Histories of football in different countries and regions

[delicatemoth]

I think it would be nice to have a thread collecting books that fall into this category.

Definitive

Argentina - Angels With Dirty Faces (Jonathan Wilson)

This book is the model imo. A weighty, detailed tome that delivers pretty much everything you might wish to know about the game in Argentina, with plenty of reference to the country's history and society as a whole. Surely Wilson's best work.

USA - Rock 'n' Roll Soccer (Ian Plenderleith)

This richly detailed history of NASL is unreservedly recommended. Again, I can't think of any area where I thought the author could have gone into more depth.


Good

Germany - Tor! (Uli Hesse)

A very good and readable book, though I'd have liked more detail on some of the less famous teams.


Indifferent

Spain - Morbo (Phil Ball)

This is too skimpy to stand as a history of Spanish football. Real Zaragoza, who won a European trophy, get a single mention. Ball likely was not trying to write a definitive history, he was writing about his morbo thesis, so these issues are mine not his. But this book occupies the space for 'history of Spanish football', which is unfortunate imo.

[ad hoc]

Has anyone read the Wilson one on Hungary? It;s on my to-read list, but then so are a lot of things.

[delicatemoth]

Oh, has he done one specifically on Hungary? I think I recall a 'history of football in eastern Europe' one by him which I'd put in the 'indifferent' category as it tries to cover too much in too small a space, but I'd certainly read more nation-specific ones by him.

[ad hoc]

Yes Behind the Curtain (the Eastern Europe one) is OK but necessarily thin. His specific Hungary one is called The Names Heard Long Ago

[elguapo4]

I've just started Soccer and Society in Dublin. It's academic and quite long. I'll let you know what I think.

[Flynnie]

The Hungary book is very good but suffers very slightly from an emphasis on the Danubian school, which means it’s actually quite a while before you get to the Puskas years. But the staggering influence of the Danubian school is certainly worth writing about, as is the Bela Guttman story.

[Flynnie]

David Winner’s Brilliant Winter is very good on the Netherlands. It’s been quite a long time since I read it, but I liked it.

[Flynnie]

I've just started Soccer and Society in Dublin. It's academic and quite long. I'll let you know what I think.

Green Shoots is dated now (it came out after Euro 2016) but I quite liked it as an interesting non-narrative history of Irish football from a 32-county perspective.

[Walter Knight]

It's been a while since I read Calcio by John Foot and I don't know if it's been updated since, but I remember it being quite interesting on the pre- and post-war eras in Italy which I knew less about than, say, the 80s and 90s.

[elguapo4]

Soccer in a football world is an excellent history of the game in the USA,a lot older one than most people probably realise

[Antepli Ejderha]

Welcome to Hell? In Search of the Real Turkish Football Book by John McManus is pretty good from what I've read, I'm about half way through. There's a few things that he's got wrong or didn't understand due to the language barrier but that's just me being a smart arse.

Patrick Keddie
The Passion: Football and the Story of Modern Turkey is OK, there's some decent bits but nothing that I didn't really know. Again it's me thinking it's the book I could have written.

[G-Man]

In defence of Tor, I think that Uli managed to squeeze in a lot into 340 pages. And for an overview of German football, he wove in a lot of details. That takes a lot of skill.

The problem with including lesser-known clubs into the narrative is that they have to be part of the narrative. The histories of, say, FK Pirmasens or Bayern Hof or Arminia Hannover might be very interesting, but they have really been passengers on the tram of German football history.

As somebody who is very familiar with much of German football history, I'd say that in he English-language repository of football books,Tor is definitive, in as far as no new book taking the approach of providing an overview of that history is required. Though a book on just the Bundesliga or the national team or even lower leagues would be an excellent idea.

[Furtho]

Sebastian Moffett's Japanese Rules is 20 years old now and aims more to tell the story of the establishment of the J-League, rather than being a fully-fledged history of the game in Japan, but it's very readable and interesting. I gather Sean Carroll, a long-standing member of the freelance football writer crew in Japan, has a book on the way, but I'm not exactly sure of the focus.

[Jon]

I liked the Alex Bellos book on Brazilian football although it's been over a decade since I read it. Good preparation for a trip to Brazil.

I didn't have a problem with morbo but, again, it's been a long time since I read it.

Neither of these are particularly lengthy though so I suppose one could argue that they aren't definitive histories.

[Cal Alamein]

Shep Messing can grate on many people, but in 1979 I raced through his autobiography THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN SOCCER PLAYER and reread it many times. From the heart and often funny as hell.

[imp]

I posted my review of Wilson's Hungary book on the Football Book Review thread a couple of years ago.

I enjoyed John Foot's history of Italian football, Winning at all Costs, although there was no original research in terms of latter-day interviews with still-living players, coaches etc. I'd add Winner's Brilliant Orange to the 'definitive' list.

delicatemoth - thank you.

[delicatemoth]

I didn't have a problem with morbo

Yeah, I've criticised it for not being what I'd have liked it to be and I'm gonna edit my OP again.

imp You're welcome, you should be very proud of what you achieved with that book. I need to check out your others.

[HeavyDracula]

Two I've read recently are The Turning Season by Michael Wragg, a look at the final season of the East German Oberliga before reunification and, by extension, the country's football history, and From Partition to Solidarity: The first 100 years of Polish football by Ryan Hubbard, which does what it says on the tin.

I also enjoyed many of the above and would also throw in Outcasts! The Lands That FIFA Forgot by David Menary.

Has anyone read Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina by Jonathan Wilson?

[delicatemoth]

I mention it in the OP HeavyDracula, it's great.

[sw2borshch]

For a history of the Bundesliga, you could do worse than Ronald Reng's 'Matchdays: The Hidden History of the Bundesliga' which is part history of the formation of the BL, the betting scandal, the influence of TV on German football and changes in society and part biography of the player and coach Heinz Hoehe who had pretty much his whole career in the BL era. It's obviously a German book, but there's an English translation with at least two different covers.