A thread for books about football

you really should, it's as if he out-ilx'd himself in 'noel gallagher' mode iygwim

Course, dunphy egged him on too

on that note, dunphy's 'only a game' is v refreshing. Not autobiography, more a diary/snapshot of a thinking journeyman at the end of his career in a very different time, football-wise

Very fond of My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach. For sentimental reasons as much as anything.

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer - David Goldblatt

Inverting The Pyramid is the most fun i've had reading non fiction.

Is the lack of great football novels a surprising thing or not, I wonder? I do like The Damned Utd despite my reservations about Peace as a writer, but I get little sense that he loves or really understands football. I haven't read Glanville since my teens but what I remember isn't enough to make desperate to re-read him. Am intending to have a look soon tho, out of curiousity. Wd be fun to check out El Tel's They Used to Play on Grass.

I've just discovered there's a David Baddiel think piece about this in the Times Online but from the cursory scan I've given it he's got no more clue than I have. I'm not saying that a football novel even could be great but there's a lot of subjects of much less social significance that have got endless literary works devoted to them. Does the world need The Great Football Novel do you think?

Simon Kuper's tuppennorth: http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-literature-literaturematters-nov05-simonkuper.htm

Did not know that JL Carr had written a football book!

Interesting enough overview and analysis but I don't think I agree with the assumption that a great football book needs to be social(ist) realism of some form. I dunno I think there's a lot, an awful lot, you could do within the world of pro football. General rule of thumb is "whatever Nick Hornby thinks, do the opposite".

Are there any great sport novels though? Like one about cricket or baseball or aussie rules or darts or whatever?

the cricket stories that I've read of the ones that Kuper lists are pretty great, I suppose you could argue they're minor. there is a lack of great sports fiction in general I think, altho again Kuper is right that the high school sports star is a big thing in post-war American fiction. I shd probably have read Underworld at some point so I can't comment there. I'd argue that Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes is a reasonably great book that revolves around sport.

but I still think the paucity of great sports books is a little odd and a lot sad.

"full time: the secret life of tony cascarino"

enjoyed this review of some new freakonomics-style sport book in the LRB. do read if you hate freakonomics:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n13/david-runciman/swing-for-the-fences

That's a terrific article.

Currently traipsing through Anthony Clavane's Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United, which I'm finding a bit fascinating, though that might be cos it's as much about the city (where I live) as the football. Making me think I need to see/read Billy Liar and read one of them books about Revie/Revie's Leeds next. The Don seems a rather intriguing character.

that runciman piece was thoroughly enjoyable. made me think of this fave article from ages back (now with added delicious dark ironies) which turns out to have been by him as well -

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,2002869,00.html

Yeah, great. I didn't know much about Pardew - interesting that he's scouring France for value at the moment, it's most unNewcastle.

i remember those OSM pieces, loved them at the time. you can see how poor aidy boothroyd missed the point, changing the subject to malcolm fucking gladwell at the first available opportunity. a postscript, courtesy of wiki:

currently unemployed... Boothroyd is a consultant, and honourary manager, to the England Writers Football Team. He has been helping them since May 2009 when he took them for a two day training session. His work with them is on-going as they pit themselves against writers' teams from around the world.

"Take West Ham. 'I firmly believe that in the development of any team there is a tipping point,' Alan Pardew said at the beginning of 2006, citing the influence of Malcolm Gladwell" - thought I was reading some ILF parody thread for a second there, and Ian Holloway, David Moyes and Big Sam were about to out themselves as New Yorker subscribers and devotees of the lapidary prose of Nicholson Baker.

I'd love it if Andre Villas Boas uses his first press conference to troll about Paulo Coelho

Currently traipsing through Anthony Clavane's Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United

Me too. Good read.

Have now finished it, and yeah, basically great. Jacket majorly overplays how much it's about the team rather than the city, though; a lot's about the football, but it's how it ties into the city itself is marvellous. There's holes, but the scope of what he covers is kind of awesome, and it's a great thing to jump off into loads of other things from. Even people with no investment in any sense of Leeds would get something from it, I'd reckon.

Am now having a crack at The Unforgiven, Rob Bagchi and Paul Rogerson's history of the Revie regime. Thus far, much Jack Charlton dickery, which is never not fun.

The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer - David Goldblatt
--Please fetishize responsibly (Michael White)

Do we have a thread for football blogs worth reading? Someone posted a link to a good one during the world cup but the name escapes me. I'm sure many of you know it. It had a nice, slick design and a snappy name. What was it?

Run of Play?

http://www.runofplay.com/

Yep, that's it! Do you like it?

Not a devout follower but the writing generally lives up to the design imo. So yes.

What else do you read? You seem like a pretty discerning fellow

as a Football Manager junkie tho Zonal Marking is seriously my thing

http://www.zonalmarking.net/

Ismael is yr man for Run of Play tho, and probably a go-to guy for this kind of question

Oh man, I miss FM =( Once I get a steady job, I will be on it again. I haven't played in three years or more, who knows how addictive it is now

i read ilf and f365 but f365 is admittedly rubbish.

I should read runofplay more.

Are fourfourtwo online?

Anything else ppl recommend? Cos yknow i'm too productive at work/home as is

nv and a hoy hoy the fm heads iirc, tho pfunkboy gave me a few tips on the latest one iirc. Dont play it anymore so i have a girlfriend.

i guess i read a lot of the broadsheet stuff on line. i'm not too crazy about some of the more whimsical or sociological football writing but that doesn't attest to its quality, i just prefer a more focused analysis.

Yes, there needs to be more analysis. That Cannavaro thing on run of play was quite good

this makes me laugh until i get that funny feeling in my head where i worry that the heart attack's about to kick in

http://backofthenet.wikia.com/wiki/No-Nonsense_Players

Not really xps, I've had a couple of pieces up on Run Of Play myself (inc the 'Roy sacked!' piece, which I was quite proud of) but I don't have enough time to keep up with blogs. A Swiss Ramble is incredible, but you've got to be into finance really.

A hoy hoy knows his stuff iirc. Pete W's a proper writer, with any luck he'll spot this and share a bit of wisdom.

http://santapelota.blogspot.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/Santapelota

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user-comments/Roberticus

This guy hardly ever posts to his blog, but I think his twitter and comments on Guardian articles are some of the best stuff going. Emphasis on the South American game but touches on most top leagues regularly.

seriously tho, if you ask a question of ilf and include any encouragement for long answers i think you'll be well served by the likes of IK NV chris pandemic the frothing gooners and the reasonable ones like er n1ck pete w the french the usa lads obvs the scotchish contingent and the benelux boys about their respective teams/leagues before a hoy hoy and i spoil it then nakh or mattdc take us to task then ronan gets disgusted. All of ilf is there imo.

Most of the ones I read are US-centric. Of those Soccer Insider is probably the best despite its DC United slant.

heh xp, if board descriptions were at all accurate I'd be having that one

i got mad lyrics but no substance, nahmsayin? I'm on the next teen publishing ting, slept through vampires

the santapelota site boxall linked to is good iirc

Swiss Ramble (financial/business side of ting)
Run of Play (although iirc it is american so you can get confused by americano sport references)
Zonal Marking (does that great Jonathon Wilson in depth tactics thing better than any other site, and regularly. a must read imo.)
Left Back in the Changing Room (can cover cricket and does lots of scottish football, but don't let that put you off. covers anything that interests him so i can't just say 'read it if you are interested in [x]'. but i <3 reading it, for example his latest article starts:

One of my favourite Sir Alex Ferguson quotes was him decrying various football journalists questioning Veron's ability:

''He (Veron) is a fucking great player. And you're all fucking idiots''

This sums up my feelings about Alberto Aquilani. )

seriously tho, if you ask a question of ilf and include any encouragement for long answers i think you'll be well served by the likes of IK NV chris pandemic the frothing gooners and the reasonable ones like er n1ck pete w the french the usa lads obvs the scotchish contingent and the benelux boys about their respective teams/leagues before a hoy hoy and i spoil it then nakh or mattdc take us to task then ronan gets disgusted. All of ilf is there imo.

― CH3C(O)N(CH3)2 (darraghmac), Wednesday, 3 August 2011 23:12 (Yesterday)

will this fit as a new borad descrip?

Football Manager blogs and message borads are a hell not worth delving into. bookmark yrself a list of best frees to pick up when you are at a lower league club and what the achievement bubbles actually mean and leave it at that. maybe a guide to club finances if you are a rookie.

Short piece on books by insiders

Anybody read any of these? The Glory Game sounds like the business, yet I've never heard of it.

The Glory Game's a classic - does a fantastic job of taking you inside the club. Only A Game? is a brilliant book, too - Dunphy before he had assumed the role of Eamonn Dunphy. One he doesn't mention in Joe McGinniss's The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, a season with a lower division Italian club, from the perspective of someone completely new to football. That means there are surprising insights, though sometimes the blindingly obvious is treated as if its a novelty.

An unusual man, McGinniss - he was the youngest author apart from Anne Frank to top the NYT bestseller chart with The Selling of the President (1968), one of the classics of the New Journalism. He was the subject of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer after his own book about the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case saw him sued by MacDonald for concluding he was guilty. He fell hard for football in the 90s. I stayed a few nights at his home once on a holiday to the States, and he really was obsessed with football. When we arrived, he showed off his latest purhcase: a statistical history of Potteries derbies.

http://images.borders.com.au/images/bau/97814481/9781448128051/0/0/plain/garrincha.jpg

http://www.rareandrecent.com/shop_image/product/002320.jpg

Anthony Clavane's Promised Land: The Reinvention of Leeds United

I was browsing his Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here? earlier. Looks a smashing read, I'll be picking it up soon. A little disconcerting at first glance how it starts off with sketches on old players and ends with chapters on modern moneymen, but he's got to write it as it is I suppose.

I actually went in to check out Red Or Dead, David Peace's new Shankly book. It looks a real slog at first - I suspect there's a zone you can get into with it, but I also suspect I'll not be going there. It's just irritating, the "Bill Shankly put on the kettle. Bill Shankly made a cup of tea. Bill Shankly took it to the table. Bill Shankly sat down. Bill Shankly put his head in his hands. Bill Shankly wept." 'He' is an excellent word imo, Peace should give it a shot.

Started The Nowhere Men, Michael Calvin's book about scouts. It's shaping up to be something very, very special. Also flag up to oppet - there's quite a bit about Brentford's youth recruitment system, including this one dizzying passage with (I think) the club's director of football where he rattles off the questions he asks himself when analysing the kids in their system. It's really rather thrilling so far.

(it's the book where that passage about Moyes' scouting hub at Everton got quoted from on another thread, can't remember which one)

Re-flag for rtc, cos I've just got through the bit where it turns out Gary Penrice is a secret genius.

I ended up buying both Clavane books thanks to your eulogy upthread. This scouting one sounds intriguing too - 'thrilling' is quite a word to use.

I still haven't bloody read Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here? - got bought shortly after I moved last October, is now somewhere in the packing from when I moved a couple months ago. But yeah, Promised Land is a corker.

Nowhere Men is amazing just for the density it packs in. Calvin's done serious yards as a journalist (I remember when he was chief sport writer on the Telegraph nearly 20 years ago), and you can really feel the craft. He's a serious knack for fleshing out his characters and settings in just a few words, and is great at just letting the people he meets speak for themselves. His biases are never hard to guess (he prefers the old-school fellers to the stats blokes), and he can be prone to sentimentality, but it's so engrossing I can tend to put that to one side. I've recommended Family, his year in the life of Millwall, elsewhere on ILF, too. They're both worth your time.

In October 2008, Penrice joined Stoke City as a European Scout. Tony Pulis was eager to add Penrice to the Stoke scouting network to utilise his knowledge of the European transfer market.[5]

not a single european player was signed in this period

that europe that they have now

Book does deal with that, oddly. Penrice is said to have recommended them Cheick Tiote (Pulis put off after a call to Steve McClaren) and Demba Ba (the knee thing), as well as Nzonzi (three years before they went for him), Llorente, Javier Martinez and Koscielny (on a free transfer, he opted to join Lorient instead). Doesn't go into too much depth about Stoke's rejections.

Penrice seems to have carved himself out a freelance job lying somewhere between scout and agent, a sort of uber-middleman type affair. And seems to be doing alright at it. I mostly just remember his tache in the old Merlin annuals.

He's also responsible for hooking Gillingham up with Paulo Gazzaniga, which then leads to Paulo ending up with us (not a Penrice doing - Gazzaniga crops up a few times, turns out he was on the radar of quite a few people before Saints snapped him up).

bergkamps new book available on kindle for 49p

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stillness-Speed-Story-Dennis-Bergkamp-ebook/dp/B00DJWA1IM/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

idk if this is a fuckup or what but there it is

bergain

meant to be very good.

the new dunphy book sounds interesting enough too.

Thanks D

I picked up another footy-related book second-hand yesterday, Awaydays by Kevin Sampson. I had it then lost it when I was a student, and remembered it as a pretty good read, plus I saw the film recently (fine, but comically underbudgeted), so I thought I'd give it another try. First chapter rolls along nicely, good bit of colour, one or two promising characters.

Arseclenching stuff from adams

Oh god: The Anatomy of Liverpool

everyone needs to read that tony cascarino book if they havent already

Bergkamp's book is really good, so refreshing to have a footballer talk about football: favoured positions and formations, how some work for him and some don't, spaces between players and lines, how he worked on technique, etc.

You can see he is genuinely interested in how others assess his difficult period at Inter - where he was something of a pawn in a religious war between Catenaccio and Sacchi's revolution at Milan - rather than just blaming failings on poor coaching or poor relationships with players.

I had just about given up on football autobiographies with all the usual shite about contracts and booze and how they carry on the fine tradition of bullying apprentices but Bergkamp may have kept me on board for one more self-indulgent tell-all.

otm

best bits def as you describe- his on-pitch spatial reasonings broken down, and the back-and-forth nature of the inter discussion

also- blessedly short.

I got it for 49p thanks to your link upthread btw, so thank you (now £9.49).

yeah idk what went on there but

everything Jonathan Wilson does is great,though i habent had a chance to read the outsider.

The ball is round by David Goldblatt(?) is a great history of football.

I really,really want to read soccer nemesis by Brian Glanville as any excerpts of it have always piqued my interest. Another on my wishlist are dunphy's a strange kind of glory.

haven't
Is

have you

i'm banging on about it now

read only a game from dunphy?

I only really started reading football books last couple years but living in fucking hockey land it's a bit difficult to get anything that is remotely old or esoteric. might get myself a crimbo present off yon internet.

It's just irritating, the "Bill Shankly put on the kettle. Bill Shankly made a cup of tea. Bill Shankly took it to the table. Bill Shankly sat down. Bill Shankly put his head in his hands. Bill Shankly wept."
Shocked that there is this kind of repetitive writing to be found in a David Peace book.

I enjoyed Inverting the Pyramid. David Winner's Brilliant Orange and Those Feet are excellent, although Brilliant Orange is as much a book about the Dutch psyche than anything lese.

I just finished The Nowhere Men by Michael Calvin, as recommended by Swygart upthread. It's fantastic - packing in the detail, never wasting a word is right. I've read four other footy books this year - Bergkamp's, Zlatan's, The Glory Game, Dunphy's autobiography - and they're all good, but this is the best. Highly recommended.

Just finished the Zlatan book. It did nothing to change my firm belief, based on years of fitba biogs, that footballers are mostly arseholes. Ten years of annually collecting league trophies at every country he passes through and it's all agitating for transfers and head-butting team mates and carrying grudges against every cunt who dared to look at him sideways.

It's amazing how in awe of his agent he is. Everything else in life he's the big boss; but when it comes to doing a deal, he's snuggling up to daddy while the grown-ups talk.

Pirlo's book is out in paperback in English translation. Good stuff especially on free kick technique, being tapped up by Pep, torturing gattuso. The gap in behaviour between English pros and European ones not so great judging by his strict Milan training regime of arrive a training for 9am, one hour of FIFA vs Nesta, train for 2 hours then more FIFA until 4pm!

He also p much accuses Depor of doping wrt the game they overturned a 1-4 deficit to knock Milan out of the CL.

His free kick technique is based on Juninho and involves striking the ball with only the last 3 toes iirc.

Just finished Ronald Reng's Matchdays. Really enjoyed it a sort of history of the bundesliga through the playing and management career of Heinz Höher (someone I had never heard of). By the end when he's training Juri Judt by himself and encouraging him it's p sad.

About 1/3 of the way thru Michael Calvin's 'Living On The Volcano'. Between Shaun Derry,Ian Holloway and Mark Hughes there's plenty of good QPR stuff including Julio Cesar advising Derry to buy a helicopter instead of commuting for 2 hours into training. The Martin Ling stuff is scary as is the Brendon Rodgers stuff though for completely different reasons.

He sets the scene in a style worthy of a local garda novel when describing his first meeting with John Still....

"in a rain lashed Portokabin in the garden suburbs of Luton, where a black plastic dustbin asking for donations 'for Africa' contains a solitary football boot."

also chronicles an aside from Sean Dyche - these guys are going to be regarded as rock legends (on Kasabian)

Poch book is really good

revelatory stuff in the p crouch book... james mcclean puts hp sauce on the majority of his meals up to and including rice pudding!