One of the classic narratives in football – indeed, in sports generally – is that of the club or team representing a hard-scrabble community or dispossessed minority overcoming the odds to win the league or cup/defeat the symbol of oppression/etc. So when Bnei Sakhnin, (“The Sons of Sakhnin”), a team from a poor Arab town in Israel which was the scene of fierce battles over land confiscation in the 1950s, won Israel’s State Cup in 2004 and thus the right to represent Israel abroad in the UEFA cup the following year, you just knew the movie and book deals were in the works. The potential for mythology made it inevitable.

Jerrod Kessel and Pierre Klochendler in fact did both the movie and the book: Goals for Galilee is simply the manuscript form of their documentary of the same name. Using the classic “follow a team for a season” format, the authors use the rhythm of a season to show the highs and lows of both the squad and its fans in the season following their State Cup triumph, when the club was both fighting to maintain its Premier League status and compete abroad in Europe. This narrative style has its pluses and minuses; on the one hand, it’s a tried and trusted format, with easy-to-follow conventions making life simpler for writers and readers alike. On the other hand, it means that the result is inevitably going to be compared to top works in the genre like Joe McGinnis’ The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro or perhaps Tim Parks’ A Season With Verona.

To answer the big question early: this ain’t no Castel Di Sangro. The authors lack a feel for writing about the football itself (though the way they handle the passion of the fans through a game is quite excellent). More importantly, their more-than-slightly idiosyncratic writing style – in what appears to be homage to the late Jose Saramago, the authors often eschew quotation marks, and encompass multiple speakers’ points of view and speaking styles in a single paragraph – is often a distraction. Fortunately for the authors, however, the subject matter is sufficiently engrossing that these problems are ultimately forgivable.

At a superficial level, the Bnei Sakhnin story is that of underdog Arabs finally winning a predominantly Jewish league; though Arabs account for roughly a fifth of the Israel’s population (and over a third of all teams in the six divisions sanctioned by the Israeli Football Association), a team from an Arab town had never before won the Cup. But although Sakhnin is an Arab town, the Bnei Sakhnin squad contains both Arabs and Jews (as well as a smattering of Europeans and Africans). And though their chairman, Mazen Ghanaim, is an Arab skilled at playing a conciliatory role with Jewish Israelis, it is their fiery Jewish manager, Eyal Lachman, who demands that the team play in uncompromising physical style to show that Jewish teams cannot push Arabs around.

Confused yet? That’s the point. Kessel and Klochendler’s big “angle” is paradox and ambiguity. 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 during the qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup, Abbas scored a blinding, vital goal against Ireland as a late-game substitute. Suddenly the Arab 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, (a fantastically dislikable club which refuses to sign Arab players) whose fans unfurled a large banner proclaiming “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.

In other words, despite Bnei Sakhnin’s potential fairy tale status, when it comes to a relegation battle their travails look pretty familiar to fans everywhere. Each team facing relegation is unhappy in exactly the same way, as it were. But having hoisted their colours to the idea that Sakhnin represents some kind of unique paradox/ambiguity trope, the authors are forced to try to wring some nobility and meaning out of the whole affair and only partially succeed in doing so.

One of the reasons their effort doesn’t quite work is that the ambiguities faced by Sakhnin aren’t quite as unique as Kessel and Klochendler make out. In fact, the paradoxes that so delight those two authors are actually shot straight through all of Arab football in Israel – a point made most elegantly by Tamir Sorek in his book Arab Soccer in a Jewish State.

Sorek begins by forcefully making the point that the most important thing to understand with respect to Arab soccer in Israel is that it is definitively not used as a form of or symbol of resistance. Forget the example of clubs like FC Barcelona, and the idea that ethnic minorities always use local football clubs as a way of showing not just ethnic pride but of resistance to the majority as well. That’s definitively not the case in Israel. Instead, in Sorek’s phrase, football in Israel is an “integrative enclave” – a space which permits integration and equal exchange between Jews and Arabs even though the society which surrounds does not. The “integrative” part of this phrase is the one which creates possibilities and hints of alternative paths of co-existence within Israel which so enthralls Kessel and Klochendler. Sorek, however, underlines the bit about it being an “enclave”, implying delicately but forcefully that these hints and possibilities aren’t going to materially affect wider Arab-Jewish relations anytime soon.

As Sorek recounts in his opening chapter, the State of Israel did not permit Arabs to have their own football clubs during the first twenty years of the state’s existence, as it was thought likely that these clubs would become political rallying points. Instead, state and quasi-state elements such as the national trade union Histadrut would set up clubs under the Hapoel name 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 “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 Betar Jerusalem virtually every squad from the fifth division up contains both Arabs and Jews. For individual Arabs such as Abbas Suan, 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.

Not all Arabs, however, 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 proselytization.

Sorek’s excellence is most in evidence during his recap of Israeli Arab soccer history, which he uses as a prelude to his examination of sports as a manifestation of modernity and the different ways in which Jews and Arabs reacted to it. Also to be applauded is the care he takes in not generalizing about Arab reactions to football. Fans, players, municipal officials and the press all have different “takes” and interests on the sport, and he is meticulous in distinguishing between them.

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, Durkheim and the like. 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 a bit mediocre, relying too much on a small sample of interviews and adding little to the overall narrative.

As a converted PhD thesis, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State 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 and dispassionate inquiry into the sociology of sport of a highly politicized minority group. Readers in search of a lighter and more engaged look at the subject will certainly prefer Goals for Galilee; despite its faults, it is certainly the more accessible of the two and provides a nice entrée both to Israeli football and Arab-Jewish relations in Israel. But for serious scholars of the game, Sorek’s book is a must.

Get your 350-050 and 642-062 dumps certifications within days using latest pass4sure77-882 and other resources of 70-663 certifications; you can get a wonderful testking F50-532 booklet.

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/08/01/goals-for-galilee-and-arab-soccer-in-a-jewish-state/feed/ 17 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/21/soccer-empire-the-world-cup-and-the-future-of-france/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/21/soccer-empire-the-world-cup-and-the-future-of-france/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:43:01 +0000 Alex Usher http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=12314 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 Laurent Dubois’ Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France as a whole can’t be considered a great book — 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, regardless of what other power relationships might exist off the pitch, “superiority” between the two is determined by sheer individual or team ability (which is precisely why Hitler tried to stop Jesse Owens competing and why the colour barrier in baseball took so long to fall). It’s partly for this reason that the agitation for racial equality has often had a sporting dimension; but it’s partly also because football clubs share with political parties the ability to 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 goes on to describe the interplay between them 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 lurking within the covers of Soccer Empire is really the weakest, and that is the history of French football, with a major emphasis on the period between 1998 and 2006. This part of the 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. Dubois shows adroitly that in fact les bleus have been accommodating players from outside metropolitan France for over seventy years. 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.

However, the closer the book comes to the present day, the less interesting it becomes. The descriptions of public reactions to both the joyous World Cup 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 Zidane’s 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 what happened on 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. Though it’s not a hanging sin, the author is noticeably less comfortable with the actual sporting facts on the ground than he is with the nuances of colonial history.

Tying these two books together is a third book, which follows Zidane and Lilian Thuram in their life journey from the cites to the historic French teams of 1996-2006. From a narrative point of view, this makes a certain amount of sense: in the Black, blanc beur squad, Zidane was the only beur and Thurman was arguably the most talented and certainly the most outspoken of the black players. 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. And both spent at least part of their childhood in the cites, Thuram in Paris and Zidane in Marseilles. Dubois can therefore use their childhoods to look at the condition of blacks and Arabs in modern France, while at the same time looking at how their sporting careers have helped to change perceptions about what constitutes Frenchness.

The problem with this last book is that it is uneven. While Thuram has gradually transcended his role as a footballer to taken on the mantle of a political figure, Zidane’s greater status as a footballing icon has never translated into a social role because he has never shown much interest in being political. 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.

But the imbalance within the third book 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 les bleus success but was also a major actor in the country’s political evolution as well. But when it comes to Zidane…well, there was that headbutt, wasn’t there? And right there, the narrative comes crashing down as Dubois gets pushed on to, as it were, his weaker foot and has to talk about the football rather than the politics.

This book is worth reading for its first couple of chapters on sport and politics and on France’s complicated colonial history and its present-day reverberations, which are undoubtedly superb. And it’s worth reading for a greater understanding of the brilliance and eloquence of Lilian Thuram (and pray the man enters electoral politics one day). The football bits, admittedly, are a weak point. But if you followed Les bleus in 1998, you know that the football was only part of the story; it was also but about the joyous, beautiful way that so many people from so many backgrounds could, briefly, transcend their differences to become united in support of a team that seemed to embody the best of a troubled country. On this vital topic, Dubois nails it. Even in a year which is crowded with football books, Soccer Empire stands out as one of the best.

---

Our self paced SK0-003 training courses and high quality 1Y0-A16 dumps provide you definite guarantee for passing the real pass4sure 70-178 exam. If you get through 642-631 exams, you will find other testking 70-536.

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/21/soccer-empire-the-world-cup-and-the-future-of-france/feed/ 18 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/06/tackling-the-absurd-ascent-of-the-manager/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/06/tackling-the-absurd-ascent-of-the-manager/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:04:39 +0000 Alex Usher http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=11722 With The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in Football, Barney Ronay has put together what should be a very interesting book on the evolution of the role of the manager in football. Well, English football anyway: Johnny Foreigner doesn’t really get a look-in unless he’s followed Arsene Wenger and washed up on England’s shores. However, because there is so much interesting material here, the monocultural perspective is disappointing, but ultimately forgivable.

Nor can one complain about the way the material has been stitched together. It’s structured in a vaguely chronological fashion, moving from the late 19th century when the earliest sideline characters appeared (having a very different demeanor and responsibilities to today’s bosses), through to the era of Jose Mourinho and company. But Ronay doesn’t let chronology shackle him; though he’s roughly moving forward in time, the real organizing principles of the book are aspects of the managerial persona, each receiving its own chapter. Thus we have chapters on Managers as Entertainers (Jimmy Hill, Terry Venables, Kevin Keegan), Managers as father figures (Matt Busby), and Managers as Scoundrels (Harry Redknapp), each of which is, in itself, organized in such a way as to see how this aspect has changed over time.

What gives the book its potential is that the author has a better-than-average sense of history, and a knack for relating sports to the zeitgeist of the times. Thus, according to Ronay, the loathing that Graham Taylor encountered as England manger wasn’t simply due to his crapness; rather it was because of the way that he and his style of play became a metaphor for the wave of national feelings of crapness and self-loathing that accompanied the arrival of John Major, the poll tax riots etc. The hysterical reaction to Hungary’s 1953 victory at Wembley needs to be seen not only in the context of the Cold War, but also in that of the early 1950s mania for UFO movies and stories – hence Bobby Robson’s comment that the Hungarian style of play was so incomprehensible that “they could have been Men from Mars”. You can take or leave these kinds of anecdotes as plausible explanations, but they do make for a more entertaining read.

So, there’s an awful lot of good stuff in this book, enough to make it a real contribution to the crowded field of football books.

There’s only one problem: the prose.

Some of you may know Barney Ronay from his occasional article in When Saturday Comes. Others may know him from the occasional article in the Guardian. But I would bet that most people, if they’ve heard of him at all, have done so through his occasional visit to the twice-weekly Football Weekly podcast, which has a large and fanatical following on both sides of the Atlantic.

Football Weekly has one host (the excellent James Richardson), and then a cast of dozens of support members who rotate in and out. The most frequent guests are La Liga guru Sid Lowe and professional curmudgeon/amateur stand-up comedian Barry Glendenning. Of the other two dozen or so irregulars, a few (Jonathan Wilson, Rafael Honigstein) are seriously insightful, but others have an unfortunate tendency to try to try to go toe-to-toe with Glendenning in aiming for the yuks. When this happens, the pod can get pretty juvenile, with guests trying to out-do each other with pop culture references and frequently dissolving into some fairly self-satisfied bouts of giggling.

I can’t specifically recall any episodes with Ronay; to me he fades into the pack of the not-especially interesting guests on the more irritating episodes. And this matters, because the prose style of The Manager resembles nothing so much as a really bad episode of Football Weekly.

First, there’s the endless and tedious pop-culture references. The fact that one of the earliest “colourful” managers, Wolves’ “Major” Frank Buckley, wore then-scandalous plus-fours instead of trousers is seen as a reasonable excuse to spend a half-page discussing the more recent appearance of plus four’s in rapper André 3000’s latest fashion collection. Similarly, Busby, Shankly and Stein get described as being “like Cream, if Eric Clapton had been joined not by some other excellent 60s musicians but by Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Liberace”. Cringe-worthy.

Then there’s the endless giggly sex bits. Ronay is not the first author to have noted the romantic aspects of the Clough-Taylor relationship, but he is, I believe, the first person to describe their mutual exploits as “manager-on-manager action”, for which he deserves a kick up the arse. Then there’s his discussion of the idea that managers are, in the mind of the fan, essentially sexless because the idea of their being in love makes them feel “like a litter of oedipally challenged children of divorce, goggling in silent revulsion as some heavy-bosomed step-mum comes shimmering into the paternal bedchamber stinking of middle-aged sex…” Besides suggesting that Ronay may have some issues with his own parents, it’s not entirely clear what the hell this passage means. But it’s indicative of a style into which he lapses all too frequently: overly-elaborate with no real point or biting edge. Like a bad Arsenal performance, in fact, only the frustration lasts considerably longer than 90 minutes.

What makes all of this perplexing is that Ronay is clearly capable of actually producing good writing. Even within this book, he occasionally manages to spend two or three chapters at a time out of the slough of sophmoricness he has dug for himself. His take on Arsenal’s Herbert Chapman and Geroge Allison are excellent and his chapters on Busby and Revie, focusing on their (arguably pathological) paternalistic desire to run their clubs as “family” are simply superb. On more modern ground, where the discussion turns to Wenger and Ferguson, who he considers the teleological apex of managerial evolution — a case more easily made for the Scot than the Frenchman — his analysis is solid though not especially unique. The arrival of Mourinho, however, sends him right back into ironic tabloid-ese, calling him a “Portuguese Man of PHWOOOAAARRR” (which is admittedly kind of funny, though the credit goes to the Daily Mail rather than to Ronay).

This book has to be marked down as a disappointment. There’s an awful lot of good material here — good enough even to shine through some of the most appalling writing I’ve seen in some time. But Ronay’s desire to seem clever simply ruins what could have been an intelligent book. Shame.

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/07/06/tackling-the-absurd-ascent-of-the-manager/feed/ 16 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/22/the-anatomy-of-england/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/22/the-anatomy-of-england/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:37:41 +0000 Alex Usher http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=11218 Jonathan Wilson is a very smart man and a very knowledgeable football writer.  He has already written two glorious football books (Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football and Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics) which will put him very high on the all-time greats 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 Kuper and Stefan Szymanski and their recent book Soccernomics (which, perhaps tellingly, was released in the UK under the altogether more vivid 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.

Now, I for one find the Kuper-Szymanski thesis a bit unsatisfying.  England’s problem isn’t that it’s punching its weight – rather obviously to my mind, the problem is that it is punching significantly below its weight and has been for decades.  Since their defeat of Argentina in Japan eight years ago, the England squad has really only played two decent games, both against Croatia (a team to which they also lost humiliatingly on two occasions).  Yet somehow, England is never short on confidence despite the fact that the team is in fact an endlessly gushing source of hubris and disaster – a sporting Deepwater Horizon, if you will.  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 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 exercises 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 it’s simply not in the same league 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.  As a result, since there’s no sustained thread that could ties these particular ten games together, what we’ve got here are essentially ten vignettes.  Extremely well-written and interesting vignettes, to be sure, but vignettes nonetheless.

This approach means is that there are large passages in the book that have almost nothing 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 great.  If you’re looking for historical clues as to why England were so shit against Algeria last week, it’s not (although there are a couple of 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; 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.  This, again, sort of makes one wonder why the book was written in the first place.

Another welcome touch in the book is 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.  Indeed, he notes that the tactics which led to the glorious win over Holland in 1996 were very nearly identical to those employed in the disastrous defeat to Norway three years earlier, but relatively small adjustments of position and personnel made all the difference.

Finally, the book provides a telling reminder of how quickly even the wisest of expert opinion can change.  Providing an acknowledged but unnecessary hostage to fortune (presumably on the advice of his publisher) Wilson concludes his book by estimating England’s chances in the present World Cup.  His summary (as of last fall when the chapter was written) was that thanks to Fabio Capello’s tactical acuity, England were going to the World Cup with the best chances of success of any England team since 1970.  Perhaps, given the disasters of the last forty years, this simply was damning with faint praise; possibly, though, it is an indication that a manager’s tactical acuity is of only limited value when presented with a team full of meatheads.`

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/06/22/the-anatomy-of-england/feed/ 9 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/05/28/book-review-the-world-is-a-ball/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/05/28/book-review-the-world-is-a-ball/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 12:57:05 +0000 Alex Usher http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=9779 I have no idea what kind of distribution The World is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer is going to get outside of Canada and Ireland, where the author, John Doyle, has some kind of following.  But if you’re in Canada, I suspect it’s going to be hard to go into a bookshop for the next two months without seeing this book prominently on display.  Being football fans, you’re going to be tempted to buy it.  So let me get the important part of this review of the way: if you do buy it, you will almost certainly be disappointed.

Who is John Doyle?  He’s a likeable enough television columnist with the Globe and Mail.  About a decade ago, when football was starting to gain some momentum as a spectator sport in Canada, he was tapped to do a little bit of football writing and given the altogether dreamy assignment of covering the first round of the Korea/Japan World Cup.  It’s not entirely clear why he was given the job; as he himself says, he’s no sports reporter.  One suspects that it’s because on a paper which was then largely clueless about the game, his Irishness seemed to give him some kind of insight into the game which the rest of Leaf Nation of Front St. lacked.

And so began Doyle’s Travels –  come every major tournament since 2002, he’s been there for at least the first round, and usually through to the quarters (at which point a real sportswriter comes and replaces him).  And he hasn’t been bad; he has a decent nose for the semi-operatic back-stories of major tournaments and unlike most North American writers he sees right through the England team’s hype to reveal it for the sad sack of crap it usually is.

But the question is: do you really want to read 375 pages of Doyle’s notebooks?

Because that’s what this book is.  It’s a re-telling – by someone who begins the damn book by admitting he’s not a sportswriter – of every international game he’s been to since 2002.  That’s about 35 games, though my eyes glazed over well before the end and I may have missed a few.  A few of these were great, but most were tedious and not worth re-living.  And even those that were memorable…well, the most distant of them was only eight years ago.  The only thing I found even vaguely surprising in here was that Emmanuel Petit was in the France 2002 squad.

It doesn’t even work as a history of major tournaments because he keeps being sent home before the finals.  Thus, in all the words about Germany 2006, we never hear about the magnificent Germany-Italy semi-final because he wasn’t there.  This isn’t a history of two World Cups and two Euros; it’s a history of John Doyle’s two World Cups and two Euros.  it’s a narcissist’s eye-view of the Tournaments

And oh, how we hear about his tournaments.  Every plane, train and taxi ride. Every surly hotelkeeper and charming bar maid.  Every half-drunken conversation with every Dutch, Swedish or Yemeni football fan across three continents.  David Winner covered this territory of football-as-tourism in his Around the World in 90 Minutes, as did Giles Goodhead in Us vs. Them.  There’s nothing about Doyle’s story that adds to this dubious genre.

The alleged payoff for all this is that Doyle can tell us about the “magic” of such events and how this shows the deeper meaning and wonderfulness of football.  Occasionally, he is genuinely insightful – most notably when discussing the Irish fans and their rendition of The Fields of Athenry.  But there’s a fair bit of dreck here, too.  He invests the travelling “armies” of fans with greater cultural meaning than they probably deserve and he can’t help but indulge in some stereotypes when it comes to certain countries.  Descriptions of Brazil never seem complete until he’s described their “glamorous” female TV correspondents or their “busty” female fans.

What he does a decent job of conveying is the way in which big football tournaments are a blast.  People from many nations get together, drink, have fun and play and watch the best football on the planet.  This is, indeed, insanely great, and he has lots of good stories and anecdotes to back this up (though, to be honest, if you’re enough of a football fan to buy this book, do you really need to be told this?).  However, when he begins to describe tournaments as events in which “the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of human nature are united”, you wonder if he hasn’t passed the line from being a profound sage to being a wanker.  Later, when he compares himself to Eduardo Galeano or muses about James Joyce’s likely response to the modern phenomenon of the “Esperanto of soccer language”, and the odds start to shift heavily in favour of the latter.

But what grates most about this book is the smugness.  Clearly, Doyle has a lovely time being at all these  tournaments on the Globe’s dime.  So good that “there is no possible way to explain and describe…these long, mad nights when there’s music in the moonlight, or those dreamy, delightful days that bracket the game” He “cannot chronicle this mad, magnificent world (he) inhabit(s), this vaudeville, this place that the gods of pleasure and play have blessed”.  Or, more concisely, as he says to another Canadian sports hack, “this is the life”.

When you get to the promised land, it’s unseemly to flaunt it.  Doyle, instead of having the grace to realize this, went out and got himself a publisher instead.

]]> http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/05/28/book-review-the-world-is-a-ball/feed/ 2 http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/05/20/book-review-soccer-passion-politics-and-the-first-world-cup-in-africa/ http://pitchinvasion.net/blog/2010/05/20/book-review-soccer-passion-politics-and-the-first-world-cup-in-africa/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 13:59:39 +0000 Alex Usher http://pitchinvasion.net/?p=9782

Ahead of the World Cup in South Africa, a spate of books on African football was to be expected.  Africa, after all, has traditionally been underserved as far as football writing goes.  Until last year, the genre could more or less be summed up in three books: Peter auf der Heyde’s Has Anybody Got a Whistle?, Filippo Ricci’s Elephants, Lions and Eagles, and a brilliant chapter by David Goldblatt in his magisterial The Ball is Round.

Of course the problem with writing about Africa is – well, it’s Africa.   It’s a big complex continent made up of over 50 countries, and in a sense it’s quite patronizing to think of it as a single entity.  But at the same time, given the chaotic and underdeveloped nature of African football it’s almost impossible to think of writing an entire book on a single country in the manner of John Foot’s Calcio or David Wangerin’s Soccer in a Football World – there simply isn’t the raw archival or video material available to do this.  So writers are reduced to trying to fit this impossibly vast continent into the framework of a single tome.

It’s a daunting task – so daunting, in fact that writers typically fall back on some pretty standard tropes when discussing African football.  There’s the nation-specific ones: (e.g. “Roger Milla’s Cameroon 1990”; “The Wasted Talent of the 1994 Super Eagles”; “Plucky Little Senegal 2002”), the financial and capacity-based ones (e.g. “why players always strike before World Cups”, “why African Nations Cups are always a shambles”), cultural ones (e.g. “there’s this thing called juju…”).  Even Ian Hawkey’s excellent Feet of the Chameleon fell prey to some of these.

Probably because he is not actually a sportswriter, Steve Bloomfield avoids the trope trap by simply eschewing any kind of history of the development of football in Africa and  describing how the sport is played and lived in some of the continent’s most dangerous countries in his new book, Africa United: Soccer, Passion, Politics and the First World Cup in Africa.  The choice of locales is a by-product of Bloomfield’s research method; unlike people who travel around specifically trying to write a book about football, Bloomfield rather obviously picked up his material while doing “other” assignments around the continent.  And since the Western media (for which he works) tends to only care about those bits of Africa that are in utter chaos or misery, his book chapters read like a check-list of Africa’s disaster zones.

So, for instance, you get some insight into the Chad-Sudan double-header held in Cairo while the two countries were skirmishing over Darfur, or the Congo-Rwanda CAN qualifier where most of the Rwanda players were actually Tutsis from Congo.  Not about the matches themselves, the players or the tactics; Bloomfield isn’t a sports writer and he doesn’t pretend to be (just as well: matches like this do not actually command much interest as spectacle).  What he’s trying to tease out is what these matches tell us about how Africa works and how Africa is changing.

Thus, we can see the progressive return of disorder and chaos in Somalia through the eyes of its national team and its current league champion Benadir Telecom (well, current since 2007, the last time a league could be played) .   We see the triumph of DR Congo’s TP Mazembe, a kind of mid-continent Chelsea, living on the generosity of a local mineral magnate and political chief who wants to see his local team make it to a World Championship and is prepared to pay near-European wages to players who come play in his remote corner of one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

Continuing the tour of the continent’s nastiest places, Bloomfield takes us to Sierra Leone and Liberia to learn about the role football is playing in national reconciliation and about the national league for the disabled for people who have been maimed by war injuries.  We learn about how football exists in the conflict-torn delta region of Nigeria, and how teams in the rest of Nigeria are occasionally encouraged to throw a game against Warri Warriors so that their fans might have something to celebrate and divert them from armed insurrection.  And we travel to Zimbabwe, where the new MDC Finance Minister Tendai Biti holds forth with some penetrating analysis of English football at the outset of the 2009-10 Premier League season (“Silvestre is crap”,  “Liverpool is crap”, etc.).

This approach naturally means that there are a few countries who are essential to African football, such as Cameroon, Morocco and Algeria, which Bloomfield unfortunately simply passes over in silence.  And the fact that his main focus is culture and politics rather than football per se means that the reader is subjected to a little too much of the “hey, all these kids in refugee camps/armed guards at Sudanese checkpoints/delightful Somali urchins are all wearing Arsenal jerseys/love David Beckham/support Chelsea” stuff than is strictly necessary.

But counter-balancing this is the frankly superb discussions of domestic football in a number of countries, including Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya.  Of all the books so far written on Africa, none has come close to the providing the depth of understanding and analysis to the economics and politics of club football as this one.

Inevitably, this book is going to be compared to Ian Hawkey’s recent book Feet of the Chameleon.  Briefly, the two books are essentially complimentary: Hawkey takes a historical approach, concentrates on the football more than the politics, and covers all the nations that matter from a football point of view.  Bloomfield, on the other hand, is relentlessly in the here and now, provides much more detail on the continent’s history and politics (surely there can be no other book on football that provides serious discussion of World bank projects).  He is also much more proficient at describing the social atmosphere around the sport and its institutions and trying to understand not what Africa means to football, but rather what football means to Africa.

There is no either/or here. Read them both. In their own different but highly complimentary ways, they are both richly rewarding.

Raphael Honigstein makes his living as a football interpreter.  Best known in the English speaking world for his columns on German football in the Guardian and participation in that newspaper’s well-known football podcast, he plays the reverse role in his home country, acting as English football correspondent for the Suddetsche Zeitung.   This dual role – explaining German football to the English and English football to the Germans – puts him in a fairly unique position among football journalists.  And it left him well placed three years ago to find a German publisher for “Higher, Better, Faster, Stronger”, a guide to English football which has just been re-issued in English as Englischer Fussball.

Now, if you’re even moderately familiar with English football, Englischer Fussball probably isn’t going to tell you very much – if anything – that you didn’t already know (the identification of Jimmy Hill as the originator of the idea for giving three pints for a win is perhaps the book’s only real surprise in this respect).   It is not a history of the sport in England, though it is competent enough in describing history as required.  Rather, it’s meant to be a kind of cultural examination of the English nation, posing the question: what does football tell us about the English national character?

This is not, of course, the first book to use football as a lens through which to spy on a local culture.  There are a dozen or more such books out there, covering places like Italy, Spain, Brazil, etc.  However, those books have all been written by Englishmen turning their gaze elsewhere.  This is the first time a foreigner has, in English at least, turned the telescope around to look at the English themselves.  True, Gianluca Vialli did take an outsider’s view of English football in The Italian Job, but he actually stayed clear of wider sociological conclusions and was in general less questioning of English football’s central myths than is Honigstein.

There is, of course, plenty of grist for the author’s mill here.  Honigstein uses the fact that the Laws of the Game initially agreed to by the FA in 1863 were adopted at a meeting held in a public house to riff on English drinking habits by observing “it had to begin down the pub”.  He puts under a microscope the English tendency to prize hard-tackling midfielders over ones with dribbling and play-making ability, and he takes apart the absurd notion that the English have an elevated sense of fair play compared to their continental counterparts.

None of this is especially problematic – the material is handled competently and his ability to make connections between various themes and concepts makes it an interesting romp.  There are times when he goes too far – Honigstein’s 4-page detour, after noting the sexuality of certain sports terminology (ie. “scoring”), covering the German love for big strong keepers as a symptom of an anal-fixated desire not to be “taken at the back” and the ludicrous idea that puritanical America will never warm to football since it consists of 22 men trying to “slip one in on each other” is completely over the top– but on the whole he covers his material competently and with humour.

Like other books of its kind, though, Englischer Fussball has trouble sticking to the point.  Only about half the chapters in the book actually remain true to the book’s premise of attempting to explain English culture through football.  There’s a good reason for that, which also applies to most other books of this nature: namely, that the football-as-sociological-lens conceit is fundamentally pretty thin and works a lot better in a book proposal than it does in an actual book.   National cultures are deeply complex local aggregates of learned behavior that grow up over centuries, while football is a 140 year-old ball game played with an identical set of rules around the world.

Will certain common learned behaviours manifest themselves on the pitch?  Yes.  Can these manifestations reliably be expected to explain much about the larger culture in which the game is played?  No, that’s absurd.  Certainly, there are local differences in the globally-regulated phenomenon known as football, but so too are there differences in McDonald’s menus around the world.  It is, for instance, interesting to note that Czech McDonald’s franchises offer fried cheese, that Japanese ones offer Teriyaki burgers, that Feta burgers can be had under the Golden Arches in Athens and that the French can order a Royale with Cheese.  But, fundamentally, so what?  Yes, there are differences – but are they really deep reflections of culture?  The inability of any author to yet convincingly hold such a case through an entire book suggests that they are not.

As a result, a large part of the book ends up being filler – a chapter on the press, a chapter on club finances and the rise of supporter-owned clubs like Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester, a chapter consisting of an interview with a slightly doddery Jimmy Hill, etc.  In it, we get a little bit of history and a little bit of sociology, most of which is handled competently but for one or two howlers that a more careful edit should really have caught, such as the description of Rushden and Diamonds as an “old” club when in fact it is the product of a 1992 merger of two Northamptonshire clubs and the back cover’s frankly baffling reference in 32-point bold type to “Mexico ‘72” as a major moment in football history.  But while it’s all amiable enough, it has nothing to do with “explaining the culture” and also contains very little that someone who follows English football more than slightly casually won’t have already heard.   One suspects that it worked better for its original German audience, for whom a larger chunk of the material would have been new.

The exception here is the book’s final chapter on the England – Germany rivalry, a subject on which Honigstein is uniquely placed to comment.  This chapter is really quite good, laying bare both the modern tabloid-manufactured nature of the English “Don’t Mention the War” attitude to the derby (prior to 1966, England-Germany games were not marked by any references to the war) and the uncomfortable fact that the Germans don’t take the rivalry anywhere near as seriously as the English because, well, England simply aren’t very good.  In perhaps the ultimate put-down, he compares the rivalry to that of England and Scotland – a rivalry, yes, but very one-sided.

In any case, the book’s specific content is perhaps less important than the fact that it was published at all. English football journalism can be waspishly and sometimes hilariously critical about English football and its culture, but this trait has never really been evident in the monograph literature. Certainly, the English are happy enough to play this game with other countries — the list of books reducing other people’s cultures to cliché through the medium of football is long.  But this is different — this is the British themselves being reduced to a set of clichés by an outsider.  Being “othered” in this way can be a jarring sensation, and presumably accounts for some of the hostile reaction the book has engendered in England, such as Rod Liddle’s bizarre review in the Times.

Englischer Fussball is thus a difficult book to encapsulate. The narrative meanders – sometimes this is a book looking to explain English football, and sometimes it is simply a litany of recent stories about wags, corruption, or what have you.  It’s also uneven in quality, sometimes reading like a collection of press clippings and sometimes, as when he outlines how the English national team became a poor parody of the German one in the 2006 World Cup  (“we’re prepared to play crap football all the way to the final”, said Ashley Cole, somewhat optimistically), demonstrating considerable astuteness.

The result is a book that the knowledgeable will often find banal but which contains flashes of brilliance that may be lost on the novice football reader.  One senses that a more thorough re-write from the German original might have been advisable and that the failure to adjust to the  different knowledge-level of the average reader has reduced what could have been a great book from an undoubtedly shrewd observer to a more pedestrian level.  Honigstein has done all right here, and he deserves commendation for attempting to force the English to see themselves as others see them, but real frustration lies in the knowledge that, like the Three Lions come every tournament, he could almost certainly have better.

Alex Usher is Pitch Invasion’s resident book reviewer

In the end I decided that if I’m going to be regaling you all with my take on football books on a regular basis, I should probably start with an overview of the state of football literature in general. After all, it’s back-to-school time, and I’m sure you’re eager to do the background reading before we begin our journey together through the coming year’s football books.

The basics

Lets start with the basics: as in every genre of sports writing, the mainstay is the biography or autobiography of the superstar player. These are normally tedious; the only ones which are vaguely of interest are the ones where the player himself is or was horribly messed-up in some way — Tony Adams’ Addicted, for instance, or Jimmy Burns’ biography of Maradona, The Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona. If anything, football lags other sports in this area: there has yet to be a player autobiography of the standard of Ken Dryden’s The Game, or that has the humour of Bill Lee’s The Wrong Stuff. This is not, in truth, entirely the fault of the publishing industry. Football doesn’t really produce many intellectuals on Dryden’s level (the only one I can think of off the top of my head would be Jorge Valdano, who does in fact write books on football, but none of them have been translated into English), and while it does have its share of “characters”, it’s hard to think of any quite as colourfully anarchic as Lee, either. Chalk it up, perhaps, to the limitations of the sporting culture than of the publication culture.

Biographies aren’t limited to players: managers and occasionally referees get a look-in, too. Again, there’s nothing here to look at, really.

After player biographies come club biographies – these, too are usually dreck. Read one on your own team, by all means. If you want more, read Phil Ball’s White Storm: The Story of Real Madrid about Real Madrid, which is probably the best of this genre and maybe Jimmy Burns’ Barca: A People’s Passion (although the latter needs to be taken with a serious dose of salt). Do yourself a favour and give the rest a miss. There simply aren’t enough teams with world-historical importance even within the limited terms of the football world. Books which look at “big derbies” aren’t much better, often reducing major clubs to outdated stereotypes (e.g. bourgeois River Plate v. proletarian Boca Juniors) in order to build up the story.

The Football Business

Football is, increasingly, a business – and there’s any number of books about how money (usually personified in the form of Sky’s owner Rupert Murdoch) is ruining football. Most are pretty uninteresting, but David Conn’s books The Football Business: Fair Game in the ’90s? (Mainstream sport) and The Beautiful Game?: Searching the Soul of Football both mix excellent financial reporting with a fierce and passionate devotion to the welfare of the fans who support the game. They’re well worth a read.

Of course, corruption isn’t just about business – it’s in the buying and selling of matches, a subject examined in Declan Hill’s recent book The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime. And there’s also a long history of serious corruption allegations at FIFA headquarters in Lausanne. A quick read of journalist Andrew Jennings’ Foul!: The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals is the best way to get a handle on this, though more academically-minded readers may prefer John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson’s books FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the Peoples’ Game and Badfellas: FIFA Family at War (Mainstream sport), or Paul Darby’s Africa, Football and FIFA: Politics, Colonialism and Resistance.

Academically minded, you say? Is there really an academic literature on football? You bet. Some of it is quite good (though since it’s priced at academic rates, it’s not the most accessible literature in the world). Most of the really good stuff is either written or edited by the University of Aberdeen’s Richard Giulianotti, and his Football: A Sociology of the Global Game is well worth the investment for the serious-minded. Also worth a look is Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini, a book adapted from author Simon Martin’s University College London PhD thesis.

Fever Pitch and Beyond

One of the problems with football literature, you’ll realize quickly, is that there is far, far too much of it about. Often, sub-genres start promisingly but then die a horrible death as someone tries to replicate the same theme for every single team in the Premiership and Football League. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, for instance, which was a well-written meditation on the relationship between sport, narrative and masculinity with Arsenal at its centre, was followed by at least thirty-odd volumes by fans writing books about their lives and how their fanatical support for (insert team here) is a metaphor for their overall condition in life. Dreck.

Another sub-genre is the “seasonal” genre. Some journalist comes up with an idea to spend a year following a particular team. Hunter Davies originally did it with Tottenham in the 1970s in his book The Glory Game: The New Edition of the British Football Classic (Mainstream Sport); the concept was updated and given a bit of a twist in the 1990s when American author Joe McGuiness spent a season at a tiny Italian club in The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy. These two books are classics and belong in everyone’s library. Tim Parks’ A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character, and…Goals! had the literary style one would expect from a novelist and is an interesting look at the culture of Italian tifosi but ultimately kind of craps out because Parks’ knowledge of football isn’t brilliant. The couple of dozen other attempts at this genre, sometimes by journalists (like Guillem Balague’s A Season on the Brink: A Portrait of RAFA Benitez’s Liverpool), but more often usually by fans trying to find a way to write off the cost of their season ticket as a business expense (e.g. The Great Divide: The Inside Story of the 1999-2000 Season at Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur by Alex Fynn and Olivia Blair). Unless you have an obsessive-bordering-on-compulsive interest in that particular club, they are not worth the paper they are printed on. And even then…

Then there’s hoolie porn: endless reams of books, usually by ex-hooligans, talking about the fights they had, how hard such-and-such a firm is, etc. Or the related genre of books about the sordid world that revolves around footballers, such as Mirror journalist Graham Johnson’s Football and Gangsters: How Organised Crime Controls the Beautiful Game. These can almost all be filed under “books that make you feel dirty when you read them”. Read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, by all means, or John Sugden’s Scum Airways: Inside Football’s Underground Economy (Mainstream Sport) (which recounts how the hooligan element came to dominate the football tourism trade and the fake replica shirt market). Other than that, steer clear.

Books about specific historical incidents are occasionally worthwhile, and there are a lot of good books about the period around World War II, including David Downing’s Passovotchka: Moscow Dynamo in Britain, 1945 (Bloomsbury Paperbacks) (the Red Army team’s 1945 tour of the UK), Andy Dougan’s Dynamo: Triumph and Tragedy in Nazi-Occupied Kiev (about a semi-mythical game in occupied Ukraine where a team from Kiev beat a German Air Force team despite severe intimidation, after which several players were executed), and of course Simon Kuper’s Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War“>Ajax, the Dutch, the War (which is about football in WWI in general but more specifically about the fate of Jewish club members once German judenrein policies came into effect in Holland in 1940).

The Global Game

Arguably, it was this same Kuper who inaugurated the modern age of football writing started arguably started in the mid-1990s with the publication of Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power. Bits of it are now dated, and some of the stuff on South America and the Ukraine are a bit dubious (the part suggesting that Dynamo Kiev was exporting fissile material in the mid-90s strains credulity), but overall it’s a fantastic read. Few have come close to equaling it – Franklin Foer’s attempt at doing so in How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization was mostly pathetic apart from a decent essay on Serbian football. But it’s nevertheless a historiographically important book because it opened up the eyes of the English reading public to the fact that football is a sociological window into the soul of other cultures.

This line of inquiry has led to a series of national histories of the game, and through it some of the best football writing around. David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, John Foot’s Calcio: A History of Italian Football, Ulrich-Hesse Lichtenberger’s Tor!: The Story of German Football, Alex Bellos’ Futebol: Soccer: The Brazilian Way, Phil Ball’s Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football, David Wangerin’s Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America’s Forgotten Game (Sporting), and Jonathan Wilson’s Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football are all excellent national/regional histories of football of Holland, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the United States and Eastern Europe, respectively.

The problem with this genre is that once someone has written about a country or an area, then it is “done” and that territory taken. And, to be blunt, we’re running out of territory. James Montague took out most of the Arab world last year in a good-in-patches-but-disappointing-overall book When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone. Ditto Russia, with Marc Bennett’s Football Dynamo: Modern Russia and the People’s Game. Steve Menary tried to outflank everyone by writing about football in non-nations – those islelets and stateless ethnic groups that make up the non-FIFA world, such as Greenland, Tibet and Gibraltar – in an engaging way in his book Outcasts!: The Lands That FIFA Forgot, even if his central premise that FIFA should chuck any considerations about national sovereignty every time some groupuscule says it wants to field a football team is only barely this side of being totally batshit. But the real problem with these geographically-centred histories of the game is that in many ways they were completely blown out of the water by the monumental and magisterial The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer by David Goldblatt. This frankly brilliant 915-page global history of football everywhere around the world has set the bar for football history so high that it’s possible no one has anything left to say.

There’s a similar problem with respect to tactics. Though historically a fringe area of football publication, you could occasionally find a half-decent book on the subject – Sky’s Andy Gray published a surprisingly good book on tactics called Flat Back Four about a decade ago. But last fall, Jonathan Wilson published Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, and it’s hard to imagine anyone ever bettering it as a description of the development of football formations. There is probably still some room for a specialist tome on the evolution of defensive tactics, but other than that Wilson’s book is it.

Rounding out the literature, of course, are the quirky books. Charlie Connelly following the Lichtenstein national team for two years of World Cup Qualification in Stamping Grounds: Exploring Liechtenstein and Its World Cup Dream; Andrew Anthony’s history of spot-kicks in On Penalties, Musa Okwonga’s take on the eleven elements of a successful footballer in A A Cultured Left Foot: The Eleven Elements of Footballing Greatness. There’s a few of these gems around, but if the title is going out of its way to scream quirky, it’s usually not worth the hassle. Paul Brown’s medley of anecdotes, published under the title Balls: Tales from Football’s Nether Regions, is one of those examples of a book that had a title long before any text was actually written.

So where next for football literature? Is there anything useful left to write in the post-Goldblatt era? Well, there’s a good deal more to be written about the economics of football. This has received some academic treatment and was touched on to a certain extent by Andrew Zimbalist and Stefan Szymanski in their comparative history of football and baseball National Pastime. Expect Szymanski to touch on this theme a bit more in his forthcoming book (already released in the UK) with Simon Kuper entitled Why England Lose: and Other Curious Phenomena Explained, which I’ll be reviewing in the next couple of months. Geographically speaking, a good treatment of African football is desperately needed – it’s been done a couple of times by Peter auf der Heyde and Filippo Maria Ricci, but neither really gets to grips with the subject in a substantive way. Mexico and Argentina could both do with something solid on their domestic games and though a couple of authors have had a run at French football, it’s still in need of a good popular treatment.

There’s definitely room for a book on how people consume football, both historically and in the electronic age – the different varieties of fandom and spectatorship. I nominate Tom for this one.

But most of all what football literature needs is some decent fiction. Apart from David Peace’s The Damned Utd, a fictionalized account of Brian Clough’s career and in particular his 44 days at the helm of Leeds United, there is remarkably little fiction of any quality at all dealing with our favourite sport. Certainly, football has yet to produce anything like the genius of WP Kinsella. With so much drama embedded in the game and the generally soap operatic nature of events off the pitch, it’s hard to believe that the sport still trails baseball in this respect. But it seems there’s no one on the horizon seeking to end this literary drought.

Over the next few months in the run up to the World Cup in South Africa, we can expect a higher-than-average stream of books about our favourite game. I’m hoping for a few gems amid the inevitable dross. But one way or another, you can find out about new football books here on Pitch Invasion, with me and my bitchy sarcasm as your faithful companions. I’m looking forward to it.

Anybody who’s ever been to China knows that this is not a country that does things by half. That’s why a Chinese bid for the 2018 World Cup, should it materialize, will be need to be taken very seriously.

A Chinese bid will fundamentally be built around the country’s three obvious strengths.

First, China – as every marketer knows – is an enormous market that football’s powers-that-be would like to make more pro-football. Right now, football is not a particularly popular sport in China. Attendances at Chinese Super League matches are often MLS-sized. Basketball (and even ping-pong) get a lot more exposure at a day-to-day level in the country and the NBA at least is making serious hay of this.

But no other sporting event engages the Chinese like the World Cup final – tens of millions of them stay up through the night to watch it. The trick for the sport of football is to convert that enthusiasm for one-off events into a more lasting passion. The experience in USA 94 shows that this can happen – given enough time.

Second, the country already has a lot of very modern stadia which will require little renovation in 2018. The country has hosted two major tournaments in the last four years (the 2004 AFC championships and the 2007 Women’s World Cup) and has a great deal of infrastructure to show for it.

Shanghai’s 80,000 seat stadium is only ten years old; Guangdong’s 80,000 seat stadium is of even more recent vintage. Qingdao, Nanking, Wuhan, Tianjin (right), Chongqing and Dalian all of have stadia that are less than ten years’ old and seat over 55,000. In Beijing, the 66,000-seat Workers Stadium may be nearly sixty years old in 2018, but it had a major facelift in 2004 for the AFC Championships in 2004 and no doubt the newly-built “Birds Nest” Olympic Stadium (below) can be pressed into service as well.

Third – and this is the important one – if there’s one thing the Beijing Olympics has already proved, it is that the Chinese government will do absolutely anything to make sure that large, prestige infrastructure projects go off well. Money? No problem. Labour? No problem. Given the infrastructure worries already dogging the run-ups to 2010 and 2014, the importance of this factor shouldn’t be underestimated. This commitment, as has been seen in the buildup to next year’s Olympics, also raises questions about human rights.

On the flip side, China doesn’t have a stellar football culture as we would understand it. When it comes to professional sports – still a relatively new concept in the People’s Republic – the Chinese are phenomenally fickle. Attendance at top flight games correlates rather sharply with the home side’s league position. The attraction is to the aura of winning rather than to the club itself. This probably won’t affect the World Cup much, but it speaks to the shallowness of the game’s roots in the country.

A more troubling issue for the country is the lack of a substantive World Cup record. Given that the host team gets a free pass to the finals, this is not an academic matter: they have to at least be able to put on a good show, and that’s not guaranteed with the squad they currently have. Indeed, in the postwar era no country has ever been awarded the World Cup without qualifying at least twice for the finals under their own steam – and China is still one short of this modest requirement.

The prevalence of local gambling syndicates will also presumable be a source of concern. Agents of these syndicates have fixed or attempted to fix games as far away as Scandinavia and England and the domestic league is still haunted by a series of refereeing scandals in 2001 known as “Black Whistle” which eroded much of the league’s credibility with fans. Given the country’s addiction to betting – all of it illegal outside of Macao – there would have to be considerable attention paid to the possibilities for outside parties to influence to flow and outcomes of games.

But these issues are comparatively minor compared to the larger geopolitical issues involved in FIFA’s decision for 2018. By then, Europe will have gone without a World Cup for a record 12 years. It may well be that the powers that be will simply decide that the game must return to its heartland. If so, China’s chances are doomed regardless of the quality of its bid.

But if the bidding is in fact open – watch out. As long as the Chinese FA learns to play politics well over the next four years and courts its CAF counterparts properly (perhaps in conjunction with Chinese companies who are making real inroads all across Africa), a potential Chinese bid has to be seen as one of the front runners.

Read more on “football, politics, the world” at the excellent Gramsci’s Kingdom, and let us know what you think about the prospect of China hosting the World Cup in the comments.

Photo credits: (1) sundaweibuaa; (2) alanadair89; (3) spiky24; (4) tao_gz2