Football Book Review Thread

[imp]

Of course, it's possible that I just don't like football books anymore.

I think there's just a glut of football books on the market that would have made for decent feature pieces, at best, but don't have the legs for an entire book. Plus, every English-speaking hack living abroad seems to think there's a book to be written about the history of football in that particular country. There are just too many other good books around for me to devote reading time to the game in South Korea, say, let alone the season of one particular club in South Korea 18 years ago. Even Wilson's Argentina book I can't face, despite its beautiful cover, great reviews and him being a writer I like and respect. When I weigh it up against my 'to read' pile, there's too much information in there I don't need and won't remember anyway.

[Sporting]

I don't remember much about most things I read, including the good stuff. The important thing is that I enjoyed them at the time.

[Giggler]

This is very strange. My most recent football reading has been a variety of "doing the 92 in a season" or groundhopping books. Almost all were written a few decades back, so I am choosing to read out of time. But the authors are certainly linking what happened at that time so the books were current when published.

My only guess would be that the author wrote the book 17 years ago, couldn't find a publisher, sat on it, and then self-publishing took off and he decided to publish it. Or he hit some birthday milestone that had him questioning the life he has lived and felt like he needed to make his mark in the world. The publication was the end goal, so he didn't think to go back and re-write an intro or sections in the book that could link to the present or foreground why that time mattered.

Was one of them Playing At Home by John Aizlewood? I really like that book even though he's less than complimentary about Bury, because it captures the country at a really interesting time (the 97/98 season, New Labour, Diana etc).

[danielmak]

Was one of them Playing At Home by John Aizlewood? I really like that book even though he's less than complimentary about Bury, because it captures the country at a really interesting time (the 97/98 season, New Labour, Diana etc).

Yes. That was on of them. He was mostly pessimistic about a lot of things. Haha. I wrote about that above and you replied, so it's a book that stuck with you for sure.

https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...88#post2237988

Edit: And now that I go back and re-read my post. I still have London Fields at the top of the pile since it got skipped by Pearson's latest; a lot of issues of WSC that I didn't read in 2010, 2011, and 2012 because I was busy with other things; and Daniel Gray's various short 50 reflections on... books. I've just started the last one he published.

[Giggler]

Yes. That was on of them. He was mostly pessimistic about a lot of things. Haha. I wrote about that above and you replied, so it's a book that stuck with you for sure.

https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...88#post2237988

Edit: And now that I go back and re-read my post. I still have London Fields at the top of the pile since it got skipped by Pearson's latest; a lot of issues of WSC that I didn't read in 2010, 2011, and 2012 because I was busy with other things; and Daniel Gray's various short 50 reflections on... books. I've just started the last one he published.

Pandemic brain fog, apologies.

[Flynnie]

I think there's just a glut of football books on the market that would have made for decent feature pieces, at best, but don't have the legs for an entire book. Plus, every English-speaking hack living abroad seems to think there's a book to be written about the history of football in that particular country. There are just too many other good books around for me to devote reading time to the game in South Korea, say, let alone the season of one particular club in South Korea 18 years ago. Even Wilson's Argentina book I can't face, despite its beautiful cover, great reviews and him being a writer I like and respect. When I weigh it up against my 'to read' pile, there's too much information in there I don't need and won't remember anyway.

Pitch Publishing seem to have literally hundreds of books coming out a year. Some are worthy additions to any fan's library*, others seem rather meh.

Having said all that, Angels with Dirty Faces is a terrific book and you really should read it. The 2000s were the glory years for "history of football in X" with Morbo, Brilliant Orange, Tor!, Calcio and Futebol, and it took almost 15 years for Argentina to get its own entry. Worth the wait though.

*I've just bought Steven Scraggs' books on the UEFA Cup and Cup Winners Cup, which I'm quite excited to read, plus Gary Thacker's book on Dutch football. And there's a translation of an Austrian book about the 1930s Wunderteam coming.

[imp]

Yes, I maybe should read it, but that's different from wanting to read it.

[danielmak]

I enjoyed Wilson's Behind the Curtain (I think that was the title) and I have Inverting the Pyramid in the pile. I have put that one off because I know it is going to pull me into a rabbit hole and I'll want to start watching games and spending time viewing teams he discusses. I am maybe 50 pages into the Argentina book but have pushed other things in front of it. I like history to be couched in more of a narrative, which is why I enjoy these doing the 92/groundhopping books as historical texts. There's more of a narrative in terms of plot, characters, movement through space. But that's just my interest. I was watching a lot of South American football when Wilson's book came out so the timing was great but I was much more engaged by the Cronicas book and, of course, Galeano's book. I know these are very different types of writing and not meant to be histories of...But if a historical account written as a historical account is a writing style that works then I think the book will be of interest to a lot of football fans who watch and read beyond a specific region or league.

[Flynnie]

Be wary of Pitch Publishing's output now, Beautiful Bridesmaids Dressed in Oranje was a sloppy, fairly average work. 2.5/5.

This is self-aggrandizing, but I think I know a fair bit about Dutch football, and so I have high standards. This book doesn't make an attempt to translate primary source documents (eg newspaper reports) or interview an extensive number of people -- which seems particularly ill-judged given most Dutch people can hold a conversation in English. Gary Thacker resorts instead to extensively quoting other books -- there's about 450 footnotes in the book and about 80 of them (including many juicy quotes) seem to be from David Winner's Brilliant Orange, so much so that I seriously considered putting down this book and re-reading Brilliant Orange instead. And also wondering if David Winner had grounds for copyright infringement. He interviews Rafael Honigstein for a German perspective, a good writer who seems oddly out of place given the primary focus on the book was 74 and 78 teams. I'm not sure Honigstein was even born in 1978. Jan-Herman de Bruijn seems to be his primary Dutch interview, which is useful but does beg the question of how Thacker didn't ask for de Bruijn's assistance in maybe getting some details for other journalists, broadcasters, or players (there is not a single player interviewed in this entire book, all quotations seem to come from either Brilliant Orange or Simon Kuper's Football Against The Enemy). Auke Kok's 1974 is quoted only in the sense Thacker translates the dust jacket blurb into English. Not everybody can afford a full-time research assistant, but this book would surely have been improved by a trip to Holland to interview some people, a subscription to the Telegraaf archives (or any Dutch newspaper), and to maybe see if some Dutch MA student somewhere in UK could translate some passages for a nominal fee.

Sloppy in terms of it badly needing an editor, Thacker keeps wedging in his book's title as if it means anything beyond a bon mot he came up with, and there's all sorts of odd inconsistencies. He keeps writing scorelines backward (eg 1-4), which might make sense in terms of economy if he wasn't pointing out whether the game was home or away (eg, Netherlands beat Israel in Tel Aviv 1-4). He likes Barry Hulshoff, so we get some gratuitous mentions of him. There's ellipses all over the place, which really should have been spotted. He writes extensively about the 1988 semifinal between Holland and West Germany, one of the great European Championship games, and pours over it in exhausting detail until Koeman ties the game at 1-1 after van Basten is given a penalty. We fast-forward 15 minutes directly to the winning goal, which is odd.

There's some decent stuff here, but if you're buying this book because you love Dutch football, you're far better off re-reading Brilliant Orange. I'm still keen on the Scraggs books, they've been very well reviewed, but I'm definitely not buying the Pitch book about Cruijff's year at Feyenoord because I get the sense that it'll be the same kind of book.

[Anton Gramscescu]

OK so I read Simon Kuper's new book on Barcelona. It's good. Probably his best since Football Against the Enemy. In fact, the first four sections are pretty close to flawless (although it might be debatable if he needed to devote quite so much time to Johan Cruyff); the fifth one, which purports to tell the story of Barcelona's decline from 2017 onwards, is OK but not great.

I liked it mostly because it isn't a club history (though it is partially that) or a player bio (though it is partially that, of Messi), or a tactical history (again, partially), but a mix of all of those things, along with, interestingly, a quite thorough examination of the club's politics and internal dynamics, fed by about 30 years-worth of Kuper's interviews of people at the club. There's a long and nuanced examination of La Masia, and a pretty forthright declaration that Barcelona's internal affairs are run by total amateurs (when every employee is a soci, and every soci a voter, there's some incentive not to fire the incompetents, but keep them on and add staff instead).

If you need your football books to be about what happens on the pitch, don't buy this book. This one is about a club as an institution. If there is a defining theme it is the question of whether Barcelona really is "mes que un club". The answer, essentially, is that if it ever was, it was about four things - Cruyff, Catalonia, La Masia and UNICEF -and it's not clear that any of these still define the institution (*maybe* Catalonia still does, but FCB is a lot further from the radical edge of Catalonian politics than it used to be).

4.5/5, for me, anyway.

[imp]

Thanks for that, AG.

[Snake Plissken]

Just finished that book, and AG summed it up superbly.

[ale]

Daniel Gray-Saturday 3 PM. Slender prose set to 50 chapters of the delights of modern football. Author states early in book that this is not a wallow in nostalgia and with few biographical details of his life have no reason to doubt. A Middlesbrough fan who saw them at Ayresome Park is the closest one gets. Specifics are few but those that are illustrate the dilemma of 'modern' subtitling-James Alexander Gordon & Jimmy Armfield no longer with us from a book published around 5 years ago. And a chapter on the beauty of headed goals may no longer be appropriate. But as a follower of a Premier club am not sure am intended as target audience for this book. Football still kicks off at 3 on Saturday (generally) further down the league system and most of the clubs dont operate mega club shops or have fan base wherever you globally go. So in end it became a wallow in my nostalgia and thank the author for it.

[Jobi1]

Be wary of Pitch Publishing's output now, Beautiful Bridesmaids Dressed in Oranje was a sloppy, fairly average work. 2.5/5.

David Townsend's pretty grim Do They Play Cricket in Ireland?, which I wasn't overly complimentary about over on the Cricket Books thread, is one of theirs.

That said, so too is Michael Calvin's latest, Whose Game Is It Anyway?, which I've just finished and quite enjoyed. It's a bit of an odd one, as it's more of a rambling memoir than an investigatory football book, as most of his others have been. He veers off, sometimes for whole chapters, into other sports that he's spent time covering (cricket, boxing) or participating in (sailing), and so it's a bit clunky when he tries to bring it round to a concluding answer to the question posed by the title, which seems to be specifically about football. A bit like Townsend in the Irish cricket book, Calvin loves a clanging name-drop, and occasionally seems to try to take more credit than he perhaps is due for a few decisions and things that have happened within sport, but his writing style and some of the stories he tells make this book far more readable than Townsend's. That said, as others have said about Pitch Publishing's recent output, you wonder if a sterner editor could have really tightened it up structurally and given it a bit more purpose and focus, and also ironed out the couple of poor grammar errors/typos (which I admit, being a copy-editor, I may be slightly more sensitive to than most) that are present.

[imp]

I don't understand why Pitch doesn't focus on producing a handful of quality football books rather than throwing out a bunch of shit and hoping something sticks. Again and again you read the same reviews - good subject, poorly executed, shoddily produced, and barely edited.

[imp]

I reviewed Nige Tassell's The Hard Yards for Soccer America last week, which is behind a pay-wall, so here you go (how I spoil you! As always, bear in mind this is written for US readership):

The Hard Yards: A Season in The Championship, Football's Toughest League by Nige Tassell (Simon & Schuster)

When you emigrate and fall into soccer small talk with people you've just met, then it's only natural they'll want to know which team you support. My answer to that is always the same: Lincoln City. This inevitably leads to follow-up questions. Who? Where? What? Why? Once that's cleared up, then the next question will always be: "Yeah, but who's your team in the Premier League?"

The answer to that is: it will be Lincoln City, should they ever make it to the Premier League. That's not something likely to happen soon, but last season they were one playoff game away from England's second tier, The Championship. Veteran soccer writer Nige Tassell is not wrong to label it soccer's "toughest league" in the sub-title to his latest book, a month-by-month analysis of the 2020-21 season that took place mainly behind closed doors because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Where the Premier League is a morally dubious, cash-centric jamboree focussed on the same group of fast-spending fat cat clubs scrambling for the four lucrative Champions League spots, the Championship is a more intriguing playground that has one eye on the EPL's vast but filthy lucre, and another on the lower exit to League One - the third tier of English soccer featuring teams like Shrewsbury Town, Burton Albion and Accrington Stanley, but also crawling with fallen former EPL clubs like Portsmouth, Sunderland and Ipswich Town.

A less predictable league does not necessarily mean a level playing field, though. Queen's Park Rangers coach Mark Warburton points out that sides coming down from the Premier League "have parachute payments that are multiples of our own squad budget. That's a fact. Is it a level playing field? No, it's not. But life's not a level playing field. You have to deal with it." It might be worth offering a less stoical and more cogent criticism too. Teams still comfortable on EPL money often go straight back up at the first time of asking - this was true last season, with Norwich being promoted as champions and Watford going up in second place. Only third-placed Brentford bucked the trend by returning to the top flight for the first time since 1947 (via the playoffs). On the downside, Sunderland's ongoing struggle to exit League One (ended in the playoffs last season by... Lincoln City) is an example of how quickly catastrophic, headless financial planning can see you plummet from the top flight to relative obscurity.

If you can't call on parachute payments, what is the best financial strategy to succeed? That depends on if you're dead set on reaching the promised land of losing every week to Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United, or if you just want your club to be an important part of the community. Luton Town's chief executive Gary Sweet says his club believes in a model "where you shouldn't have to rely on the generosity or the egotistical nature of an owner to constantly plough money into the business. We operate on something called an optimum loss model. You spend as little money as possible on players to achieve your ambitions, because the more money you spend on players, the more you ultimately have to charge your supporters. We don't want to rip them off. The opposite in fact. We want to give them value. But that gives us an absolute finite limit on what we spend on our players. It's a really simple model."

Sweet points out that besides the soccer club, "there's nothing else in Luton that connects that broad church of people, of characters, of backgrounds, of religions, of race. We are the glue of all that." The club's new stadium is being built even closer to the center of town than the current Kenilworth Road, because "you glue the hub, not the edge of the spindles." Contrast that with nearby Reading FC, who announced operating losses of of £43.5 million in the 12 months to June 2020, giving them an overall deficit of £138 million. "The problem is wages," soccer finance expert Kieran Maguire tells Tassell. "The average wages Reading are paying is about eighteen grand a week. If you spread that across the squad, immediately we find that the club is paying more than twice the amount in wages that it is generating in income."

For all that spending, Reading finished seventh - seven points shy of a playoff position, and just five places and eight points above the more frugal Luton. This is not, however, a book about soccer finance, even though economics are crucial to the league's outcome. Tassell travels up and down the country in the depressing time of lockdown, watching games in empty stadiums and talking to players, coaches, locked-out fans, administrators and to backroom staff in, say, the laundry room at Birmingham. Or to Dan Sparks, the groundsman at Ashton Gate, the home of Bristol City, who describes how tough it is watching games and seeing your carefully cultivated playing surface take the strain, "sighing at the continuing vogue for knee-sliding celebrations that gouge scars into the turf". When a player scuffs up the penalty spot after a spot-kick has been given and the ref isn't looking, Sparks laments how "he really did a job on it. We knew it wouldn't recover in a week or two. We'd have to put grass seed down and it would be a full four weeks before it was fully grassed again. We were pulling our hair out sat in the stand."

Tassell has a real knack for prompting his subjects to say something interesting about the game. Watford and former Manchester United goalkeeper Ben Foster talks about how, after the game's over, soccer "is the last thing I think about, ever. The moment I leave the football arena, whether that's training or a match, not one thought about football passes through my brain for the rest of the day. Whether we win, lose or draw, as soon as I'm on that coach - maybe even as soon as I'm in the shower - I know that game's done. There's no point in wasting any emotional energy on worrying about this or that."

Foster worries about young players who, "the second they get off the pitch and are back in the dressing room, they check their Twitter and Instagram feeds to see what people are saying about them. They'll never meet these people in their lives, but the words they say permeate these players." Millwall's forward Jed Wallace, meanwhile, is honest in describing how the season in mostly empty arenas "felt a little bit boring. As a footballer, you thrive off the atmosphere of the crowd, so even winning goals late in the game haven't felt the same this season." Wallace also notes that the quality of play was worse because of the packed, Covid-dictated schedule: "This season, everyone's got a long throw. Because everyone's so tired, teams have been concentrating on set plays. There isn't the energy required to open teams up."

It's voices like that which make this book a really engaging read from September through to May, and which should prompt the reader to take a closer and much more regular look further down the English league pyramid. Just below the over-hyped, self-styled "greatest league in the world" is one of the hardest, but also most variable and intriguing flight of 24 soccer teams - hovering between the extremes of six-time European champions Liverpool FC, and what in English soccer are commonly referred to as 'the likes of Lincoln City'.

[Felicity, I guess so]

That's a treat, imp, thanks

[Sunderporinostesta]

Seconded.

[ale]

Really fancy that book on basis of imp review.

[Giggler]

I'm currently reading This Is How It Feels by Mike Keegan, which is about Oldham's success in the late-80s/early-90s. It's really, really good. It's amazing how many of those players seeped into my consciousness from old episodes of Kick-Off on a Friday evening, with the pastel sketch titles, Elton Welsby, Clive Tyldesley, Rob McCaffrey and goals packages soundtracked by piano house from the time. I feel like I know Nick Henry, Neil Adams, Mike Milligan, Andy Ritchie, Earl Barrett, Roger Palmer, Jon Hallworth, Neil Redfearn and the rest as well as the Bury players of the era.

[sw2borshch]

I'm enjoying 'The Turning Season' by Michael Wagg that follows the clubs from the Oberliga in 1989/90 though it's not quite the book I want abour football in the DDR. It's part travelogue part history but really just focuses on the fourteen teams from that season. The author is self effacing enough to acknowledge this and pretty much says that Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger had it right in Tor! that the story is just too fantastical to ever be told properly, but tales of the scoreboard at Brandenburg and the floodlights at Erfurt are well worth the read.

This might be the book you want?

https://radiogdr.com/east-german-football/

The People's Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany by Alan
McDougall. Both of them were the books I wanted.

[danielmak]

I'm nearly finished re-reading Harry Pearson's The Far Corner. I figured I'd re-visit this since I read The Farther Corner when it came out last year and when I first read the first book, I was still learning some of the nuances of the English pyramid system. Obviously, this book is a classic, but some of the best chapters are so brilliant. I just finished the second to last where Pearson describes local old timers who support the two teams taunting one another and weaves this with a description of the detached yet committed chatter of the groundhoppers. Magnificent descriptive writing that puts a reader in the scene while also providing implicit analysis of that scene.

I'm not saying anything anyone who participates in this thread doesn't already know but figured I'd post anyway. Kind of a thoughtworm parallel to the earworm thread in the Music forum.

[ale]

Personally he captured the perfect moment in 1992/3. Documented a season which changed the way North East football initially developed at highest level. And yet still finds itself lacking any evolution in getting on for 30 years later.

[imp]

WSC has been pushing the 'Football, She Wrote' anthology, and with good reason. Here's my review at Soccer America. If you can't access it, I'll paste it on here in full in a couple of days.

[imp]

Football, She Wrote: An Anthology of Women's Writing on the Game, Foreword by Gabby Logan (Floodlit Dreams)

Lisa was in the grade below me at school, but I saw her every day during recess when we played pickup soccer on the tennis courts. I remember how she constantly brushed her long brown hair away from a face that was red with the exertion of keeping up with the boys. She was no better or worse than the rest of us, and not once did we question why she was there. Yet neither did I question why, in all the years I was at school in England during the 1970s and early 1980s, she was the only girl I ever saw play soccer.

This was only a handful of years after the English FA lifted its unconscionable ban on women playing the supposedly 'global' game. That ban must still have been in place the morning that my grandfather walked me to our local ground in my hometown of Market Rasen to watch my first ever soccer match. Remarkably, the game was between two women's teams. I've no idea who they were or where they came from, but it's telling that they played in a tiny, anonymous Lincolnshire town on a weekday morning when no one was around to watch, or inform the FA of this illegal activity. It was the last time I watched women play until I took my daughters three decades later to watch the opening game of the Women's United Soccer Association at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.

Just as it's heartening to see how far women's soccer has come since the 1970s, it's heart-breaking to think of all the lost decades when the game was banned and -- for no reason besides the thick-headed prejudice of men -- women struggled for the right to kick a ball on a stretch of open field. This wonderful collection of 20 essays captures much of that struggle against the prevalent ignorance and bigotry, while stressing that there's still much work to be done in terms of acceptance and equal opportunity.

"Evidently we need to keep pushing boundaries -- and that is exactly why this book is important," writes broadcaster Gabby Logan in the foreword. In a piece by Kate Battersby, FIFA's Chief Education and Social Responsibility Officer Joyce Cook tells her remarkable tale of overcoming disability, and concedes that, "FIFA, like all sports and society in general, were late to the table with this. We're now writing the script. Will we ever finish the job? I doubt it." (You might flinch, though, at Cook's banal reiteration of the official FIFA line that staging tournaments in countries like Qatar -- where homosexuality is banned and women are second-class citizens -- is the best way to change people's minds. That remains widely open to debate given Amnesty International's report last month that thousands of migrant workers there remain trapped and exploited by the kafala system -- a disgraceful manifestation of latter-day slavery.)

Cassie Whittell tells the story of how, age 10, she formed a five-a-side team for a school tournament, but her sports teacher wouldn't let them take part on the logistically twisted grounds that ... girls don't play soccer. Yet still she forges her way into a soccer job after a life of setbacks and discouragement. Suzanne Wrack writes how Chelsea coach Emma Hayes garnered all the positive experiences and values of growing up on a rough housing estate and "took the atmosphere of unity, diversity and togetherness into every team she has built." Molly Hudson writes movingly about how soccer "is nothing, and yet it is everything" as she reflects on losing her mother, and how her "first true women's football idol," Fran Kirby, overcame her own grief and loss as a teenager to come back to life, with the game as her driving force.

"The importance of having a safe space to play and talk about football cannot be understated," writes Katie Mishner in her piece on the spectating experience for LGBTQ+ fans. Isabelle Latifa Barker reflects on the challenges of being a female soccer reporter, and asks us to "imagine any industry where people feel the commitment to the job would be so great that they wouldn't be able to have children if they wanted them." In similar vein, Louise Taylor tells of being snubbed and ignored by established male reporters in her early years on the Newcastle United beat. Both writers, though, also laud established coaches like Bobby Robson and Sam Allardyce who bucked the trend by offering them help, encouragement and, in one incident involving Robson, a sincere and public apology for a crass, chauvinistic insult.

Christina Philippou starts a team for moms, most of whom have never kicked a ball in their lives, lamenting that, "I was never taught how to throw, how to catch or how to kick at school, or elsewhere." Her team plays for fun without the pressure to perform or having to show up every single week. "If only sports had been like this at school," she reflects, "I might have got involved in team sports years ago." Tracy Light's concluding piece, 'Inclusive Football,' relates how soccer provides her teenage son Thomas, who has Down's Syndrome, "with the building blocks for a happy and fulfilling life. It's the key to his mental and physical well-being. It allows him to be fully involved and immersed in a community who accept him without bias or exclusion."

There are almost exclusively outstanding essays in this anthology, but I especially loved Katie Whyatt's piece on being a fan and reporter at fourth-tier Bradford City. "So often, I played football as the only girl," she writes, "and operated not with a chip on my shoulder, but a constant, underlying awareness that I was, as a result, a representative of all my kind. A mistake would not be mine alone, but would mean that girls could not, and should not, play football."

That made me think of Lisa again, going in hard for every tackle on the concrete surface. Did I think back then that every mistake she made meant that girls couldn't play soccer? Not at all. But maybe that's how she felt. And all the girls besides her who dared not even try.

'Football, She Wrote' is my favorite soccer book from 2021. Here's my Top 5:

1. Football, She Wrote: An Anthology of Women's Writing on the Game, Foreword by Gabby Logan (Floodlit Dreams)
2. Sidelined: Sports, Culture and Being a Woman in America by Julie DiCaro (Dutton)
3. The Barcelona Complex by Simon Kuper (Penguin Press)
4. The Hard Yards by Nige Tassell (Simon & Schuster)
5. Referees, Match Officials and Abuse: Research and Implications for Policy by Tom Webb et al (Routledge)