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My autobiography
by Uwe Rösler & David Clayton
Trinity Mirror, £16.99
Reviewed by John Van Laer
From WSC 327 May 2014

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Uwe Rösler is one of the best-known German footballers to have played in England but is widely regarded in his homeland as nothing more than a journeyman striker. Somewhat injury-prone and sporadically effective at various clubs in Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rösler’s cult status among Manchester City fans remains a mystery to those whose only memory of him is for playing in East Germany’s last-ever international fixture in 1990.

His autobiography is yet to appear in German (although each chapter has a title in his native language) but is certainly not just aimed at diehard City fans. As the title suggests, much of Knocking Down Walls deals with his childhood in East Germany and the opportunities afforded by the collapse of the communist system after 1989. He seems keenly aware of the important role in his personal development played by his years in the East German sporting system. Remarkably, neither of his parents were Communist Party members but that didn’t prevent the young Rösler from being offered a prized place in the academy system at Lokomotive Leipzig, one of the biggest names in East German football. Rigid discipline and pressure to succeed became part of daily life for all trainees, in a world where seniority was defined by the canteen tokens their performance merited rather than financial rewards.

However, Rösler’s temper and unwillingness to accept gradual progression to the first team in Leipzig resulted in his first managerial bust-up and a subsequent transfer to a lower-division team. Such impulsive behaviour became something of a feature of his career, colouring his image in Germany and flaring up most publicly in his outburst at then City manager Alan Ball, who had dropped Rösler from the starting XI for a Manchester derby.

His time in England certainly never featured anything as intimidating as being interviewed by the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police), who threatened to end his footballing career if he refused to become an informant. After this experience, Rösler rarely seems to have been fazed by any negative developments, not even the aggressive tumour in his chest that ended his playing career in Norway and left him with just a five per cent chance of survival.

Since recovering from cancer, his managerial career has described a gradual ascent – first at three clubs in the Norwegian top flight before being given the chance to return to English football at Brentford, a club for which Rösler seemed to have developed a real, and reciprocated, affection. One of the quirks of footballers’ autobiographies is that they often end on phrases such as “hopefully, we can really make things happen over the next few seasons” only for the author to move on shortly after publication. This book is no exception but Rösler’s departure was not acrimonious and his genial personality and professionalism won him many friends during his tenure at Griffin Park.

Indeed, the majority of chapters about his time playing and managing in England and Norway are written with great affection for his adopted homes. While much of his early career was very different to anything experienced by young professionals in England, there are sections of the book that follow a pattern common to many footballing autobiographies: anecdotes about favourite team-mates and unpopular managers, big matches and training ground incidents. However, the historical context and Rösler’s willingness to embrace challenges give Knocking Down Walls something a little different, and it will be interesting to see where his ambition and attitude can take him.

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The David Armstrong biography
by David Armstrong 
with Pat Symes
Pitch Publishing, £17.99
Reviewed by Harry Pearson
From WSC 324 February 2014

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There was always something a little Dickensian about Middlesbrough and Southampton midfielder David Armstrong. Small, prematurely bald, slightly portly with a face that fell naturally into an expression of melancholy, he was more Oliver Twist than the 1970s footballer of popular mythology. Even his nickname Spike has a whiff of the Victorian workhouse about it.

The nickname, it transpires, was given to him by Middlesbrough team-mate Basil Stonehouse for no other reason than that Stonehouse thought someone in the squad should have it. It’s the kind of anticlimactic tale that seems to have characterised Spike’s career. A hard-working left-sided player and an excellent passer and crosser, Armstrong scored over 100 goals from midfield and was so robust at times he seemed indestructible (he made 356 consecutive appearances for Boro).

He was not a dribbler though, nor was he quick, both of which counted against him when it came to international honours – he was only capped twice by his country. Trophies too eluded him. At Ayresome Park Jack Charlton’s reluctance to spend money – faced with a choice between Trevor Francis or Alf Wood, Big Jack opts, naturally, for the latter – scotches Middlesbrough’s chances of silverware, while Southampton fall agonisingly short of a Double in 1983-84 with Armstrong playing in all 51 games.

While other footballers’ autobiographies are often brimming with bitterness or rancour, The Bald Facts is tinged with sadness and regret. Armstrong’s career ended by an ankle injury that was treated in so bungling a manner the player is barely able to stand up for several years, his finances in tatters, you come away from reading it with the impression that the midfielder feels let down, not necessarily by individuals, but by the game itself.

As is too often the case the player’s unworldliness has hardly helped his cause. You don’t need to be a genius to realise that when you are going to court for an alimony hearing driving into the car park in a brand new red Mercedes is not the best idea. That’s what Armstrong does though. The results are predictable – his wife gets the house and whacking great yearly maintenance payments. “I came out of that court and burst pathetically into tears,” Spike records. There are a lot of tears in these pages, the odd laugh too, and a rather puzzling story about dognapping and Joe Laidlaw. Ultimately though there’s a sense of promise unfulfilled and of tales half told.

I started reading The Bald Facts during the hullabaloo that followed FA chairman Greg Dyke’s comments on the number of foreign players in the Premier League weakening the national team. Armstrong, of course, played when there were very few non-British professionals in the English top flight so it is instructive to see the midfield Ron Greenwood selected for the game against West Germany in 1982. Alongside Armstrong were Alan Devonshire, Ricky Hill and Ray Wilkins. Is that the sort of line-up that would strike fear into the hearts of the current Spanish, German or Brazilian sides?

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by Sven-Göran Eriksson
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 323 January 2014

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When it comes to blockbusting autumn autobiographies this was always destined to be the Other One. Ah, Sven. Is there a more glazed, jaded and – here at least – unexpectedly fascinating major player in English football’s most recent decade of plenty? Sven-Göran Eriksson may not have Alex Ferguson’s trophy haul, planetary-scale publisher’s advance or enduring sense of heft. He may have spent the last five seasons in retreat from the years of Peak Sven, when he seemed permanently ensconced among the sober suited managerial elite, catnip to the billionaire, darling of the tabloids, golden-handshaked by assorted FAs and fossil-fuel newbie-powers.

He may have emerged at the end of it all, at least judging by Sven: My Story, as an oddly chastened and soulful one-time master of the universe, assailed not just by law suits and malevolent ex-girlfriends but by doubts, fears and regrets. But he definitely has the more interesting book, and by some distance too. In fact My Story is a genuine treat from its oddly fractured opening pages, all present tense and angsty, existential regret – “it is early December and the first snow has just arrived” – the football manager’s autobiography as reimagined by Bret Easton Ellis.

As early as page six we find Sven being swindled out of his fortune by a financial adviser and dismissing Nancy Dell’Olio with “We met in Rome during my time at Lazio. She was irresistible, then”. This is the familiar softly spoken, equivocal Sven, but fretted now with melancholy and producing after some delicately sketched lines on his childhood (“I was born into secrecy”) one of the more memorable football books of recent years.

There is a brilliant, and at times rather forgotten, managerial story in here: from the rise to precocious success at IFK Gothenburg, to glory in Portugal and Italy, to the initially giddy England years. There are plenty of laughs, many of them unintentional (as a young man Sven wrote a doctoral thesis on the 4-4-2 formation, and its unbending application in all circumstances). And there is footballing insight too, from the “revolution against individualism” of Sweden’s tactical awakening in the 1970s (sped by the young Roy Hodgson), through Sven’s dealings with Boniek, Baggio, Beckham and the rest.

Plus there is of course lots of sex. Before long we’re hearing about Sven’s first girlfriend whose father “ran a support group for people who had been caught shooting moose illegally”. Later indiscretions include the occasion Sven was discovered reclining nude on the sofa of a cuckolded husband and ended up walking home through the streets of Stockholm without his trousers, through the familiar tabloid narrative of Nancy, Ulrika Jonsson and assorted others.

Throughout it is a strangely taut and vulnerable account, with a jarring skin of honesty. This is not so much a football book as the story of a man trapped in a series of scenes, a machinery of desire and ambition that seems at times to have overwhelmed him. Towards the end, while coaching in China, Sven describes going out for a bicycle ride on his own just after reading the proofs of My Story for the first time. “I felt depressed. Where had the years gone? My children? Friends? The women? Time? It hurt to think back.”

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My autobiography
by Stevie Chalmers with Graham McColl
Headline, £19.99
Reviewed by Mark Poole
From WSC 314 April 2013

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Stevie Chalmers scored the winning goal in the 1967 European Cup final. It’s still the most important goal in Celtic’s history: the goal that liberated club football’s greatest prize from its Spanish-Italian-Portuguese stranglehold for the first time and that inspired Bill Shankly to call Jock Stein immortal.

Chalmers scored 230 other goals for Celtic – including the last hat-trick in an Old Firm derby – but his career has come to be defined solely by his tap-in (team-mate Bertie Auld’s words) against Inter in Lisbon. His autobiography does nothing to change that. The middle two chapters, one for each half of that final, are where the book comes alive and Chalmers’s detailed perspective of the match is compelling reading for Celtic fans.

There are other intriguing aspects to his life and career: he almost died from tuberculous meningitis when he was 20, he only played five times for Scotland (in spite of his clear talent and scoring against Brazil) and he had a long career at the club he supported but an uneasy relationship with its most successful manager.
His perspective on Stein is interesting but no more so than many others and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a renowned gentleman, Chalmers seems reluctant to complain directly about being overlooked or played out of position.

A lot remains unsaid, leaving readers to infer much of the story. Like many of his contemporaries, Chalmers repeatedly insists that he would always rather do what was best for the team than for himself. However, it’s clear that some managers’ and selectors’ tactics and decisions (including Stein’s) still rankle with him over 40 years later, particularly his omission from the Scotland team that beat England at Wembley in 1967.

It’s a melancholy experience to intrude upon such a successful player’s feelings of loss. Stein was a notoriously hard man to read – his players’ feelings were rarely allowed to intrude on the business of winning matches – but his choices as a manager made it clear how much he valued Chalmers. The reader is left to wonder if Chalmers realises this and also if he would seem more content now if he’d made more of a fuss back then. This glimpse into a 1960s footballer’s mind is one of the more interesting aspects of the book.

The Winning Touch could have provided more of an insight into what it was like to experience Chalmers’s terrible illness, and to recover so remarkably from it. This presence of detail but absence of insight is symptomatic of other parts of the book, perhaps evidence of the adage that consummate professionals often produce mostly pedestrian autobiographies and typical of the emotional restraint of mid-century Scotsmen.

In his playing days Chalmers made the most of the chances that came his way, so it’s surprising that parts of his autobiography seem like a missed opportunity. Although it is worth reading, at least for the insight into the day when he and ten other men from the edge of the football world shocked the game’s aristocracy.

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Although publishers are increasingly wary of handing out multi-million pound advances, footballers’ autobiographies remain as popular as ever. Joyce Woolridge looks at our seemingly insatiable interest in the life stories of Premier League stars

One morning in 1996 I opened a letter on the bus to work. I thought it was a bill, but instead it asked me if I was interested in writing what became Brian McClair’s autobiography, Odd Man Out. “The people at WSC suggested your name,” it concluded chummily, “please give us a call.” Which I did, nipping out to a phone box during a break.

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