Treatments of the history of the GAA generally begin with cultural and political overviews of Ireland in the lead-up to independence - of course, the same political context would be absent in England of the Victorian/Edwardian era, but has any book for a general audience examined the development of football in relation to themes such as the growth of education, mass media and communications, the development of the railways, the influence of "muscular Christianity", and the class divide in terms of sports patronised, amongst other themes?
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Sociological histories of football?
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Very much a personal view, but I thought that Mason did a similar thing better than Walvin (though anyone seriously looking at this should read both).
They are both quite old now.
Mason was originally published in 1980 and Walvin even before that. I recall being excited that Sportspages had both, as they were hard to find in the US at the time.
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Originally posted by ale View Post
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Originally posted by ursus arctos View PostDavid Goldblatt also covers this in detail in the early chapters of The Ball is Round, which I would say is a bit more for general readers than Mason
And in terms of a similar approach to football in other countries, I've said it before and I'll say it again: Angels With Dirty Faces by Jonathan Wilson for Argentina is probably the best one I've read on any country.
Other good ones are Futebol by Alex Bellos for Brazil and – a clich? though it might be given the hype it got when it came out way back in 2000 (good grief am I that old already?), near the start of the boom in Decent Football Books – Brilliant Orange by David Winner for the Netherlands.
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Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
Though entertainingly written I had the occasional problem with Sanders's speculations, sometimes he gets carried away with his own excitement. An example is his gloss on "holiday games" of football. I don't believe they could have been totally "anarchic," which he claims was the point of them. There must have been agreed boundaries of some kind, streams, tracks etc. Also rules, few and rudimentary though they almost certainly were,
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The Mason book Amor de Cosmos mentioned upthread is certainly the best I have read on the birth of English football. It is written with so much enthusiasm that it was a joy to read. Mason's book on South American football that I read subsequently was much less engaging.
Football: A Sociology of the Global Game by Richard Giuilianotti is maybe more sociology than history but is another brilliant book on similar topics.
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Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View PostI've got a book about the 58 World Cup with that jacket design in orange
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I've recorded several podcasts about it, if that's any use to you.
Otherwise, I'd second The Ball Is Round as a decent enough one stop shop for it. He tells the stories of how the game started in each of its major markets, though he doesn't go into the forensic detail that I should think most of the other books listed above do.
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The first two or three of these take you up to the start of WWI.
https://twohundredpercent.net/an-echo-of-glory/
(I'm not going to vouch for the quality or otherwise of these - they were recorded as the first lockdown started and I felt as though I was sliding towards what felt as though it would be a nervous breakdown; I didn't get any particularly negative feedback at the time, though.)
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