamorous, but not much fun.
13 Niall Quinn: The Autobiography
Niall Quinn & Tom Humphries 2002
There’s definitely something about Irish players and their autobiographies.
Quinn’s book might not be as controversial as those of some of his compatriots, but it is nonetheless a candid insight into a man generally recognised as one of the nicest in football.
More than that, it is a real book, written in a simple, dryly amusing, almost lyrical style that, even if it wasn’t, could have been written by Quinn and yet still qualifies as proper writing.
He was helped by having the 2002 World Cup and the rumpus surrounding Roy Keane’s departure from the squad as a starting point, but by the end that is just one issue among many.
Football happens to have been Quinn’s life, but his autobiography is just as much about regret, about moving on and about remaining a decent man in a world that is profoundly indecent.
"The players are totally behind me. Isn't that right Niall..."
12 The Miracle Of Castel Di Sangro
Joe McGinniss 1999
This hilarious, compelling, often misunderstood book proves Americans can write about soccer.
McGinniss, who made his name writing about American politics and his fortune penning true crime bestsellers, details the rise of Castel di Sangro, from a town of 5,000 people, to Serie B.
But this is as much The Sopranos as Field of Dreams. A season of joy, tragedy, hilarity and courage draws to a shabby close with the team throwing a game as a player reminds the author: "Remember, we are the land of Dante but also of Machiavelli."
The comic highlight is the press conference where the club’s new African ‘signing’ from Leicester City announces he’s planning to sleep with all the players’ wives – a deal that proves to be a hoax.
Odd as that sounds, it’s not the strangest incident in this book.
11 The Glory Game
Hunter Davies 1973
"There is no way that a writer these days could possibly do what I did in The Glory Game," explains Hunter Davies. "He or she wouldn’t be able to get past the minefield of agents, lawyers and officials."
In 1973, Davies was granted unprecedented access to Spurs boss Bill Nicholson and his 19-man first-team pool. With no official contract behind him, he admits to "worming my way in" at White Hart Lane, and convincing all those concerned that an "inside story" book charting Spurs’ season would be a worthwhile project.
"I’d originally been told that as a club, Spurs would be completely unapproachable, and that Nicholson would be dour and difficult. He was completely cooperative though, and when I informed the players that I would keep 50 percent of the royalties and split the other half equally between them, they were happy too. It wasn’t a huge amount of money though!"
The Glory Game defines the fly-on-the-wall sports book. Although Nicholson later claimed that he’d occasionally felt inhibited by Davies’ presence (particularly when chastising Martin Chivers), the Spurs players and staff were remarkably candid in confiding their hopes and fears.
Aside from the frequent references to flares, Triumph Stags, and Nicholson’s hatred of men with long hair, Davies’ book simply doesn’t date. "The tensions, the personality clashes, the fear of losing one’s place in the team, the monotony of training, triumph and despair, concern over injuries, old players fading... all these factors will remain constants in team sports for as long as they’re played," argues Davies.
Printed in five different languages, and a big seller in the USA, The Glory Game is rightly regarded as a classic. And remember that in an era of media trained stars and Fort Knox-style security at big clubs, there will never be a remake.
"This had better be going in that book of yours, Davies..."
10 Puskas on Puskas: the life and times of a footballing legend
Rogan Taylor & Klara Jamrich 1998
A warm, intelligent and revealing biography which fuses history and politics with the study of genius to produce a unique portrait of the great Hungarian, Ferenc Puskas.
A labour of love, it was born of Taylor’s urge to know his boyhood hero. One early fruit of this was an unmade film script with Stalin dying in the opening scene with the word “Puskas!” on his lips. In 1993, researching the TV series Kicking and Screaming [see No.33], Taylor met Puskas and persuaded him to tell the story of his unparalleled career, first with Hungary and later as kingpin (with Di Stefano) of the great Real Madrid.
Some of the most mesmerising passages deal with the star’s status as the only free man in the vast prison camp of Stalinist Hungary in the early-’50s. Tragically, Taylor’s Hungarian co-author Klara Jamrich has since died of Cancer at the age of 35.
Di Stefano scores three and Puskas four in 7-3 win vs Eintracht Frankfurt
9 Football In Sun And Shadow
Eduardo Galeano 1997
American sportswriter George Plimpton said the smaller the ball, the greater the literature.
He hadn’t read this remarkable, poetic, episodic history by a left-wing Uruguayan writer who once asked “Why is football like God? Each inspires devotion among believers and distrust among intellectuals.” The book consists of short stories on a theme – a famous game, a spectacular goal, a great player – written in a lyrical style which could quickly grate yet somehow doesn’t.
Some episodes, like the tale of Brazil’s greatest goalscorer – Artur Friedenreich, not Pele – read like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realist fiction.
Unlike many authors who dwell on Albert Camus’ goalkeeping for spurious intellectual credibility, Galeano gives it a twist: Camus, he insists, liked to keep goal because that way his shoes didn’t wear out so fast.
8 Tor!
Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger 2003
Few football cultures inspire as many clichés as Germany’s: ruthless, defensive, boringly efficient. Such labels are proved hopelessly inaccurate by this book.
In Hesse-Lichtenberger’s capable hands, the history of German football seems more entertaining, unpredictable and scandal-infested than England’s. Part of the attraction is that when German players insult each other – and they do so incessantly – their jibes are a cut above the “not fit to tie my bootlaces” routines which pass for abuse in UK footy media.
While British mavericks have usually been confined to the margins, Germany’s social misfits and rebels – from Franz Beckenbauer to Gunter Netzer and Lothar Matthaus – have often taken centre stage. And the startling chapter on East German football says more in a few pages about totalitarian football than most books on the subject.
7 Full Time
Tony Cascarino & Paul Kimmage 2000
Initially, it seemed Paul Kimmage would struggle to find a publisher for Full Time: “I’d spent a lot of time with Tony and had already got four chapters done before Simon and Schuster agreed to publish it,” he explains. Famously, one publisher said: “Tony Cascarino? He’s not exactly David Beckham, is he?”
“I could see what they meant,” confesses Kimmage. “Tony hadn’t played in England for a few years. But I always had the gut feeling that the book would be successful because Tony was prepared to be totally honest, which is the key to a project like this. And having been a professional cyclist for four years, I could identify with his fears as his football career drew to a close, and real life began.”
"I thought we were supposed to be posing with David Beckham..."
Full Time works on two levels. On the one hand, there are the testosterone-fuelled stories of dressing-room banter, numerous references to Jack Charlton’s potty mouth, and Glenn Hoddle’s suspect humour. But it also transcends football issues. Cascarino’s troubled relationship with his father and his painful separation from his wife and sons are themes which run throughout the story.
Then there is the doubting inner voice – “Come off it Cas, you won’t f***ing score. You shot it years ago” – which plagues him each time he bears down on goal. “Tony didn’t need to confess to that,” says Kimmage. “But it’s about trust between author and subject. The writer can only push the buttons, the player is the one who must unburden themselves.”
Since its publication in 2000, Cascarino has adapted well to “real life” and enjoys a fulfilling media career. “But for every Cascarino,” explains Kimmage, “there are two players who can’t adapt at all. The money makes little difference at all.” Gazza would doubtless concur.
6 Keeper Of Dreams
Ronald Reng 2003
A riveting memoir, Reng’s book tells the strange and fascinating tale of Lars Leese, a goalkeeper plucked from the German minor leagues (and computer software industry) to play for Barnsley in the Premier League but soon returns to obscurity in Germany
The culture shock is immense: Leese puzzles over tactics, watches his team-mates rogering strippers on stage at the Christmas party and tries to handle the claustrophobic hysteria of a small Yorkshire town desperate to bask in football glory. He commits one early, unforgivable sin on the pitch: throwing the ball to a team-mate.
To correct this ‘mistake’, the coach stands on the flank near the halfway line to show Leese where he must always kick the ball to. Among the many delights is the revelation that German keepers shout “Leo!” if they’re going to kick the ball in the air so defenders know to duck.
5 A Strange Kind Of Glory
Eamon Dunphy 1974
Just the title reveals that this biography of Sir Matt Busby is no ordinary football book.
“I called it A Strange Kind of Glory because that’s what it was,” explains Dunphy. “Here is a man who created all this legendary magnificence, the first modern football manager, who made Manchester United into more than just an ordinary club and yet was ultimately powerless, ending up in a semi-detached house in Chorlton.”
Dunphy was inspired by admiration for the man and by his service at United as youth and reserve-team player from 1960 to 1965. He knew that the real story of how one man conceptualised much of modern football had never been properly told and, financed by the profit from his U2 biography The Unforgettable Fire, spent months in Manchester and Scotland researching his biography.
“Busby was a great man,” he says. “Even great players – like Bobby Charlton and Denis Law – were in awe of him and professional footballers don’t do awe. He was the first manager to lay down how a club should be run, how players should behave, how the game should be played. And he had vision – he took United into Europe, advocated floodlit football and was one of the first managers to take a risk on young players, throwing youngsters like George Best into the team.”
But he was, Dunphy concedes, “ruthless beneath the charm – when Fulham paid Johnny Haynes £100 a week in 1961, he gave stars like Bobby Charlton a fiver so they were on £25 a week.”
The book traces the corrupt and corrupting rise of professional football to put Busby into context. Dunphy makes you feel as if you are inside the club: with Busby and Jimmy Murphy on the training ground; watching the Busby Babes and the 1968 European Cup-winning side emerge; and eavesdropping as players bicker and, in the early-1960s, wonder if Busby has lost it.
In its own way, this book – the best biography of a football manager ever written – is as much of an achievement as winning the European Cup.
Sir Matt keeps watchful eye over Old Trafford
4 Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius Of Dutch Football
David Winner 2000
“I wanted to be provocative. I wanted it to be quirky and unusual and to ensure it looked at football in a different way,” explains Brilliant Orange’s cover designer Will Webb.
This book, which takes an idiosyncratic look at the enigma that is Dutch football, leapt off the shelves by virtue of the ball of Edam and Astroturf on the front framed by, well, brilliant orange. “Like a football, but not quite. Like grass, but not quite. David’s book proves that Dutch football is rather different; the cover is in keeping with the content,” adds Webb.
Winner interviews quirky former stars like Rep and Rensenbrink, but also offers a unique insight into the psyche of the Dutch, and goes some way to explaining why the team underachieves in big matches. Winner confesses to being “fascinated by the correlation between football and space, and football and architecture”.
Not your average football book. Not your average football team.
3 All Played Out: Full Story Of Italia 90
Pete Davies 1990
This riveting, passionately-written inside story of the England team and its fans during Italia 90 made ‘football literature’ mean more than daft ghosted biographies.
“There had been good football books before,” recalls Davies, “but they were rare, and there’d been bugger all in the 1980s. I wanted football to have a proper place in popular culture; I thought someone should say ‘Not all of us are lunatics. We have legitimate emotional reasons for watching this game, which is incredibly important culturally and matters to everyone in the world.’”
Even more remarkable than winning the trust of England boss Bobby Robson and his players was persuading a major publisher to take a gamble on a genre that didn’t yet exist. Davies then wrote the book in just eight weeks after the World Cup to hit the Christmas market.
“I’m 45, but it’s still incredibly vivid to me,” he once said. “I’ll never forget being in Turin.”
2 Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby 1993
A completely original book. Hornby didn’t start the new wave of football writing – Pete Davies did – but he was the first British writer to examine the apparently unremarkable experience of being a fan.
Following the theory of fandom as therapy, Hornby describes how he used Arsenal to escape from his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and so on. He treats his fandom as a problem, as something not entirely healthy.
This set him apart from the previous notion of fandom as a hobby, and from his imitators who wrote cutesy accounts of watching bad football in the rain without any of Hornby’s honesty about their own lives.
It helps that Fever Pitch is hilarious and beautifully written and that it offers a social history of Britain from the 1960s through the early-1990s. Its only flaw is its formlessness: it’s a book to dip in rather than to read through.
"And it's up for grabs now..."
1 Football Against The Enemy
Simon Kuper 1994
“I had mixed feelings when I began work on the book,” confesses Simon Kuper. “I felt that the whole thing might be too big for me, and I was concerned about what friends would say when they read it. Yet I also had a sort of blind confidence in my writing ability. An established author probably wouldn’t have taken on such a project. It’s the sort of thing that a young writer needed to do.”
With a small(ish) £5,000 budget, the 22-year-old set off on a Palinesque jaunt which saw him visit 22 countries in a crazy nine-month period – “I’d go around Europe for three months, using mainly Inter Rail tickets, then come home to London and wash my clothes, fly to Cameroon, come home and then fly off to South Africa.”
His aim? “To investigate precisely how politics and football intertwined throughout the world. It was a subject that always fascinated me, and I was conscious that such a book hadn’t been written before.”
In the course of his epic adventure, he interviewed an eclectic mix of players and officials, including an Argentine general with unique views on the way the game should be played, a Berliner who’d suffered persecution at the hands of the Stasi simply because he supported his local team, and most bizarrely, Cameroon star Roger Milla, who had made headlines with his attempts to organise a tournament for pygmy tribes.
Kuper planned the trip carefully, but the actual interviewing process was distinctly ad hoc. “In the pre-internet age, it could be difficult. I’d arrive in Argentina, speak to someone in basic Spanish, and arrange to meet the friend of a friend. At first, I had a vague idea of meeting up with people in bars, but I quickly realised that I needed to be far more proactive in speaking to people. Sometimes I just got lucky, and bumped into people in airport queues – like a Dynamo Kiev official who spoke perfect English.”
Groundbreaking though Kuper’s book is, he denies that it was responsible for the mushrooming of more insightful football literature. “Nick Hornby and Pete Davies created the idea in publishers’ minds that football books could be good and sell, not me. Maybe I did influence some authors to carry out studies on football in other countries, but the process of excellent books being published was already under way.”
Saturation football coverage and internet access means that fans are far more cosmopolitan in their outlooks than ever before. However, Football Against The Enemy remains the only book to take a definitive sweep on world football, and explain how political and cultural issues influence the game across the globe.
For that reason, it deserves its title as the Number One football book.
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