28 May 2020
Best Football Books For Lockdown
Almost like the real thing.
By Philip Throp
There are a number of odd things about the title of this article.
It’s amazing, for instance, that there seems to be general agreement about which are the best football books in English (unless you have a 4-4-2 magazine of about a year ago, and NONE of the ones I discuss below are on it!!). But none of my top four are about English football. The undisputed top of the pile is not described on its author Tim Parks’ website as principally about football. So if you’re not interested in football, please read on. And if you want to read either of the best two books, you’d better be interested in Italy.
Tim Parks: A Season with Verona
Parks’ website describes A Season with Verona (2002), which seems to be generally accepted (sorry 4-4-2!) as the best book on football in English, as “a general overview of Italian life as seen through the business and passion of football”. Parks is given inside access to the Hellas Verona football club, its players, its matches, through their 2000-2001 season in the Italian First Division (Serie A). The author follows the team for that whole season and the book is punctuated by chapters relating to each game, with very intelligent revelations about Italian life, political allegiances and social issues based on Parks’ observations on things seen during that 9 months.
Hellas Verona were known as a team with a Far Right history and fans who had similar tendencies. At the time of the season which is the subject of the book, Hellas had never had a black player represent them.
The book is interesting from all sorts of points of view, the football side made exciting by the showing of the league Table at the end of the chapter after each game week. For full enjoyment as I did, don’t read any descriptions of the book before you read it, don’t read the cover,
AND DONT READ THE LAST CHAPTER TILL YOU GET THERE.
If you are not interested in football and are still with me at this point, your reward is: My recommendation of Parks’ later journey around Italy by train: Italian Ways (2013), full of very funny contemporary anecdotes, observations and explanations about Italian mores and the sheer absurdity of aspects of the Italian rail system.
Joe McGinnis: The Miracle of Castell Di Sangro
A good runner-up to Verona (actually published 3 years earlier), this is again about inside access to an Italian professional football team, this time a team in the year after they gain promotion for the first time ever to the heady heights of the Italian second division. The author (1942-2014) is best known for his bestseller about the marketing of the then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and his final book about Sarah Palin.
A warning: the author has fallen for “soccer” after watching Brazil in a World-Cup tournament; this makes him something of an expert on the American scale and a good chunk at the beginning of the book has to be tolerated as he explains to his imagined American readership that soccer is a game played with a round inflatable ball, no handling the ball etc etc. Bear the tedium or skip this section, it’s annoying.
Castell di Sangro being a smaller Italian team than Verona, McGinnis pushes his influence in it to the nth degree in applying his football “expertise”, getting himself inside the management of the team and to the personalities and lives of the players and owners, but lacks the insights about Italian life that Tim Parks brings to the party. So the book is much more an insight into the characters and lives of Italian second division footballers, some on the way up and some on the way down, than about Italy in general.
But the highly-paced climax is thrilling and compelling, considering it’s supposed to be non-fiction (McGinnis is a writer of crime fiction too).
Fully deserves its place as number two.
Charlie Connelly: Stamping Grounds (2002)
This is a shortish paperback book, and supply seems to be up and down.
No inside access here. If McGinnis’ passion for football is somewhat incongruous, then what about Englishman Charlie, who attends a match of the never-win Lichtenstein football team and develops such a passion that he resolves to follow them through their 2002 World Cup qualifiers, with Israel, Bosnia, neighbours Austria, and the mighty Spain? This is very much a fan’s-eye view from the stands, but retains an Italian connection in that the team’s prospects lie at the feet of one centre forward’s shifting loyalties when he is lured to join a league club in nearby Italy. The book has some nice picture-painting of Lichtenstein’s scenery etc which have remained in my imagination. A good number 3.
Jeff Connor: Pointless (2005)
We’re getting more personal in our choices now, and though not in England, we are at least (tenuously) in Scottish Division Three. Not “A Season with Verona”, but subtitled “A Season with Britain’s Worst Football Team (TM)”, this is about East Stirlingshire (average home attendance 200). If you think this team is based near Stirling, you are in good company, so do successive new entrants to Division Three, who were wont to arrive at Stirling and be unable to find any signs for the ground. They won’t: it’s in Falkirk! They were only one game off achieving British football’s record 27 game losing streak when they beat Elgin 2-1 in the last game of the 2003-4 season. Their games were excluded from football coupons because bookies were losing thousands on fixed odds bets against them. Their one achievable ambition: after 3 consecutive years finishing bottom of Scottish Div 3, to finish second from bottom.
Alex Ferguson was once the manager (in joke – read the book for further details). Another access-all-areas-of-the-club (except the owner) storyline, a book about character, players, managers and fans, opposing fans and players, local characters, my wife loves this one! Read the book, imagine the characters, then peruse the 16 pages of black and white photos and see them in all their… hem, hem, “glory”.
Nick Hornby: Fever Pitch
I don’t know where it stands in the popularity lists but what is thought to be the first football book in English about English football to take an intelligent view of the game, apart from the myriad biographies and “ghosted” autobiographies, is Nick Hornby’s (he of About a Boy) Fever Pitch.
Rolling back the years, I read this AFTER “Verona” even though I’ve subsequently found it was written a good ten years earlier. Fever Pitch seemed feeble, lightweight after Verona. Writing this article has made me re-read Fever Pitch to find out if I still felt the same and why.
No change, but I’m clearer. All my recommended four look OUTWARDS from the author. If they don’t tell you things about the country or region or society of the places where their teams are located (and all of them do some of these to a greater or lesser extent), they are observant of CHARACTERS other than the author. Fever Pitch looks inwards. Although its structure is governed by various and many Arsenal matches watched by Hornby over his life, these matches turn out to be pointers through the growing-up (if he ever does grow up) and life of the author.
It’s in effect his autobiography, nothing more, an explanation of HIMSELF. I feel sure he would admit to this. There are various indications outside the book which try to make it a more worthwhile book than it is, to generalise it as an analysis of the mania of “being a football fan”, but Hornby, I feel, makes no pretence to be typical. He is a definite one-off, let’s simplify and say “a loner”. It has a good and surprising ending where one particular goal in one particular match gives him a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment, and in a flash he begins to take a more mature, self-aware view of himself.
Though in many ways, to the few other characters in the book (who are only very lightly sketched in for their tiny part in the story), it seems to me that they are little changed in how THEY see HIM.
Anyway, I’m sure Nick doesn’t need my approval for his book, or his life as it’s narrated in the book up to his self-confessed coming of age at 35 in 1992. Movie producers saw enough in it to make a 1997 British film and a 2005 US equivalent. The movie scores around 3/5 in most of the reviews.
But this led to the movie About a Boy, a comedy-drama about growing up, starring Hugh Grant where a 35 year old unattached (at the beginning) rudderless man mentors a boy of 12, and finds his own personality in helping the boy to grow up. A movie which has been very successful.
So well done Nick, you don’t need my approval of your 1992 book.
But dear reader, I hope you might get some lockdown enjoyment out of the football books I HAVE recommended here.
