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My autobiography
by Didier Drogba
Hodder & Stoughton, £20
Reviewed by Si Hawkins
From WSC 348 February 2016

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A couple of lines late in Didier Drogba’s autobiography really drive home that this isn’t your average burly striker life story. “On November 2009 I teamed up with Bono to help launch an initiative with Nike on the eve of World Aids Day,” Drogba recalls, before rattling through his UN work, including “mobilising people to eradicate the use of cluster bombs/munitions”. Clearly we’re in a different ballpark to, say, Micky Quinn’s Who Ate All The Pies.

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The art of war
by Fran Guillen
Arena Books, £9.99
Reviewed by Dermot Corrigan
From WSC 344 October 2015

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The worst thing about this new biography of Diego Costa is the subtitle, and the faux-inspirational Sun Tzu quotes which start each chapter, giving the immediate and unfortunate feel of a popular business bestseller.

This packaging, also a feature of the original Spanish book published in 2014, is a pity. Because beneath the guff about the “warrior centre-forward” and the “what happens on the pitch stays on the pitch” posturing, this unauthorised but very well researched biography does a very good job of explaining how Costa nearly never made it only to burst onto the scene almost fully formed as a world-class centre-forward at the age of 23.

Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes enters the story early – apparently as he personally noticed the 16-year-old playing (and getting sent off) in a youth tournament in Brazil. Former Atlético Madrid sporting director Jesús García Pitarch then appears with some entertainingly open talk about how the relationship between Mendes and Atlético worked in those days, and also what he calls the “smoke and mirrors” aspect of the deals that get done.

The travails of Costa’s early career are also well described – especially the seasons on loan at Celta Vigo, Real Valladolid and Albacete – where a teenage Costa is apparently amazed to see snow for the first time. He and his team-mates enjoy late night poker games, watch pornographic movies in hotel rooms and get into rows at motor service stations. The many former team-mates and coaches who spoke to Guillen, a well-connected Marca reporter, all seemed to have been equally impressed by Costa’s ability to both score goals and get 
into scrapes.

Through these years nobody seems to have tried too hard to put into place a structure that would help the “overgrown kid” to grow up and reach his potential. At various times Mendes and Atlético tried to sell him (to Besiktas and Real Betis) in cut-price deals which fell through at the last minute. Even Diego Simeone didn’t really rate the still raw 23-year-old when they started working together in summer 2012.

A matter of months later, Costa was maybe the best centre-forward in the world, the key player as Atlético became a better team than both Real Madrid and Barcelona. His own less than convincing explanation of the transformation is that “something just clicked”. Pitarch reckons the late development was mostly down to “bad luck”, but haphazard career management by his elders seems more 
to blame.

Guillen’s telling of Costa’s more recent story, with Atlético’s successes, his switch to represent Spain at the World Cup in 2014, and his first year Chelsea, will hold few surprises for readers who follow the game day to day. You do notice, however, how even all Costa’s most recent coaches – Simeone, Vicente del Bosque and José Mourinho – have put short-term gains ahead of his long-term fitness. Even now, nobody within the game really cares what’s best for Costa himself.

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by Philip Kerr
Head of Zeus, £14.99
Reviewed by Robbie Meredith
From WSC 340 June 2015

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Despite the relatively recent success of David Peace’s The Damned United, football, given its prominent position in many people’s lives, has always been under-represented in fiction. Partly this is due to most of the extensive media coverage of the game being a form of story-telling itself, but it’s also the fact that the collision of the two worlds often feels so unsatisfactory on the page. Peace, successfully if somewhat controversially, wrote a fictional interpretation of actual people and events, but Philip Kerr decides to insert his central character and an imagined team – London City – within the existing reality of away games in Newcastle and tactical battles against Sam Allardyce.

Kerr is best known for a long, and very good, series of thrillers set in Nazi Germany, but he has a specific set of problems to tackle in using modern football as a backdrop. His flawed hero is Scott Manson, a rising coach at City, who are themselves a franchise team, a high-flying Premier League version of MK Dons. When manager Joao Zarco – a charismatic, aggressive, lyrical Portuguese – is found dead in City’s east London stadium, Manson is invited by the club’s hard-nosed Ukrainian owner both to take over the team and to investigate Zarco’s killing. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is mentioned twice in the novel, and there’s more than a hint of a Gunners fan’s – which Kerr is – fantasy in imagining such turmoil at a fictional parallel of the Chelsea of José Mourinho and  Roman Abramovich.

There are some obvious tensions in the narrative. Manson is a black, former top player with Arsenal and Southampton, whose playing career ended prematurely after he was wrongly convicted of rape. He is occasionally misogynistic, but is also educated to degree level, has a detailed knowledge of modern art, is fond of quoting Aristotle after sex and, in his fledgling coaching career, has already worked at Barcelona and under Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich. If anything, he’s too rounded a character.

This is presumably because Kerr has decided that his audience are either going to be devotees of his previous work who know little of football and view it with distaste, or fans drawn to a rare novel about their passion. As a result, there are regular, and sometimes grating, narrative digressions, especially in the first half of the book, so that Kerr can explain some facet of the game to a reader who knows little of football or its history.

Despite this, January Window just about carries it off, mainly because Kerr is such an adept plotter and because he’s on surer ground as the quest to find Zarco’s killer comes to dominate the narrative. It’s an effective thriller, with numerous potential suspects, red herrings and a seemingly insignificant detail which leads to the case being solved, while revealing little about football that a literate supporter will not already know.

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