Football Book Review Thread

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Sorry, by championship, I meant Euro Cup/CL. It's not that euro 2008 was special, it's that 2008 was the 50th year of Euro Cup/CL and so a couple of magazines had big retrospectives.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

So, I just finished Les Enrages du football: l'autre Mai 68. Disappointing. The bits about Kopa in the early 60s were the best bits. The occupation of the french FA in '68 seems to have actually been conducted in large part by journalists rather than "footballeurs", which makes it significantly less interesting. There's too much wooly stuff about how the french club owners, at the same time that they were repressing the rising player power movement, were also beginning to stress "results-oriented" football - thereby setting up some mystical connection between increasing union power and more "beautiful" football. Which is crap.

Now about 1/2 way through the new Jonhathan Wilson book, The Anatomy of England. I shall report back anon.

[danielmak]

Football Book Review Thread

Following an earlier post about the Africa Kicks documentary series on BBC, David Goldblatt has a 4-part series that started recently airing on the BBC and available as a podcast.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Jonathan Wilson: The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches

Jonathan Wilson is a very smart man and a very knowledgeable football writer. He has already written two glorious football books (Behind the Curtain and Inverting the Pyramid) which will put him very high on the all-time great writers list. His knowledge of tactics is prodigious and he is by some distance the leading writer on the subject in the English language. So it was with considerable interest that I learned earlier this year that he was applying his talents to the problem of English football's status as perennial underachievers in a new book called The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches.

In a sense, the book's topic is a bit unfashionable, and not just because of the underlying naffness of giving a shit about England in the first place. Thanks to Simon Kuiper and Stefan Szymanski and their recent books Soccernomics (which in the UK tellingly went under the title Why England Lose), we’re no longer supposed to think of England as underachievers; rather, as the rest of the world has got better, England now simply punches is proper weight in the game, which naturally tends to favour larger and somewhat poorer countries such as Brazil.
I for one find the Kuiper-Szymanski thesis a bit unsatisfying. To my mind England's problem isn't that it's punching its weight – rather, it is that is punching significantly below it and has been for decades while at the same time exuding simply enormous amounts of hubris. The England team is a sort of sporting Deepwater Horizon, an endlessly gushing source of hubris and disaster that invites gawking from far and wide. And so it was that I eagerly opened this book in search of answers.

The book is arranged around ten matches which Wilson believes are either "defining" games (in the sense of being the beginning or end of a particular era) in the history of the England team, or of being generally illustrative of particular trends in the English game. A chapter is then devoted to each match, with the space being roughly equally divided between a context-setting exercise (e.g. how had England got to the place it was that day? Why were certain players picked and others not? How had their opponents been doing recently?) and a tactical dissection of the match itself.

Each of these ten chapters are very good and some are quite superb. In a chapter on England’s humiliating defeat to Norway in the qualifiers for USA '94, Wilson takes the opportunity of Graham Taylor facing Egil Olsen to make a superb foray into the life of Charles Reep, the proponent of the long-ball game who helped to form both their coaching philosophies. Wilson has clearly spent some serious time banging around Reep's archives, and he manages to skewer the man's essential monomaniacal battiness while at the same time remaining sympathetic to a guy who essentially was a retired coot with an enthusiasm for football and statistics. (Some might have preferred a slightly longer dissection of why Reep’s statistics were nonsense, but if you’re really interested, there's the better part of a chapter on the subject in Inverting the Pyramid).

Other standout chapters include the one on England – Argentina 1966, which skewers the myth that it was an exceptionally violent match (a view which may have gained extra currency retroactively after the Falklands conflict) and provides an interesting Argentinian counterpoint to the better-known English account. And the two chapters concerning matches for which no film footage exists (the 4-3 defeat to Spain in Madrid in 1929 and the comprehensive 4-0 win over Italy in 1948) are interesting exercise in the historian's craft.

But for all the wonderful writing and incisive analysis in these ten chapters, the book as a whole is something of a disappointment. There’s no question that it's packed with great stuff, but somehow all that doesn't quite add up to it being a great book. It's probably unfair to hold the bar quite so high, but this book simply isn't anywhere near as good as Inverting the Pyramid, the book to which it invites comparison.

The problem comes down to Wilson's reluctance to place any of the ten games into any wider theory about the English game. Being English, he says, predisposes him to suspicion about "all-encompassing" theories. But then, frankly, why write the book?

More to the point, why choose these ten games? Some of these are probably obvious – Wembley '53, Turin '90; but others are not quite as easily understood (why England-France '82 or England - Argentina in '66?). Some of these choices would be clearer if he were trying to illustrate larger trends, but he isn't. Since there’s no sustained thread that could ties these particular ten games together, what we’ve got here are essentially ten vignettes. Really well-written and interesting vignettes, to be sure, but vignettes nonetheless.

This approach means is that there are large sections of the book that have little to do with England. The chapters on Hungary '53 and Argentina '66 for example are excellent in their treatment of England’s opponents (the former especially, since the Hungarian source material is so rarely used in England because of the language's fiendish complexity). It is precisely these in-depth treatments that makes the individual chapters so good, and also precisely why it is so hard to find a consistent England-related thread making its way from chapter to chapter.

If you're reading for the meandering pleasure of dipping in and out of football history, it's a great approach. If you’re looking for historical clues as to why England were so shit against Algeria last week, it’s not (although, to be fair there are two excellent pages on the perennial Lampard-Gerard controversy – the gist of which is that the two *can* play together effectively, but it would have meant dropping Beckham and playing Rooney out of position, neither of which was permissible due to their star status).

What the book comes down to is the following 1) English footballers don’t do "patient"; 2) English football as whole puts far too much emphasis on pace, which is both it's strength and it's weakness; 3) When England get into trouble, they instinctively fall back on a combination of long balls and pace. Wilson does a good job of illustrating how these three propositions have been true for at least sixty years. But he’s hardly the first person to have come up with these observations, which again makes one wonder why the book was written in the first place.

One final touch in the book which I quite liked was his repeated return to the theme that the line which divides good teams from poor ones is actually quite small. Few people remember now that after two games of England’s "glorious" run to the semis at Italia, the team was, as they are today, winless. But for some funny refereeing, England probably would have managed to make it to USA '94 and Graham Taylor would not be remembered as a root vegetable with a tenuous grasp of English grammar. And it provides reminders of how quickly even the wisest of expert opinion can change; Wilson concludes his book by saying that at the time of writing last fall, Capello's England were going to the World Cup with the best chances of success of any England team since 1970.

How quickly things change.

[Sport Economist]

Football Book Review Thread

Apologies if this book has already been discussed as it's a year old ( I searched the firms for a mention but couldn't find one)but I just read Anthony Cartwright's Heartland - a nice stab at capturing the mood of Noughties Britain and in which football is an interweaving theme, in particular the 2002 World Cup and the Sapporo clash between England and Argentina. It's also set against the backdrop of a General Election so is very relevant to goings-on of teh moment. I wouldn't say the book was perfect but it explores a lot of important issues through fiction and any book set in teh West Midlands makes a change.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Laurent Dubois. Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France

It's easy to be cynical about a book written by an American history professor which starts out describing the events of July 9, 2006. Oh shit, you think to yourself, it's John Doyle with a doctorate; another football outsider thinking his fresh set of eyes can derive some deeper social meaning from "The Beautiful Game" which the rest of us have somehow missed all these years. And there's going to be more drivel about the head-butt. I mean, please. Spare us.

Easy to be cynical, certainly, but in this case you’d be largely wrong. While the book as a whole can’t be considered a great one – for reasons I'll delve into momentarily – it nevertheless contains passages of surpassing excellence which makes it well worth delving into.

The book is a bit of a mish-mash in that it is essentially three books in one. The first of these is an exploration of France's colonial history through sport and in particular football. Since Dubois is a historian, it's not surprising that this is by some distance the best of the three. In the space of about eighty pages, he manages to illuminate the long and tangled history of France's long relationship with its colonies in Algeria, West Africa and the Caribbean. In doing so, he illuminates the role of sport in the evolution of anti-colonial and anti-racism movements in ways that few have ever rivaled.

Basically, sports – and especially team sports – have always had a strong egalitarian streak because within the timeframe and rules of a given sport or event, any larger oppression or social influence disappears. When a team of black players plays a team of white players at any sport, they are on the equal for as long as they are on the field. Partially for this reason, the agitation for racial equality has often had a sporting dimension. But also, the organization of clubs has often acted as a spur to more important political organization because of the way that sport, like politics, can act as both a focus and a channel for collective emotions and desires. Dubois' exploration of this theme is nothing short of excellent.
Having made the general point about sport, equality and politics, he then shows how the three merged in the course of the de-colonization of the French Empire.

Especially poignant here is the biography of Felix Eboue, the black Guianan civil servant, who by one of those quirks of French history and politics rose so high in the colonial civil service that he became Governor of Martinique and then of Chad (though colonialism made a mockery of the words, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, they occasionally retained their meaning in some surprising ways, you see). History remembers him primarily as the man who rallied the French African colonies to the side of De Gaulle’s Free French in 1940 (for which he was rewarded with burial in the Pantheon), but he also spent much of his career organizing greater sporting opportunities for his subjects in the Caribbean and as a result left a sporting infrastructure which would nourish many athletes who would eventually come to be the heart of French sport.

The second book in here is really the weakest, and that is the history of French football, with a serious emphasis on the period between 1998 and 2006. This book starts off well, performing a particularly valuable service in dispelling the idea that the 1998 Black, blanc, beur team was an unprecedented breakthrough in multiculturalism; in fact, the national football team has long been a multi-national entity. North Africans (or their children) have been a mainstay of the French national team since before World War II and the first black was capped for Les Bleus, Raoul Diagne (whose father Blaise was the National Assembly member from Senegal), got his call up in 1931. Indeed, the first genuinely multi-cultural French team was not the one that won in Paris in 1998 but the one that was so cruelly defeated in Sevilla in 1982.

The problem is that the closer this book comes to the present day, the less interesting it becomes. The descriptions of public reactions to both the joyous victory of 1998 and the bemusing loss of 2006, capped as it was by Zinedine Zidane's iconic coup de boulle, are essentially collections of press clippings. The final chapter, an extended meditation of the possible meanings of the head-butt, is a particularly tedious summation of much of the pseudo-intellectual masturbation that followed France's defeat (for those genuinely interested in this subject, Ed Smith’s What Sports Tells Us About Life offers a more succinct and believable explanation about 9 July 2006).

Less forgivably, the book contains enough niggling factual errors about the sport of football itself that it puts Dubois' credentials as an actual football fan in some question. The Heysel stadium disaster, for instance, occurred in 1985, not 1983; the famous France-Brazil match of 1986 was a quarter-final, not a semi-final, and so on and so forth. It's not a hanging offence or anything, but the author is noticeably less comfortable with the material when the subject shifts from colonial history to football history.

Tying these two books together is a third book, which follows the midfielder Zindane and defender Lilian Thuram in their life journey from the cites to the historic French teams of 1996-2006. It makes an eminent amount of sense: in the Black, blanc beur squad, Zidane was the beur and Thurman was arguably the most talented and certainly the most outspoken of the blacks. Both scored two crucial goals on the road to the 1998 triumph (Thuram in the semi-final and Zidane in the final), and both retired briefly before being coaxed back into the fold for the 2006 World Cup. Dubois therefore uses these two as a metaphor for how France's colonies are continuing to affect her future even today.

The problem with this last book is that it is uneven. Zidane is clearly a footballing icon, but though his story arc comes from the poor suburbs of Marseille which lie at the heart of France's continuing failure to absorb its ethnic minorities, it ends up only in the rarefied world inhabited by international footballers. Thuram, on the other hand, has chosen to become a political figure, speaking out on issues of race and inclusion. He, too, came from the cités (albeit after a childhood spent in Guadeloupe), but in a sense he has returned to them by insisting on speaking out on behalf of their inhabitants and the social exclusion they face.

In effect, because of Zidane's silence, this third book is really just a long love letter to Thuram. In itself, that’s not a bad thing: Thuram is genuinely one of the most intelligent and eloquent men alive on the subject of race and tolerance, and his repeated showdowns with Jean-Marie LePen, Nicolas Sarkozy and other law-and-order politicians in France are a joy to read. Unusually for a sportsman, his political engagement is neither self-serving like George Weah's nor pablum-like like Thierry Henry's (curiously, despite his anti-racism stands within football, he’s never seen fit to comment more generally on racism in society, hanging back even during the run-up to the 2002 World Cup when it briefly seemed as though LePen might become President of France and the rest of the team in effect threatened to go on strike if the country voted for him. Admittedly, given the French performance in Korea, it's not obvious what the difference would have been)

In effect, it is this imbalance within the third book which unbalances the book as a whole. Having set up Thuram and Zidane as the twin ethnic pillars on which to make a narrative bridge between France's colonial history and the remarkable story of the French national team between 1998 and 2006, he has to give them equal time. When it comes to Thuram, it works well because he personally contributed not only to the country's sporting success but was also a major actor in the country’s political debates during the deacde as well. Zidane...well, there was that headbutt, wasn't there? And right there, the narrative comes crashing down.

This book is worth reading for its first couple of chapters on sport and politics and on France's complicated colonial history and it's present-day reverberations, which are undoubtedly superb. And its worth reading for a greater understanding of the brilliance and eloquence of Lilian Thuram (and pray the man enters politics one day). You just have to get over the fact that the football bits aren't especially good.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Beau Dure – Long Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer

This is a very difficult book to review. Though it suffers from long passages of thorough mediocrity, I'm inclined to forgive it a lot of sins for the simple reason that author Beau Dure, a Virginia sportswriter has chosen a really, really difficult topic.

Not difficult in the sense that source material is difficult to come by - MLS is one of the few competitions in the world that has existed exclusively since the arrival of the interweb, so document retrieval isn't tough. Not in the sense of having difficulty accessing primary sources, since with only one or two exceptions, all the main players are alive, kicking and prepared to be interviewed.

No, the difficulty here is simply the idea of doing the history of a league. Leagues are boring. Leagues are frameworks in which other dramas occur. It's like a political scientist trying to write a spellbinder about House procedural rules; it's possible, but very, very difficult.

Sure, there are lots of books about national football cultures – David Winner's Brilliant Orange (the Netherlands), John Foot's Calcio (Italy), Phil Ball's Morbo (Spain), etc, and to a considerable degree these books are about those countries' top leagues. But they can be so much more than league histories, because their greater investigative width gives them permission to look at clubs, cultures, national teams, etc. They can parcel time into eras based on particular teams' dominance, on the use of particular tactics or styles of play, or based on particular triumphs or tragedies. In short, most authors of national football histories have a lot of options to create compelling narratives.

The problem is that virtually none of this is true for MLS. Only half the clubs have been around since the start fifteen years. The league has not produced any significant tactical innovations. Thanks to the salary cap, no team has been able to really build a dynasty. Coaches move with such regularity that there is nothing like the era-defining consistency of a Ferguson or a Wenger.

So, what does that leave you as a narrative structure? Corruption a l'italiana? Fortunately for fans but unfortunately for the writer, there's none of that. Tragedies like Munich or Superga? Nope. Great national team victories? Beating Portugal and Mexico in 2002 was all right, but you can't build a book around it.

By now, your heart has to be going out to the poor bastard who signed a contract to write a book about MLS. But it gets worse. The league's only real star-driven story is David Beckham, but that story has only very recently been expertly covered by Grant Wahl in The Beckham Experiment and so that whole soap opera gets relegated to a couple of pages. Even the idea of putting MLS in the larger sweep of American football is off the table, as its already been expertly done by our own Exploding Vole in Soccer in a Football World.

Down to the bottom of the barrel now: you could write fifteen sets of season-by-season Cliff notes, complete with major player moves, coaching changes, player-of-the-season awards and blow-by-blow descriptions of each playoff match. Which Dure duly does, but this approach clearly bores even him to tears; by chapter 12 ("Beckham and Beyond"), he can't even be bothered to put his notes into actual paragraphs and he resorts to simple bullet points.

This approach does reveal the odd gem, particularly if (like me) you’re relatively new to MLS. I had no idea, for instance, that Preki played for as long as he did; and I was simply floored to learn that not one but two teams (Miami Fusion and DC United) gave the managerial reins to the lovable confirmed lunatic Ray Hudson. But the amount of dross one has to sift through to get these is awfully high.

Despite all this, there is a good small book struggling to get out here, and that is the one that deals with history of the actual league. Forget the clubs, forget the players (I know, it's too easy to do both) – what is really interesting about MLS is the league itself, its single-entity structure, its player-allocation system and its (for North America) radical decision to eschew gimmicky score-enhancing rules in favour of gradually adopting a full set of international rules.
Dure does a workman-like job of covering these issues, especially the league's chaotic birth in the aftermath of World Cup '94. The description of the process that led MLS' proposal to be selected over two others - including the totally bizarre League One America proposal from investor Jim Paglia, which involved having colour-coded players being restricted to certain parts of the field, and a scoring system which involved awarding more points for goals from further out or for being able to put the ball between the first and second goal frames (no, I'm not going to explain that last bit – read the book yourself) – is probably the book's best passage, so it's rather too bad that its over in the book's first twenty pages. But it also contains valuable details on the players’ association’s lengthy court challenge to the single-entity structure, as well as on changes both in league and playoff structures and the gradual extinction of "special" league rules such as the shootout.

But for all the qualities of these bits, the real problem is that MLS is a mere teenager and vanishingly few teenagers are actually worth writing about. For instance, you'd almost certainly avoid a book about Justin Bieber like the plague unless he suddenly evolved into one of the world’s most sophisticated businessman (which is essentially how Chris Morris' Premiership, the only other book I can think of that tries to tell a league-specific story, deals with the issue) or, if he were to blow it all on crack and busty hookers (essentially the story of Once in a Lifetime, which charts the history of the Cosmos and the NASL).

Unfortunately, MLS' success is specifically due to avoiding all these things. It's about being a sensible league, building slowly and not overextending itself. It's about the long game. There is no doubt that it's working and that's a great – even miraculous - thing for North American football fans. But there's not a miracle in the world big enough to make this story a gripping read.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Have picked up Gary Hopkins' Star-Spangled Soccer: The Selling, Marketing and Management of Soccer in the USA. I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish it. The writing is cartoonishly awful. And though published by Palgrave (!), not only does no one seems to have sprung for a copy editor, but the author himself doesn't seem to have proofed it, as he seems to have left in some of his own editorial comments in the text. My favourite is the section entitled:

"Let's face it - television revenues can only go one way: UP (rewrite)"

Seriously.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Keep these reviews coming, AG. I really like the way you write them.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Cheers, TEV. That's very kind of you. So here's one more.

Gary Hopkins. Star-Spangled Soccer: the Selling, Marketing and Management of Soccer in the USA.

Let's get straight to the point: this is a book that will fill readers with wonder, despair and hope.

Wonder, in the sense of "I wonder what psychotropic drugs the folks at the Warwick Business School and Palgrave Macmillan (!) were using when they green-lit this thing?" Despair, in the sense of "Jesus Christ, can't this guy spell, punctuate or accord nouns with pronouns?" And Hope in the sense that of "if this turd of a manuscript can get a contract from a major publisher – an academic publisher no less - maybe there’s hope for me after all".

The ground that Hopkins is covering is more or less the same as that traversed by Dure, only with an earlier start date (the awarding of the World Cup to the USA in 1988), a focus on the business end of things, and the slightly more expansive subject of the sport as a whole rather than MLS specifically, though obviously MLS takes up a good portion of the text here. This broad focus is actually what's useful about the book: by including the USMNT, women’s soccer, youth soccer and the marketing of Mexican soccer to US Hispanics, it actually provides a very broad and nuanced perspective on the US fractured US soccer market.

It was the fractured nature of the US market that made soccer so difficult to sell in the US, and it was Don Garber’s genius to recognize this and do something about it by getting MLS to create Soccer United Marketing to purchase the rights to all other US soccer properties (including the USMNT, USWNT, world cup rights, Mexican football rights, etc) and then start selling them together. This is a topic that Dure touches on in his book as well, but Hopkins really delves deeply into the facts and figures and creates an interesting business case study out of the whole event. Along with a relatively detailed examination of the TV market for various soccer events and the evolution of soccer on screen over the past two decades, it's definitely the highlight of this book, and an area where Hopkins is really bringing a lot of value to the table.

But oh, Lord, the linguistic atrocities you have to wade through to get there.

Forget the fact that sentences frequently lose their verbs before making it onto the page, or that collective nouns like FIFA are always erroneously referred to by the pronoun "they". Pardon the parenthetical statements within parenthetical statements, the sentences that contain two colons and two semi-colons and the ellipses followed by exclamation points. Look beyond the complete failure to grasp even the most elementary principles of using commas within sentences. Forgive the frankly random capitalization of nouns or use of quotation marks (my particular favourite here is the use of the three separate terms "soccer mom", "soccer" mom and soccer mom all on the same page). Ignore Hopkins’ tendency to craft five- or six-clause sentences where the tenuousness of the link between the first and last clauses resembles that of a Larouchite conspiracy theory. Wave away the alarming frequency with which rather basic football names – Erickson, Beckenbaur, Havelanche, Mazeratti – are misspelled (if it’s a foreign name, chances are extremely high that Hopkins has butchered it). In a sense, the author is not entirely to blame here, because all of this is also clear and damning evidence that neither Warwick University or Palgrave invested a penny in copy-editing this sucker.

(Actually, I tell a lie. The book's intro does contain thanks to a Mr. Keith Povey for his "patient" copy-editing services. Given the quality of the manuscript, I can only assume that Povey is either legally blind or harbouring some incredibly deep grudge against his employer. What, for instance, was he thinking on page 294, where he decided not to red-circle a note Hopkins had left to himself to re-write a bit of the text in an actual section title, to wit: "Let’s face it: television revenues can only go one way: UP (rewrite)". The only alternative to sabotage or incompetence that I can think of is that Povey views Hopkins as a kind of literary Ed Wood – a so-bad-he's-good figure whose talents deserved a wider audience. All I can say is that at most publishers, it’s someone above the level of copy-writer who makes that decision.)

Anyways, what Hopkins definitely can't escape the blame for is subjecting his readers to his clearly near-terminal case of Pub-Bore-itis. A mere review can't really do it justice– you really need to read the endless clichés for a few hundred pages to get the full forces of it. It's passages like "football is the biggest sport in the world, and I do mean world" (yes, he actually writes like that); or the banging on about USA having beat the "Ticos" of Trinidad to make it to Italia ’90, and how those "Ticos fans" took it tough – all the while blithely unaware that Ticos are the nickname of Costa Rica. And though the author might generate kudos for discussing the finances of the women's game and the failure of the WUSA in some detail, the fact that he did so in a chapter dismissively entitled "Pony Tails and Dollars" tends to lessen the effect.

Lurking somewhere behind the sophomoric prose, there is an author who really has thought about the business of soccer in the US. There is enough material here to make a decent chapter in a larger book of some kind on the money side of football. By my reckoning, that makes this 313-page book too long by about 270 pages. If you can negotiate a discount on that basis, buy this book. Otherwise, not.

[ursus arctos]

Football Book Review Thread

Erm, the Ticos are Costa Rica.

Perhaps you need a copy editor.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Ha!

Of course, the reason I put them up here before giving them to Goldstone is so I can get my copy editing done by real experts....

(I also see I've misspelled the name of the author whose book I *just* finished...)

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Antonio GramSheba wrote:

The book's intro does contain thanks to a Mr. Keith Povey for his "patient" copy-editing services. Given the quality of the manuscript, I can only assume that Povey is either legally blind or harbouring some incredibly deep grudge against his employer.

Brilliant.

More praise for the copy-editing genius of Mr Povey, this time from the author of "Social Forces in the Making of the New Europe: The Restructuring of European Social Relations in the Global Political Economy." (Yes, that one.)

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

To be fair, any copy editor who has to work on "neo-Gramscian perspectives in the International Political Economy" deserves a little bit of sympathy.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Agreed.

We should invite him for drinks.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Football Book Review Thread

The Exploding Vole wrote:

I'm working through Feet of the Chameleon: The Story of African Football by Ian Hawkey. So far, so good.

Done 60 pages so far and have found it to be informative, let's hope it continues to be so.

The Goldblatt book is an amazing piece of work, it took two goes to start it but was well worth getting through.

As for the other reviews and suggestions I have yet to disagree.

Just finished the Jimmy Burns on Barça, generally ok but did drift a little.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler: Goals for Galilee: The Triumphs and Traumas of the Sons of Sakhnin, Israel's Arab Football Club

One of the classic styles of football books is the "follow a team for a season" story. At its best, this style uses the rhythms of a season to show the highs and lows of both the squad and its fans – and if you're lucky, sheds some light on the culture of the team being followed. Though it's been used dozens of times, the best of this genre is almost certainly Joe McGinnis' The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro (Tim Parks' A Season With Verona is not bad, either, but since he’s following a bigger team he can[t deliver the intimacy with the playing staff that McGinnis did).

Goals for Galilee follows this same formula to a T. And the authors have a good story to tell – that of Bnei Sakhnin ("The Sons of Sakhnin"). Sakhnin is an Arab town in Israel, whose team rose to prominence in spectacular fashion, winning Israel’s State Cup in 2004. Though Arabs account for roughly a fifth of the population, a team from an Arab town had never before won the Cup, nor – in consequence – had one ever represented Israel abroad in Europe. Kessel and Klochendler chose to follow them the following season as they tried to maintain their place in the top division and play in Europe as well.

But of course, in the middle east nothing is ever quite this simple. Sakhnin may be an Arab town, but Bnei Sakhnin has both Arabs and Jews (as well as a smattering of European and African foreigners) playing for them. And though their chairman, Mazen Ghanaim is an Arab skilled at playing a conciliatory role with Jewish Israelis, their Jewish manager, Eyal Lachman is a fiery type who urges the team to play a hard, uncompromising style to show that Jewish teams cannot push Arabs around.

It is this ambiguity of Israeli Arabs that forms the heart of the narrative. The football – well, it takes a back seat. Kessel and Klochendler are not bad at capturing the passions of the fans watching the game (and not just during the match – their description of fans' matchday rituals isn't bad either), but they either have little feel or little interest in transmitting the flow of the actual game action. It's not a fatal flaw in a book like this, but if you’re after a description of play in the Israeli leagues, just be warned that this isn't the book you’re looking for.

What this book is meant to do is to give the reader a look into the constant stream of paradoxes that affect the life of Israeli Arabs. For instance, when Sakhnin play abroad in the UEFA Cup (they managed to knock out FC Tirana before succumbing to Newcastle – this being back in the days when the latter still had European ambitions). They are in the competition representing Israel – does that mean they should wave the Israeli flag? Some think yes, but then again they are also a symbol of Arab pride – so maybe their supporters should wave a Palestinian flag? No, that might be disrespectful to Israel, and Bnei Sakhnin is above all an attempt by Arabs to gain entrée into Israeli society.

Nowhere is this desire for entrée seen as fiercely as in the story of Abbas Suan, Bnei Sakhnin's captain and all-action midfielder. Called up to the national team in during the qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup, Abbas scored a blinding, vital goal against Ireland as a late-game substitute. Suddenly, the Arab Abbas was feted as a savior of Israel. For those looking for symbols of national reconciliation after the second intifada, Abbas fit the bill perfectly.

In the hands of some authors, this kind of material would end up being grist for some kind of schmaltzy "football can bring world peace" story. But thankfully, Kessel and Klochendler are smarter than that – football works better as a metaphor or a mirror than as a fairy tale. Within a week of being crowned the King of Israel, Abbas was being abused in a game against Betar Jerusalem, whose fans (they can properly be called cunts, what with their motto being "Arabs will never play for Betar" and all) unfurled a large banner proclaiming "Abbas, you don’t represent us".

By the end of the season, Sakhnin are struggling. The Jewish refs and FA seem to have it in for a team which is seen as too obviously physical (there's a racist subtext here about "Arabs fighting dirty" even though as often as not it's the Jewish players being penalized). The iconic coach who forged them into such a fighting unit in the first place is let go after a run of bad results. Far from remaining a hero, Abbas is by the end of the season a figure of hate among the Sakhnin faithful as he is powerless to stop the team's lurch towards relegation.

This book is in many ways quite excellent – as an introduction to the complications of identity politics within Israel it is extremely good. The two basic strikes against it are the lack of a feel for the football itself and a more-than-slightly idiosyncratic writing style (the authors eschew quotation marks, and often encompass multiple speakers' points of view and speaking styles in a single paragraph - an outgrowth, it would seem, of the book's origins as a documentary film).

As a football book, it's not in the same class as McGinnis' Miracle, though it shares with that work a toughness and unwillingness to romanticize its subject. What elevates it above its station as a literary work is the uniqueness of the subject of Sakhnin itself; if you've any interest at all in the Middle East, this book is certainly worth a read.

[Ek weet nie]

Football Book Review Thread

In the hands of some authors, this kind of material would end up being grist for some kind of schmaltzy "football can bring world peace" story.

The film trailer brings the schmaltz. I wonder if it is being unfair to the film or not.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

You've seen it? Is it a movie on general release? I sort of got the impression this was a documentary headed for the CNN/AJE circuit rather than a cinematic event.

[ursus arctos]

Football Book Review Thread

Arthouse circuit. 12 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

[The Exploding Vole]

Football Book Review Thread

Schmalz is such a wonderful word, isn't it? Much better than "lard".

And they say German isn't a mellifluous language ...

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

For those of you who haven't already seen the new review chez Goldstone...

Intrigued as I was by Goals for Galilee, I went in search of some further reading. To wit, Tamir Sorek’s Arab Soccer in a Jewish State. Which is a hell of a great piece of work.

The most important thing to wrap your head around with respect to Arab soccer in Israel is that it is definitively not used as a form of or symbol of resistance. It's easy to assume, given the example of clubs like FC Barcelona, that ethnic minorities will tend to use the local football clubs as a way of showing not just ethnic pride but of resistance as well. But that's definitively not the case here – rather, football is used as a force for integration. Or, as Sorek elegantly puts it, Arab football is an "integrative enclave" – a space which is integrative even though the society which surrounds it is not.

For the Jewish majority, permitting Arabs to have their own football clubs was anathema for the first twenty years of the state's existence, as it was thought too likely that these clubs would become political rallying points; instead, state and quasi-state elements such as the Histadrut would set up Hapoel clubs in Arab regions, which rapidly gained in popularity. But by the sixties, Arabs were setting up their own clubs, and by the seventies their nascent municipal governments were beginning to fund these clubs as well. Gradually, the number of Arab clubs in the Israeli soccer league began to grow substantially. By 2000, roughly 35% of all teams in the six-division league were Arab (though the top division was overwhelmingly Jewish).

But of course, signifying teams as being "Arab" and "Jewish" is merely a way of identifying their ownership or the ethnicity of the town they are from; with the exception of a few blatantly racist clubs such as Beitar Jerusalem virtually every squad from the fifth division up contains both Arabs and Jews (and, in the upper divisions, some foreigners as well). For individual Arabs, success in Israeli soccer is a means of pursuing individual success in an economic space where Arabs can compete on an equal footing with Jewish Israelis. And, of course, there are a number of predominantly Jewish teams (most notably Maccabi Haifa) that have a significant following of Arab fans because their image, or the image of the city they represent, is one of tolerance and understanding. In other words, Arabs can find ways to identify with Israeli symbols, provided these symbols themselves do not align themselves with exclusively jewish notions of Israel.

At Arab-owned or managed clubs, the dynamic is a bit different, but no less intriguing. The Arab sports press certainly likes to make the most of Arab-jewish confrontations on the pitch, using martial metaphors and calls to Arab solidarity when a major Arab teams confronts a team like Beitar Jerusalem. But this isn't necessarily the attitude of the fans in the stands; not only do fans conform to national norms by singing in Hebrew (even at games when two Arab teams are playing), but they also look at arab-jewish matches as an opportunity to demonstrate the possibilities of peaceful and equal co-existence. The Jewish sports press plays the same game, using these themes to highlight what they believe to be Israel’s essentially tolerant nature. But it’s a tricky area: when Arabs are selected for the national team and wear the religious symbols like the Star of David which has been adapted for national purposes, how does it play? Jews are forced to accept that the democratic nature of their state requires that non-Jews be allowed to represent them; Arabs (for the most part) feel pride that they have forced Jewish Israelis to see them as equals in this sphere of public life. Intriguingly, this has a spill-over into politics as well – among Arabs, Sorek shows that football fans are statistically more likely to vote in Israeli elections and vote for Zionist parties than non-football fans.

Now, in fairness, not all Arabs believe that football should act as an integrative activity. In fact, as Sorek describes in one excellent chapter, the Islamists among them have gone in entirely the other direction and set up their own independent leagues. Far from being an integrative initiative, the Islamic League is deliberately segregationist in intent (the point is to create an "Islamic soccer space" based on discipline, fair play, and piety), though given football’s universal appeal it is also an instrument of prosetylization.

Sorek is at his best describing the history of Arab soccer in Israel and the way he methodically builds his case for the emergence of sports as a form of modernity and the way Jews and Arabs reacted to it is quite excellent. So, too, is his notion of football as an "integrative enclave". And he is very careful not to over-generalize about Arab reactions to football. Fans, players, municipal officials and the press all have different "takes" and interests, and the way he carefully distinguishes between them is admirable.

If there are weaknesses with the book, they stem from it not having fully erased its origins as a PhD thesis. There are a few too many references to Gramsci (heh), Durkheim and other long-dead sociologists. Some of the quantitative analysis is so-so and poorly integrated into the narrative (they are the kind of thing graduate studies advisors require in a thesis to demonstrate mastery of statistical regression). And the chapter on municipal support of Arab teams is definitely "meh".

As a converted PhD thesis, the book isn't going to appeal to a general readership. It's refreshingly light on the jargon, but all the same it's not going to win anyone over on lively prose, either. There's none of the "thrill of the match" writing here – it is serious inquiry into the sociology of sport of a highly politicized minority group. For scholars of the game, it's an excellent addition to the literature.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

Also, while on vacation last week I read two other books worthy of mention.

The first is Simon Inglis' Stadium Odyssey. Formally, this isn't about football at all; it's about Inglis and his obsession with stadia. This of course has the potential to be brutally anorak-y but Inglis is an absolutely lovely writer; modest, self-deprecating, but not afraid to try some odd literary devices to get his point across (a faux-epistoalry chapter between a Greek and a Roman arguing the merits of the Colosseum vs. Olympia to demonstrate the ancient nature of the modern stadium vs. traditional stadium debate; an imaginary conversation with Papa Hemingway about the Pamplona arena, etc). And in the end, it isn;t really - or at least entirely - about stadia; it's equally about the kinds of communal experiences one can have within them. Two of the best chapters are about bullfighting in Spain and the hurling final at Croke Park.

If you're a ground-hopping nerd, there's stuff in here for you (4 chapters describing a 6-day groundhopping trip to Buenos Aires is a treat). If you;re interested in the politics or economics of stadia, ythere are bits in here for you. If you love baseball, the chapters on Wrigley Field and the Atsrodome are both excellent...seriously, there's almost nothing not to like here. Sure, 300 pages on stadia can sometimes seem a little wearing, but I can't imagine a nicer writer to guide one through it - quite excellent.

The other was Les negriers du foot (Football slave-traders), An ex-athlete turned journalist, Ewanjee-Epee tries to shine a light on human trafficking of players from Africa to Europe. She has a couple of very good stories to tell about young boys brought from francophone west African countries to rural Spain or Armenia or Costa Rica. But unfortunately, the look into the world of the slave-trader himself is pretty cursory. in fact, most of the book is devoted to talking about efforts to combat slave-trading. both in France and in Africa. It's not bad stuff, exactly, but nor is it quite what is advertised. there needs to be more written on this topic for sure - however, I think there's still room for someone to get into the down and dirty of the mechanics of getting people across borders and into football teams. Overall verdict - great concept and topic, middling execution.

[Guest]

Football Book Review Thread

This book is fascinating, and mirrors some of my what I saw in Israel. Abass Suan, the famous Arab Israeli national player, was definitely an integrationist, playing for the national team but not singing the national anthem. It set out a template of how to be a top level Israeli sportsman, with a Star of David on your breast, and a proud Arab (Christian or Muslim).

The more left wing or liberal teams have certainly lead in this area on the pitch and on the terraces, especially Maccabi Haifa and Hapoel Tel Aviv (it is worth mentioning that Hapoel is changing, with many new Mizrahim fans from the poorer areas of Tel Aviv eroding its overtly left wing identity, a kind of Beitar-isation).

But I'd like to see a second edition looking at how the perception of Arabs in Israel has really hardened since 2007. This has translated into football. Fans of Bnei Sakhnin especially have become radicalised. The former chairman, who I interviewed in 2006 and was talking about integration and harmony, was castigated as a traitor by the Israeli press a few years later for leading huge protests against the 2009 war on Gaza. He was far more radical, talking a very different line.

Every time the situation is 'hot' the FA now cancels any games involving Arab teams for fear of trouble. A majority of Israelis, according to a survey in the NYT, now believe in transfer. Now you have a kind of seige mentality.

There's a very different political climate now, and you can see that as much on the terraces as you can in the press, or even the Knesset...

[Anton Gramscescu]

Football Book Review Thread

That would be *very* interesting. You should write that one yourself, II. "The End of an Integrative Enclave". You could probably sell to both WSC and Foreign Policy with only slight modifications.