The Perfect 10

Richard Williams

Richard Williams is a sports writer not a football writer. This distinction is hugely significant in understanding and appreciating this book, published in 2006 and focussing on the greatest number 10s of all time.

The Perfect 10 is probably not the book for the football purist. Although clearly passionate about the game, Williams’ panoramic interest in all sports means he views football as one of many articulations of athletic skill rather than the sine qua non which many fans and writers like to think of it as. Your position on the above debate may well affect how you take to The Perfect 10. However, there’s little doubt these mini biographies of the games finest fantasistas and centre-forwards make for an enjoyable read.

Nor could it be argued these are the type of self-indulgent musings often found amongst sports writers of a certain gravitas. Williams researches his subjects well and never strays from offering a balanced judgment on their place in the game. The passages on Platini and the forgotten Francescoli of Uruguay are particularly interesting.

Moreover, Williams’ previous life as a music journalist helps him to position each of these footballing geniuses in the cultural and even political climate of their time, without ever labouring the point.

However, Williams’ skill in synthesising these trends as well as comparing football to other sports leaves one thinking that perhaps such a narrow subject topic was a waste of his considerable skills. The book’s publication, in the frenzied build up to World Cup 2006, was certainly well planned but another, broader football book might have been more appropriate though perhaps less remunerative.

Puskas on Puskas

Ferenc Puskas with Rogan Taylor

As a boy and as a football nerd, my hero was Ferenc Puskas. Although he was well into his 80s when I saw it for the first time on video, Ferenc’s drag-back for his second goal in Hungary’s 6-3 rout over England in 1953, was the most audacious piece of skill I’d ever seen.

The fact that it was performed by the most unprofessional-looking professional footballer I’d ever seen only added to the charm.

Ferenc Puskas was tubby, small, slow and arguably Europe’s finest ever football player. Born in Budapest in 1927, Puskas’ career took in not only his own extraordinary achievements - captaining Hungary to within a whisker of World Cup success in 1954, re-defining footballing tactics in the process, ending English domestic ‘invincibility’ and forming part of Real Madrid’s finest ever side - but also some of the most significant footballing and political changes in post-war Europe.

Rogan Taylor, now Director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool, has done a brilliant job of synthesising all these changes as well as allowing Puskas’s own unique charm to dominate the book.

Although all of Puskas’s life fascinates, the story of how he re-invented himself at Real Madrid having been forced to turn his back on Hungary is particularly absorbing. When the supposedly washed-up Puskas manages to muscle his way into a Real Madrid dressing room including Gento, Di Stefano and Kopa, it feels like the triumphant end to an adventure story.

The Story of the World Cup

Brian Glanville

Brian Glanville is to football writing what Stevie Wonder is to pop music. Both have enjoyed incredibly long careers at the peak of their profession and despite some aberrations as they approach senility (for Stevie’s collaboration with Blue, see Brian’s increasingly bizarre pronouncements like naming Jermaine Pennant man-of-the match in last year’s Champions League final) they remain revered and respected.

No book shows Glanville’s longevity and journalistic skill better than the Story of the World Cup, his perennially updated account of the world’s most famous competition. the book’s structure, each chapter devoted to a single tournament, suits Glanville’s laconic, old-school reporting style - particularly since, for the most part, Glanville can claim to have been present at the tournaments and matches in question.         In truth, there is a lot more than mere match reports. Glanville weaves the game’s slow-moving changes into his narrative rather than crow-barring them in as other football histories have. Moreover, he has always been a friend of the players in a way which must have turned the rest of the press corps green (Glanville helped write the autobiography of Arsenal’s Cliff Bastin when he was only 19) and the insights and anecdotes this book is filled with (one suspects, off-the-record transgressions from Glanville’s circle of football playing friends) are welcome additions.

Yet Glanville has never been merely a mouthpiece for anyone. In fact it’s his didactic writing style that makes this book so appealing. Glanville tends to view the players, officials and administrators as unruly schoolchildren whose mistakes he needs to criticize lest they happen again. Some find this unappealing but it makes a nice break from sycophantic journalists wary of losing interviews with ‘star’ players. What’s more, Glanville is sometimes hilariously dismissive - poor Mario Zagallo, Brazil’s coach in 1970, seems to Glanville’s eyes to have won the trophy in spite of his natural failings as a coach.

Glanville’s language is also pretty archaic - when we are told to be impressed for Enzo Brearzot Italy’s triumphant coach in 1982, because he was “a simple man who had routed his enemies” it feels a little like you are reading from a Latin textbook.              Still these are all parts of Glanville’s inimitable charm and it’s still definitely worth cuddling up with on the sofa during the next pre-World Cup hysteria.

Fever Pitch

Nick Hornby

To some Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, a simple story about his own fascination with football and Arsenal football club in particular, resuscitated football writing to others it was its death knell. The book’s admirers saw a beautifully lucid description of football’s power and the unexplainable control it can wield whilst others saw a hopelessly bourgeois attempt to rebrand football as a literary conceit, creating the yuppyish ‘Hornbyite’ football fans who gentrified the game in the 1990s.

Hornby’s book became an emblem of a new game in a way he never intended; less of a political football and more of a ‘footballing’ football. First its huge popularity combined with the post-Italia ‘90 boom and all-seater stadia revived interest in the national game from those who had abandoned it during the dark ages of the 1980s. Although these new fans weren’t exclusively the broadsheet-reading bourgeoisie, those who had stuck with the game through thick and thin presumed they were and lamented the game’s decline accordingly.  This petty divide usually over-simplified between north and south, rich and poor was an interesting development in fan identity but Fever Pitch deserved far better treatment.

Hornby was in fact as far away from a ‘Hornbyite’ dilettante as could be imagined. Since his youth he had been besotted with Arsenal football club and had followed them around England and Europe whenever possible during his adolescence and later life as a writer - even masochistically adding Cambridge United to his list of obsessions whilst a student.

Although the book does explore the more complex reasons behind his fanatical support, it is his brilliant ability to tell a story which makes the book so enjoyable. Hornby writes in a style which appears effortlessly simple but manages to leave indelible images in your mind, even years after reading one of his books. His account of being penned in with other Arsenal fans after a demoralising defeat to West Ham at a sodden Upton Park sticks in the memory. Having been refused permission by police to leave their terraces, the Arsenal fans sit in stony silence, rain soaking them, as one of West Ham’s groundstaff mows the grass in front of them, swearing gleefully every time he rides his lawnmower past the helpless away support - “Up, down and the finger. Up down and the finger”.

Hornby didn’t kill ‘proper’ British football as some like to argue. He was there at its lowest point and we should be grateful for the account he gave of it.

Harry’s Game

Harry Gregg

The effect of the Munich Air Crash in 1958 has been documented in almost every football publication (including this one). The tragedy of the 23  dead was insurmountable, but for some of the survivors there was a peak ten years later to counterbalance the physical and emotional low of Munich. In May 1968 Matt Busby, having been given the last rites in a Munich hospital, led his Manchester United team containing fellow survivors Bobby Charlton and Bill Foulkes to European Cup glory.

However, not all the lives affeced by Munich had second acts. Harry Gregg, United’s goalkeeper in 1958, was one such figure who didn’t get the poignant catharsis Busby and Charlton enjoyed and more than most has become synonymous with Munich.

Gregg, as becomes clear through his matter-of-fact prose style masked to some extent by his co-writer, never had literary aspirations and his tough upbringing in 1940’s Londonderry created a Calvinistic almost ascetic approach to life which doesn’t lend itself to either elation or despair - the usual pre-requisites of the sporting biography.     The reasons why this book was written were more to do with Munich than the man himself.

After escaping from the wreckage, Gregg returned to the aircraft to help rescue four players and his manager as well as a woman and her young child. Gregg was lionized as a hero and it was this myth as well as the fall-out from Munich that ‘Harry’s Game’ was primarily written to shed light on.

Gregg had hoped to let Munich be remembered but not discussed however his act of heroism kept him at the centre of his story much against his will. As various survivors and the victim’s families became embroiled in feuds with each other and also the club over compensation and recognition, Gregg abandoned his taciturn instincts to give his side of the story. Yet the prolonged furore over Munich from which Gregg had stayed away for so long has not allowed the wounds to heal. Gregg writes with such anger over the aftermath of the crash, particularly his unwanted hero-ification, that it is more uncomfortable than informative for the reader.     It is the rest of his life which is fascinating. Harry’s lonely career - on the pitch as a goalkeeper, off it as a Northern Irishman making a living in English football offers an unusual insight into football writing. Despite playing for England’s biggest post-war club and its most famous manager Gregg’s describes an intensely personal journey where he had to think of himself at all times. In a world where footballer’s biographies discuss hundreds of thousands and millions with the frequency of an economics textbook, Gregg’s egocentrism is frank and refreshing rather than greedy. After being dumped by Busby (not Gregg notes the avuncular figure he is often portrayed as) Gregg’s career is eked out not only through his own skill but his own ability to work out how to make use of his finite time at the top.     There is also the great tale of Northern Ireland’s remarkable run to the quarter finals of the World Cup in 1958 but even this is downplayed. Here, as ever, Gregg lets his actions speak for themselves.

Football Against the Enemy

Simon Kuper

Nowadays it’s difficult to imagine a world politics and football were not happy bedfellows. Britain has a Prime Minister who once considered jacking in politics to buy his beloved Raith Rovers, whilst his predecessor morphed a fleeting interest in Newcastle United into seeming fanaticism to de-gentrify his public persona. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy can often be seen running in the streets of Paris sporting a Manchester United t-shirt whilst just over a decade ago Silvio Berlusconi named his political party after a terrace chant.      It seems strange therefore that Simon Kuper’s Football Against The Enemy seemed such a novel idea on its publication in 1992. Kuper, spent nearly a year travelling the world investigating football and its usually murky connections to political institutions and interfering politicians, with only £5,000 pounds advance from his publishers to keep him going.      The result was the best footballing travelogue ever written. Kuper’s polymathic background (he speaks four languages and having been born in Kenya was educated in Britain and lived in the US) gave him the linguistic and cultural flexibility to make the most of the introductions he was given to the world’s most intense football cultures.         His tragic-comic description of Herbert Klopfleisch the diehard Hertha Berlin fan whose commute to see his beloved team required overcoming the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most successful chapter yet Kuper’s flowing style is the key to the book’s brilliance. Continents, languages and teams change but Kuper manages to keep the reader so close to his side that the book rarely confuses or over-elaborates.      Indeed, although it is the stories he tells that stick in the memory, Kuper himself is a large part of the book’s appeal.  Aged 23 at the time of writing Kuper was clearly filling out his fantasy as an intrepid footballing-explorer and as a consequence he writes with a gung-ho enthusiasm that suggests he can’t quite believe his own luck.         Now arguably Britain’s finest sports columnist in the Financial Times, Kuper remains as trenchant on the game as he was in the early 1990s though perhaps a little more sceptical.

The Ball is Round

David Goldblatt

For all the poetic bluster associated with ‘the beautiful game’, football didn’t get the sweeping, scholarly analysis of its history that it deserved until 2006 and David Goldblatt’s ‘The Ball is Round’.  The title is taken from Sepp Herberger’s  maxim that everything in the history of the game has changed except the shape of the ball and Goldblatt takes 650 pages explaining to the reader just how these changes came to pass. It is an extraordinary achievement - beginning with primordial Chinese footballesque games at the court of the Ming Emperor and ending with football’s current potentate Sepp Blatter and bleak warnings for the future of an over-televised, unbalanced football ‘product’.     In between, Goldblatt covers every single development of the game in painstaking detail. Although some may choose to skim over the less celebrated epochs of football history or the less scintillating football nations Goldblatt’s panorama of the world game is probably most strong on football cultures that have received little or no analysis. A welcome antidote to the Eurocentrism of most football writing, Goldblatt offers fascinating insights into South America, clearly a passion of his, as well as Africa and Scandinavia’s inveterate professional leagues. Persisting with this narrative up every nook and cranny is always an extremely rewarding experience.  As befits a former politics lecturer, Goldblatt is excellent on the murky nexus between power and football which becomes the central theme toward the end of the book though more in a detached scholarly style than the journalistic style employed by his fellow Brit Simon Kuper in  Football Against the Enemy. Goldblatt’s other previous incarnation as a stand-up comedian means the book never descends into textbook drudgery.     With Goldblatt’s wit and erudition combined with such an outstanding degree of analysis one can only assume that had this been a history of music or painting it would have been laden with praise and awards. Since it was about football it almost faded into obscurity but it certainly doesn’t belong there.     If you read one book about football make it this one.