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FC St Pauli: Falling in 
love with a radical football club
by Nick Davidson
Sportsbooks, £8.99
Reviewed by John Van Laer
From WSC 331 September 2014

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It is often held to be one of the unwritten rules governing the life of a football fan that your allegiance, once chosen, remains unchanged. However many now feel priced out of what used to be an affordable form of popular entertainment, while any sort of supporter activism is seen by the clubs as a threat to the sanitised matchday experience. Only very few such people, however, have taken as radical a course of action as Nick Davidson, the author of the first English-language book about FC St Pauli. Once a season-ticket holder at Watford, he drifted away from Vicarage Road, attempting to rekindle the footballing flame by getting involved at his local non-League club. Sadly, the petty politics that blight local football proved equally unappealing and a lifelong interest in the game appeared to be at an end. However, chancing upon an article about St Pauli and deciding to visit the Millerntor stadium for a match in 2007 proved to be a turning point – the essence of this book is about a rediscovered love for football, coupled with the enjoyment of sharing the experience with thousands of like-minded individuals.

What could be described as just a German second division team that happen to be based in the red-light district of Hamburg in fact embodies a political viewpoint and an attitude to football’s place in society that has all but disappeared from the game in England. Over the last 30 years or so, the fan groups from St Pauli have become the most prominently left-wing supporters in German football. The politicisation of football at this working-class club started almost by chance but over time the groups such as Ultras Sankt Pauli have become an important counterpoint to the right-wing influence within some supporters’ groups at clubs such as Rostock, Dortmund and others. Of course, that is not to say that there are no other left-wing fans’ movements in the German game, but those connected with St Pauli are easily the most high-profile and active within the professional game.

Davidson tells the stories of his visits to St Pauli games across Germany in a style that betrays the increasingly partisan nature of his relationship to the club and its fans, while realising that both have their faults. These travelogues are intertwined with information about the history of the club and how the support has developed over the years. As a club St Pauli are not immune to the financial pressures of modern football, and certainly make capital from the iconic Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) emblem, but it is one of the few places where supporters still have effective influence over decisions affecting the future of their club, and are not afraid to voice their opinions. Many fans (and some players) are also actively engaged in political and social causes, both within the local St Pauli district and further afield.

It is hard not to share Davidson’s obvious enthusiasm for his team and the culture that they continue to embody, which he is actively supporting by donating all royalties from this book to the St Pauli Museum project.

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The annual WSC writers’ competition was set up for amateur writers with a legacy left by long-standing contributor David Wangerin, who died in 2012. Submissions had to be based on any aspect of last season. The winner in 2014 was Charlie Monaghan’s account of how diving has infected all levels of the game

“Oh come on! He gave me the option!” An 11-year-old’s desperate plea for a foul to be given in a game of keep-ball during training on a chilly Saturday morning. Glaring, I shake my head and make a mental note. At the end of the session I get all the boys together – the squad is strong for the relatively low level they play at and should go on to win the league – and we summarise the main points worked on this morning. I remind them of where we are meeting tomorrow for our game and what kit to bring. Before they disperse, I introduce a new team rule.

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The secret world 
of José Mourinho
by Diego Torres (translated by Pete Jenson)
Harper Sport, £12.99
Reviewed by David Stubbs
From WSC 329 July 2014

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José Mourinho is a strange, as well as a special, one. He seems quite consciously and gleefully to play up to the stereo-type of a conniving practitioner of cunning tricks and brazen gamesmanship – a living affirmation of the lower morals of the southern European sort, with decent Englishmen being advised to be on their guard and lock up their wives and daughters should he attempt to beguile them with his oily ways. He revels in obnoxiousness, in his fist-pumping touchline displays, his churlish barbs against officials and fellow colleagues. His “specialist in failure” sneer about Arsène Wenger was particularly lacking in grace. Yet, get past his poor etiquette and you have to admire the fine honing of that particular verbal dagger – the word “specialist” had a particular genius when applied to the professorial yet long-time trophyless Arsenal manager.

Behind this mischievous smokescreen of public hullabaloo, you suspect a genius is at work; a master of tactics, albeit that systematically squeeze the joy out of football as an attacking, free-flowing spectacle, as well as a certain psychological understanding of how to handle players, despite never having been one himself at the top level.

This, you would assume, is Mourinho’s secret world and the secret to his success. There’s very little of that, however, in Diego Torres’s exposé of his time as manager at Real Madrid, the period covered exclusively by this book. The author’s contempt for Mourinho bristles on every page – a Machiavellian operator more obsessed with his self-image than the club he happens to be managing at any particular time, at odds with his key players, with too close and unhealthy a relationship with the agent Jorge Mendes, over-promoting players in his fold, alienating those represented elsewhere, unsportsmanlike, disrespectful to his fellow professionals (including a sneaky poke in the eye of an opposite number during a Barcelona game) and ultimately a person with far too high an opinion of himself and his tactical skills.

The book begins with Mourinho in floods of tears when he learns that he’s been passed over for the job of Manchester United manager in favour of David Moyes. Disastrous as that decision was for United, could it be that Ferguson cannily envisaged catastrophe of a similar sort had Mourinho and his ego landed at Old Trafford, with Mendes not far behind? Maybe he had some inkling of the behind-the-scenes goings-on related in Torres’s account.

We read that Mourinho’s tactic was to turn “the control of information into a fine art” – whether to the press, with players briefed heavily on what they were to say in interviews, or to the players themselves, exploiting their fear of being marginalised in the team. However, this only served to create dressing room divisions at Real Madrid, most importantly of all with his captain Iker Casillas. Moreover, his insistence on applying his customised “high pressure triangle” formation regardless of the players he had at his disposal, who he regarded as mere “assembly line” components, frequently backfired, as in a 5-0 thrashing against Barcelona in the 2010-11 season.

There’s an element of literary licence at work; Torres recounts entire, paragraph-long dressing room tirades from the manager verbatim, filled with hysterical insults like “traitors” and “sons of bitches”, clearly fed to him by players on the receiving end of them (there is no shortage of suspects) but which no one could possibly remember word for word. For all that, and the partiality of the author, this account rings and reads true.

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The unknown story of football’s true talent spotters
by Michael Calvin
Century, £14.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 322 December 2013

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Shaun O’Connor arrived at the Potters Bar pitches to check on the progress of some under-12 players who’d shown potential, but when the referee for a neighbouring game between teams of under-9s failed to show, he volunteered to officiate. He was about to start a new job with Arsenal’s academy and one eight-year-old, playing on the wing for Luton, caught his eye.

“This kid was quick. His close control, running with the ball, was the best I’d ever seen. He had fantastic balance, and didn’t mind leaving his foot in. He had that nasty streak you need, had such a will to win.” The kid in question was Jack Wilshere, but while there’s an obvious romanticism to O’Connor’s right-place, right-time tale, it’s hardly typical of the experiences of the scouts Michael Calvin, a writer for the Independent On Sunday, focuses on in this engrossing book.

True, there are equally fortuitous stories about the discoveries of the likes of Raheem Sterling and Jack Butland, but for the most part the author paints a picture of an aspect of the football world where the hours are long and lonely, while the rewards are few. More common are the examples of scouts dragging themselves to lower-league and youth matches for little more than petrol money and a half-time sandwich, the unsung shadows of the game where talent-spotters spend as much time watching each other for leads as they do the action on the pitch.

The bottom end of the business offers little in the way of job security, Calvin finds, as changes in the higher echelons of a club can result in new brooms bringing in their own people to scour the UK and beyond for the future Wilsheres of the game. He also draws intriguing contrasts between clubs’ attitudes to scouting; whereas one unnamed old school manager has yet to embrace email, David Moyes went as far as setting up a “secret” room at Everton where sports scientists and strategists kept him updated via the internet on as many as 200 potential signings at any one time.

Calvin learns that this modern approach owes a lot to Billy Beane, the American baseball figure whose use of statistical analysis turned around the underperforming Oakland Athletics, a rags-to-riches story that became the Oscar-nominated film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Beane. Arguably, the shift towards such practices has been propelled by the influx of US owners into the English game, but television and the internet play equally significant roles, the availability of matches to be watched and rewatched meaning clubs are less reliant on the humble bloke on the terraces scribbling away in a notebook.

Ultimately, The Nowhere Men scores on two fronts: as a history of scouting and its increasingly quaint and outdated traditions, and as a pointer towards the more scientific methods that look likely to determine how most future stars are found and nurtured, as the financial investments – and potential payoffs – grow ever larger.

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The row over Tottenham fans’ use of the word yids has started a wider debate about discriminatory terminology, argues Alan Fisher

David Cameron’s intervention in the long-running dispute over the use of the Y-word at Tottenham Hotspur took everyone by surprise. No doubt with a keen eye to the debate around free speech rather than a football audience, his interview with the Jewish Chronicle nevertheless struck a chord with many Spurs fans. “There’s a difference between Spurs fans self-describing themselves as ‘yids’ and someone calling someone a ‘yid’ as an insult. You have to be motivated by hate. Hate speech should be prosecuted – but only when it’s motivated by hate.”

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