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by Lutz Pfannenstiel
Vision Sports, £12.99
Reviewed by Jon Matthias
From WSC 344 October 2015

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The slogans on the cover indicate that this is more than a journeyman footballer’s lifestory. “Died on the pitch”, “Kidnapped a penguin”, “Played on six continents”, “Wrongly jailed for match-fixing”, “Lived in an igloo”, “Played against Beckham” and so on. The igloo, it turns out, is a throwaway reference about a stunt to raise awareness of climate change.

What really stands out throughout Lutz Pfannenstiel’s story is his naivety, which seems undiminished after several years. Born in Bavaria in 1973, his globetrotting career began aged 19 when he met an “agent” and flew to Malaysia for a pro contract that never materialised. Fifteen years later he is recruited for a new super-club in Armenia, but the money runs out before the season starts.

Being overly trusting led to his match-fixing conviction and five-month prison sentence in Singapore. One night he was followed home by a fan who had recognised him in a restaurant. Normal people might be suspicious of that but Pfannestiel befriended the fan, who almost inevitably worked for a betting syndicate. Pfannestiel thought they had just been chatting about football, but when the friend gets busted by the Singaporean Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau he says Pfannenstiel was supplying information. The experience of prison is not overly elaborated, but the bare details are horrible enough.

The book is reasonably well written (possibly due to the assistance of journalist Christian Putsch), but padded out by cliches and familiar facts about places he has visited. It only takes eight pages before he says you have to be mad to be a goalkeeper. The Premier League, meanwhile, is every professional’s “utopian dream”, even though Pfannenstiel was barely connected to it, barring a season without playing at Nottingham Forest. With a charming lack of self-awareness, he gives a potted history of legendary German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann’s experience in England before saying he couldn’t possibly compare himself to Trautmann. Of course, he promptly then goes on to do exactly that.

Pfannenstiel has been through trauma. His heart stopped three times after a hefty challenge in a game for Bradford Park Avenue (for whom he played 14 games in 2002-03) – he copes with it by going back to training a week later. He is less affected by his failed marriage and other relationships and there are some seedy womanising tales, including helping an English under-21 team avoid police charges of rape while on tour in Asia. His lack of awareness prevents him from realising how these stories implicate him.

Still, Pfannenstiel has plenty of interesting observations to make. He reckons at least a dozen Bundesliga players are gay; North American soccer crowds “just came to the stadium to eat” – one game in Calgary is ignored by the crowd, who are watching a Stanley Cup ice hockey game on the big screen instead. Everywhere, though, has “lovely people”, the fans are great and he’d love to go back. Recently Pfannenstiel set up Global FC, a charity highlighting the threat of climate change which he hopes will get people seriously addressing the issue. Sadly, it’s hard not to think this is his trademark naivety on display again.

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by Steven Kay
1889 Books, £8.99
Reviewed by Paul Brown
From WSC 327 May 2014

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Rabbi Howell was the first footballer of Romany origin to play for England. A slight but skilful half-back, he was a star of the excellent Sheffield United team of the 1890s, alongside the better-remembered likes of William “Fatty” Foulke and Ernest “Nudger” Needham. “A Gipsy by birth, [Howell] perhaps owes some of his inexhaustible vitality to his lucky parentage,” wrote Needham of his team-mate. That “inexhaustible vitality” won Howell the nickname the “Evergreen”. But in 1898, despite his talents, and with United on the verge of securing their first League championship, Howell was hurriedly sold to Liverpool for reasons that remain unclear.

The “Wikipedia version” of Rabbi (or Rab) Howell’s story, sourced from club history books, suggests that he was booted out of United after being accused of deliberately throwing a game against championship rivals Sunderland by scoring two own goals. Author Steven Kay has never believed this version of events, and has been unable to find any evidence of match-fixing. He has, however, uncovered suggestions of a very different kind of scandal. Kay’s research forms the basis for a novel, The Evergreen In Red And White, a fictional account of Howell’s pivotal 1897-98 season.

This is football fiction based on fact, much like David Peace’s recent Red Or Dead, albeit with fewer and further-removed sources. Nevertheless, The Evergreen feels suitably authentic, set in an evocatively realised Victorian Sheffield during football’s thriving early years. Kay’s Howell has a quirky sense of humour, extrapolated from contemporary interviews, and a voice coloured with the use of Romany and Sheffield dialects. He rubs embrocation on swollen knees and worries about his waning football career, but it’s his personal life that proves to be his downfall.

The facts, as Kay has found them, are that when Howell moved from Sheffield to Liverpool he left behind a wife and four children – one of them a new-born baby – for another woman. In the novel, Howell meets the “other woman”, Ada, in Sheffield as the city prepares for the Diamond Jubilee visit of Queen Victoria. Torn between Ada and his pregnant wife, his football performances suffer and his season becomes derailed, culminating with the climactic match at Sunderland’s hostile Newcastle Road ground, where a tormented Howell scores those two fateful own goals. “If tha don’t keep things steady in life, it affects thi game,” Needham tells Howell, who is dropped from the team and effectively exiled from his home city.

Despite the defeat at Sunderland, Sheffield United did win the Championship. Howell was a Liverpool player by then. He subsequently played for Preston North End, where his career was ended by a broken leg in 1903. He did apparently find stability in his personal life – he married Ada, and the couple had five children. We may never know the whole truth about Howell and his hurried departure from Sheffield United, but Steven Kay’s novel is so diligently researched and affectionately written that it’s easy to believe the author’s claim in his introduction that it is “as close to the truth as is possible”.

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The secret history of women’s football
by Tim Tate
John Blake, £17.99
Reviewed by Georgina Turner
From WSC 324 February 2014

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“The secret history of women’s football” seems a tall promise for those of us who are interested in the women’s game. The story of the pioneering team formed in the yard of the Dick, Kerr factory in Preston in 1917, which is the one the author highlights from the book’s start, is not a “secret” to anyone who has read Gail Newsham or Barbara Jacobs’ books on the subject. Happily, both authors are among those credited in later chapters – by which point Tim Tate’s assurance that his is a “more rounded” account of the early days has been well met.

Told in 14 short chapters, the book hops this way and that across the globe. The episodic structure allows tales of social conditions – cotton famine, for example, class friction, suffrage, world war, factory life, Spanish flu, enduring misogyny – to sit alongside and contextualise the various attempts to establish women’s football in the UK before the FA’s outright ban in 1921 made things next to impossible.

The correlation between the FA’s decision and Dick, Kerr’s landmark match at Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920 is probably one of the most well-known moments in this history. With the FA already irked at its billing as a cup final, the match attracted a crowd of 53,000, with at least 10,000 more out in the streets – at a time when some men’s league matches were struggling for double figures. It was one in the eye, all right, but the book does a good job of fleshing out the FA’s relationship with the women’s game, one that bore the brunt of the FA’s frustration at its own haplessness. Having been shown up by illegal payments and match-fixing in men’s football, the FA set its jaw at signs that the Dick, Kerr manager might be taking home more than his expenses.

There are excerpts from contemporary records and write-ups throughout the book, whose cadence (not to mention their moral outrage) transports you back in time. “The husbands – what about them!” yelps a reporter from the Westminster Gazette in 1895, as the mythical Nettie Honeyball explains that several players at the British Ladies’ Football Club are married. These curios allow the book to chart an interesting shift in press commentary, from the contemptible wagon circling ahead of BLFC’s first fixture to the generally positive coverage of Dick, Kerr’s charity matches, and sometimes thoughtful reaction to new developments. When a woman applied for a place on a referees’ course, for instance, the papers thought it a question worth pondering. Alas they soon succumbed to the briefings of men concerned about the innards of the next generation of mothers, and the FA’s refusal to accept female applicants settled in to fact.

Reading this book feels much like walking around an exhibition: Tate has curated a collection of artefacts that can be enjoyed for themselves but together offer the reader a real feel for the journey that women’s football has been on. There is considerable overuse of the phrase “would come back to haunt the sport”, but this probably says more about that journey, set back and off course by the same troubles over and again, than it does about the author. For an illustration of the suffocating habits of committees of “old farts”, look no further.

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Poverty, war and football
by Julie Ryan
CreateSpace, £9.99
Reviewed by Neil Andrews
From WSC 317 July 2013

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In and Out of the Lion’s Den is a case for why you should never judge a book by its cover. Ostensibly a biography of former Millwall striker John Shepherd, author Julia Ryan – Shepherd’s daughter – delves a bit deeper into her ancestry to explore the journey of her maternal grandparents and their flight from Franco’s Spain to England. As such, this is a very personal account of many lives rather than one, offering a vivid and at times fascinating insight into the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, as well as the life of a professional footballer in the 1950s.

The early part of Shepherd’s story is a remarkable one. Recommended to the Lions by an insurance salesman who never saw him kick a ball, he overcame polio while on National Service to score four goals on his debut away to Leyton Orient – still a post-war record. Unfortunately for Shepherd a combination of injuries and bad luck meant he never fulfilled the early promise that saw him being courted by managers such as Matt Busby. More surprising still is his behaviour off the field.

In an age where many decry modern footballers and how they bear little resemblance to their predecessors, Ryan inadvertently proves that Shepherd and his team-mates have more in common with today’s players than is often suggested. Bonuses are placed – and lost – on horses, cars are driven without a licence and FA Cup final tickets are sold on the black market. The striker also sulks and refuses to turn up for training when dropped from the first team. When left out for a second time Shepherd sells his story to a national newspaper. He is even arrested after playing stooge for a gambling ring, receiving a fine for his troubles (he escapes press attention after providing a false name to the courts). More sinisterly there is a hint of match-fixing, although it’s a shame the author fails to press the matter further.

Ryan is clearly more comfortable writing about the war in Spain and handles the atrocities of the conflict and its aftermath, particularly the concentration camps in France, delicately. Her mother’s acclimatisation to life in England as a young child is particularly touching, yet while she is prepared to tackle the awkward and unexpected reunion of her grandparents in London head on, she shies away from any scandal her father may have been involved in.

There is also a lack of attention to detail in the chapters on football. While census records, casualties of war and even the address of a toy company are recorded with impressive accuracy elsewhere, Millwall fans will be startled to discover that the Den was located in London’s East End and that Neil Harris retired in 2011, while the date the club was formed is wrong by ten years.

Such errors could have been avoided with the help of an experienced editor. However this book is still worth a read, especially for manager Charlie Hewitt’s programme notes, which are an unexpected delight. Remarks such as “when will people learn how and when to mind their own business?” prove that today’s bosses haven’t changed that much from their predecessors.

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Andrew Crawford believes that an influx of money, famous players and foreign managers could help football become China’s most popular sport

The Chinese Super League (CSL) season gets underway on March 15. Most of the country’s big clubs receive substantial funding from various wealthy business tycoons or state-owned enterprises, and several teams have recruited expensive foreign reinforcements. Shanghai Shenhua started things off last December in spectacular fashion by snapping up Chelsea’s Nicolas Anelka for £190,000 a week. Since then, Beijing Guoan have spent around £1.9 million to secure strikers Andrija Kaludjerovic and Reinaldo, while Shandong Luneng have paid a reported £830,000 for their own Brazilian forward, Gilberto Macena.

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