Football Book Review Thread

[Giggler]

The chapter on supporters was probably the most interesting one for me to write, as I could see a lot of myself in the research that's out there. There's an academic (and Mansfield Town fan) called Alan Pringle who has written a research paper on the topic and was very generous with his time when I interviewed him.

One of the main themes I picked up on was hope. Going to the game at the weekend can provide you with a feeling of something to look forward to at the end of a tough week, the feeling that things will get better. The unpredictable nature of football means you can put hope in the team you support itself. Achievements like those of my team, Sutton United, over the last few years show that anything is possible! Often if your team does badly it only matters in the very short term - you're always thinking forward, hopeful that next season will be better. Of course community is a massive one, and interviews with Newcastle United Foundation and an AFC Bournemouth fan-led initiative, Talking Cherries, reflect that in the book.

Hi Johnnie, did we speak at a Bury AFC game?

[JohnnieLowery]

Hi Johnnie, did we speak at a Bury AFC game?

Certainly did! It was nice to see the good news about the merger last Friday - hopefully that paves the way for a journey back to the EFL with everyone united once more

[Discordant Resonance]

A rather odd contribution to this thread, which has probably appeared in earlier pages, called Saturday, Bloody Saturday - which, on the cover, at least, claims to be co-written by Alistair Campbell and the former footballer and Burnley CEO Paul Fletcher. 90% of the plot would appear to be the work of the latter, dealing with the travails of a northern First Division club in the Seventies, and aside from transposing said team to Yorkshire, seems to be a thinly veiled portrait of Turf Moor, by and large looking realistic in terms of recreating the general atmosphere of the era. What lets the novel down is Campbell's tithe, a hokey subplot about the IRA bombing campaign in Britain that not only never leaves the realm of cliché, a la Colin Forbes, but is entirely superfluous to proceedings, bar an entirely contrived conclusion which renders the entire exercise neither fish nor fowl.

[JohnnieLowery]

I've been putting together a few reviews of football books I love on my website - have posted a few below, with more available on my website blog

The Boy on the Shed - Paul Ferris: https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...by-paul-ferris

The Bromley Boys - Dave Roberts: https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...y-dave-roberts

Up Pohnpei - Paul Watson: https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...by-paul-watson

State of Play - Michael Calvin: https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...michael-calvin

[imp]

Long piece in Esquire about the tough market for sports books, and why the future looks grim for the genre.

[Satchmo Distel]

Cricket writer Jarrod Kimber recently noted that people may only write serious sports books in future to promote podcasts or get work on newspapers (probably online ones) or magazines. But that might be the case with all serious writing now.

[imp]

Football Book Review Thread

I've just started The Football Cronicas collection, which was reviewed in WSC. I have only read the first 3 stories, since I have been swamped with work, but so far so good. If you're into South American football and/or enjoyed Eduardo Galeano's Football in the Sun and the Shadows, you should check this one out. I'll hopefully share a more thorough review if I can finish it in a timely fashion.

I've picked this up again as the first time I only got about two thirds of the way through, for reasons I no longer recall. It's a really brilliant collection of writing, and once I get to the end, I'm going to start again from the front. Many South and Central American football writers seem to pull off this slightly detached, ambivalent, philosophical view of football that approaches the game from a witty, ironic perspective, while never losing sight of its power to possess and obsess us.

There's a great essay by Hernan Iglesias Illa about playing in Brooklyn's weekend Hispanic league which reminds me of everything I ever experienced playing in the Montgomery County Over 35s league. Especially loved this sentence where his team is playing a much better side, something my variably talented team experienced whenever we played a Caribbean or Central American team:

"When they played their football, we seemed ashamed of interrupting them. It would take us five minutes to win the ball back and ten seconds to lose it again."

Although in our case, it was more like three seconds, at best.

[Flynnie]

Cricket writer Jarrod Kimber recently noted that people may only write serious sports books in future to promote podcasts or get work on newspapers (probably online ones) or magazines. But that might be the case with all serious writing now.

Well, that's not entirely true because Pitch seems like they're publishng a book every other week. But I think the vast majority of those are labours of love, not really even written by professional journalists. That market of niche sports book (University of Nebraska Press seems to publish a couple very well-researched and regarded baseball books every year by SABR members) seems to be surviving.

Also, there's a monkey-see, monkey-do effect with big publishers that is running out of steam. After Moneyball and Jeff Pearlman's book on the 1986 Mets, two kinds of books got run into the ground over the next two decades:

1) Team wins a couple championships with a new kind of stat-nerd approach, and gets a book written about them. We'll call this Sons of Moneyball.

2) Remember Those Guys? Pearlman alone did four of them -- 86 Mets, 90s Cowboys, 80s Lakers, 90s/00s Lakers (Shaq and Kobe era). The Knicks book discussed in the Esquire piece is that.

Actually, I'll add a third: Big Structural Biography of legend. Again, Pearlman did a bunch of those -- Favre, Walter Payton, Bo Jackson, etc. -- and so did others. David Marianiss on Vince Lombardi. That Roberto Clemente bio was a best seller. James Hirsch did one on Willie Mays. Leigh Montville did one on Ted Williams and then one on Babe Ruth, where Jane Leavy did Sandy Koufax and also Babe Ruth.

What I would say here is all three, but especially the last two, were largely fuelled by the rise of the Internet and the ability to search and find copious amounts of newspaper reports from the contemperary period. This allowed new ground to be broken and new information (Leavy famously found out that Ruth got sent away to reform school because his parents got divorced, thanks to his alcoholic mother being caught inflagrante delicto with another man, due to a newspaper search) to fuel new works.

We're at a time when I think people are trying to find something new to consume...all three of these trends seem to have largely run their course. You'll get a few Big Bestseller books if somebody can wring access out of a surviving superstar (if Barry Bonds wants to set the record straight, I'll buy that), but short of that it'll probably be labours of love.

[danielmak]

I've picked this up again as the first time I only got about two thirds of the way through, for reasons I no longer recall. It's a really brilliant collection of writing, and once I get to the end, I'm going to start again from the front. Many South and Central American football writers seem to pull off this slightly detached, ambivalent, philosophical view of football that approaches the game from a witty, ironic perspective, while never losing sight of its power to possess and obsess us.

There's a great essay by Hernan Iglesias Illa about playing in Brooklyn's weekend Hispanic league which reminds me of everything I ever experienced playing in the Montgomery County Over 35s league. Especially loved this sentence where his team is playing a much better side, something my variably talented team experienced whenever we played a Caribbean or Central American team:

"When they played their football, we seemed ashamed of interrupting them. It would take us five minutes to win the ball back and ten seconds to lose it again."

Although in our case, it was more like three seconds, at best.

I never came returned to post about the rest of the book, but I really enjoyed it. I was on a steady run of English-language books about football in Latin America for a year or two.That reading coincided with watching a lot of Libertadores, Sudamericana, and South American league football. I'm not going to look back through this thread to see which books I reviewed in this thread, but I would also recommend all of these in addition to Football Cronicas:

Freeman, David Barra Brava Create Space 2012

Stein, Shawn and Campisi, Nicolas (Eds.) Idols and Underdogs: An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction Freight Books 2016

Villoro, Juan God is Round Restless Books 2016

And of course the best of them all: Galeano, Eduardo Soccer in the Sun and Shadow Verso 2003

I have others on the shelf that are focused on football in South America, but they're on the backburner for now. I had been reading the Falling for Football collection, which is good. I was derailed a bit but will get back to that next week when the commute picks up again.

[Jon]

I've picked this up again as the first time I only got about two thirds of the way through, for reasons I no longer recall. It's a really brilliant collection of writing, and once I get to the end, I'm going to start again from the front. Many South and Central American football writers seem to pull off this slightly detached, ambivalent, philosophical view of football that approaches the game from a witty, ironic perspective, while never losing sight of its power to possess and obsess us.

There's a great essay by Hernan Iglesias Illa about playing in Brooklyn's weekend Hispanic league which reminds me of everything I ever experienced playing in the Montgomery County Over 35s league. Especially loved this sentence where his team is playing a much better side, something my variably talented team experienced whenever we played a Caribbean or Central American team:

"When they played their football, we seemed ashamed of interrupting them. It would take us five minutes to win the ball back and ten seconds to lose it again."

Although in our case, it was more like three seconds, at best.

Yes, I had a similar experience in Madrid every time our team played a south American team.

[john the revelator]

I recently devoured 'The Rodfather', autobiography of Irish hard man footballer and manager Roddy Collins (brother of world champion boxer Stephen Collins).

Great summer read with lol moments from his career in Irish league football followed by years spent trying to break into football management.

Neither were any success, his football career peaked in Mansfield town and his management career peaked in Carlisle United avoiding relegation from third division.

Blessed with a complete lack of self awareness and drawn by the light of impending glory, he continued to slog on, repeating mistakes but determined to break through despite terrible injuries and a unique talent for alienating club owners and committees.
(I was two thirds of the way through the book thinking that Roddy comes across as the soccer equivalent of Ross O'Carroll Kelly when a flick to the cover explained that as the book was co-written by Paul Howard.)

Fortunately he had a side line in plastering that appears to have funded his football. And he was also blessed with a wife who may be canonized if the Archbishop of Dublin ever reads the book.

It provides an insight into the shoe string existence of small clubs that could have been explored more instead of getting laughs.
e.g. in 1983 he played for Athlone Town who lost 8-2 to Standard Liege, he swapped jersey at the end of the match only to be told by the manager to get it back as the club only had one strip...

[elguapo4]

I recently devoured 'The Rodfather', autobiography of Irish hard man footballer and manager Roddy Collins (brother of world champion boxer Stephen Collins).

Great summer read with lol moments from his career in Irish league football followed by years spent trying to break into football management.

Neither were any success, his football career peaked in Mansfield town and his management career peaked in Carlisle United avoiding relegation from third division.

Blessed with a complete lack of self awareness and drawn by the light of impending glory, he continued to slog on, repeating mistakes but determined to break through despite terrible injuries and a unique talent for alienating club owners and committees.
(I was two thirds of the way through the book thinking that Roddy comes across as the soccer equivalent of Ross O'Carroll Kelly when a flick to the cover explained that as the book was co-written by Paul Howard.)

Fortunately he had a side line in plastering that appears to have funded his football. And he was also blessed with a wife who may be canonized if the Archbishop of Dublin ever reads the book.

It provides an insight into the shoe string existence of small clubs that could have been explored more instead of getting laughs.
e.g. in 1983 he played for Athlone Town who lost 8-2 to Standard Liege, he swapped jersey at the end of the match only to be told by the manager to get it back as the club only had one strip...

I would have said winning the double with Bohemians, knocking Aberdeen out of Europe and beating the Bundesliga side Kaiserslautern away in the following round would define the word " peaked " better. Knowing Roddy, I would believe one in three of his stories anyway.

[john the revelator]

You're right (damn my parochial inferiority complex)

He still managed to get fired at the end of the season despite his Bohemians double.

[elguapo4]

You're right (damn my parochial inferiority complex)

He still managed to get fired at the end of the season despite his Bohemians double.

He wasn't fired, he didn't turn up for a meeting over a new contract and went on holiday instead. With only two players under contract and no word from him, the club had no choice but to move on.

[JohnnieLowery]

My book on mental health in football, Match Fit, is out today. You can grab a copy from Amazon here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Match-Fit-E.../dp/1801504687

Match Fit was inspired by a desire to raise awareness of mental health through football. There are 13 chapters, each on a different topic, including everything from the unique pressures on Premier League footballers to using football to help people deal with PTSD after the Grenfell Fire. I've written about some of the book's key influences on my website:

Retired (Alan Gernon): https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...by-alan-gernon
Soccology (Kevin George): https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...y-kevin-george
Recovering (Richie Sadlier): https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...richie-sadlier
State of Play (Michael Calvin): https://www.johnnielowery.co.uk/post...michael-calvin

I've also appeared on a couple of podcasts in which I talk about the book, so check those out if you want to learn any more:

https://audioboom.com/posts/8355476-...johnnie-lowery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJCsEOiO-b0

Last thing to mention - 15% of the profits from the book go to mental health awareness and suicide prevention charity Beder. I hope you enjoy Match Fit, and perhaps learn something too. If it helps just one person then the hundreds of hours I’ve put into the project over the last three years will all have been worth it.

[imp]

Congratulations on the book, Johnnie. I might be interested in reviewing it for Soccer America. PM me for an email address so you (or Pitch) can send me an e-copy, if you're interested.

[danielmak]

I'm probably 6 to 8 chapters into Dave Roberts' 32 Programmes. I'm enjoying it so far and assume that will be the case as I continue since I don't expect the type of storytelling to change.

The blurbs at the front of the book almost all compare the book to Hornby. Of course, this is lazy blurb writing, but probably something the publisher wanted since Hornby found a broader audience. Anyway, I mention the Hornby comparison because I have a question for folks who regularly visit this thread and have either been reading football books for a long time or spend most of their time digging into the history of football books. Was Hornby really the first person to write a culturally smart, memoir-focused book about being a football fan? He mentions WSC in Fever Pitch if I remember correctly, but WSC was not doing long-form journalism (perhaps akin to a chapter in a book). Hopcraft's The Football Man is often discussed as providing an alternative to what was being published when his book came out. I started to read that book many years ago and will need to go back to it soon, but it reads nothing like Fever Pitch. Any recommendations for books that came out before Fever Pitch or around the same time that had the same quality writing and offered a similar approach to memoir/fandom? Or was Hornby truly the starting point?

[tee rex]

I can't think of anything prior to Hornby. Certainly nobody was writing about visits to Hampstead psychiatrists and linking football to self-loathing, both disease and cure.

Although the book is "of its time", he was more prescient than he is generally given credit for I feel. He writes about the bond schemes pricing fans out of the game, the TV kick-off times likewise, and all this before the Premier League even existed.

[danielmak]

I should have added one more query attached to long-form journalism. Were there any long-form pieces that came out before Fever Pitch that garnered some attention among folks who were hungry for a different kind of writing? Something that might have previewed that Fever Pitch could find an audience?

[ursus arctos]

I can't think of anything in particular either, though one possible line of inquiry is the various "Road to Wembley" projects, which appeared in print, television and radio versions and followed the FA Cup from the preliminary rounds through the Final.

The standard approach was to pick an "interesting" club in the first round and follow them as long as they lasted, then focusing on the club that eliminated them, etc., all the way through to the Final.

The early pieces in any "edition" necessarily focused on non-league clubs and their unique supporter culture and some of them continued to look through that lens as the focus shifted to "bigger" clubs.

That said, I think the real appetite for that kind of writing was much better demonstrated by the popularity of fanzines and WSC.

[danielmak]

I have some of the from..to Wembley zines in my pile to to be read. I also have Brian James' Journey to Wembley, which will likely be next up after I finish the Dave Roberts book.

[tee rex]

I really enjoyed Brian James' book at the time (when my teenage reading list was very narrow, admittedly. Books were homework).

One of the vignettes that seem odd today was Geoff Hurst as manager at Telford. Long before he became a knight and compulsory presence on every World Cup retrospective, he was just another fading star struggling in the non-league mud.

But generally it was a pretty evocative depiction of life down the (not yet official) pyramid if memory serves.

[imp]

danielmak Fever Pitch was published by Victor Gollancz without any expectations, because it was a new form of football writing, and anything new takes the publishing world by surprise if it takes off. It was a hugely unexpected success - I know this because it was Gollancz who bought my first book before they got re-branded as Orion and Gollancz got stupidly sidelined as a sci-fi publisher. (Funnily enough, I came across a Victor Gollancz Strasse in Frankfurt the other day.)

Also, I've just finished JohnnieLowery's book (see above) and reviewed it - before the review is published, I'd just like to recommend it on here too, it's an excellent effort. As it will be published behind a paywall, I'll copy and paste it on here in due course.

[Sunderporinostesta]

A mates partner is assembling a couple of football book reading lists for a writing class she’s involved with and has asked me for recommendations.
There are non football fans involved so one list is for books that hopefully are capable of hooking those with little or no knowledge of the game. I immediately thought of Fever Pitch and All Played Out and as I’m on holiday at the moment can’t access my shelves for others and I’m drawing a blank for others.
The second list would be for football enthusiasts and I’ve a rough idea of about twenty for that. The Ball Is Round, Moro, Tor, Angels With Dirty Faces, etc etc.
Biographies, auto biographies and club histories aren’t wanted but national or regional football histories such as Moro, Tor etc seem welcome.

Any suggestions especially for the non fan list? Gallus in this months WSC looks a possibility?

[elguapo4]

I'd add The Far Corner and it's sequel. Also maybe a bit dated, but Football against the enemy.