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edited by Jethro Soutar 
and Tim Girven
Ragpicker Press, £10
Reviewed by Nick Dorrington
From WSC 335 January 2015

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The Crónica is a Latin American literary form, somewhat akin to the output of the new journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the author involves themselves, to some degree, in the story. Written from a bold and engaging first-person viewpoint, it is a form that is the subject of a number of dedicated magazines across Latin America.

It is through the medium of the Crónica that this collection explores the football and society of a region in which a team bus is shown more deference than an ambulance in traffic, where villagers gather on a hillside to get the best possible signal for the radio broadcast of a match and where entire cities can be brought to a halt by an important fixture. These entries are supplemented by a book extract in similar style and three short stories.

The standard varies a little from piece to piece but the overall quality of both the writing and translation is to be applauded. Authors from across South America, plus two from Mexico, have been included, writing on subjects as varied as a prison team in Argentina, a Latino immigrant league in New York and a team of transvestites in Colombia. The rare missteps occur when the focus is on well-known subjects such as Alcides Ghiggia or Romário.

One of the most interesting entries is by the Peruvian writer Marco Avilés. It tells the story of the women’s football team of a high Andean village where no Spanish is spoken and the comforts of modern society are not to be found. The women travel down to the nearest developed city to take on the local team in a match that Avilés bills as a battle of ojotas (rustic flip-flops) versus trainers; ancient tradition against globalisation.

The changing face of football is masterfully described in a wry short story about an elderly man denied access to a stadium due to his failure to produce a shop loyalty card. “Purchasing power is all that matters,” a steward tells him as the man fruitlessly describes the various triumphs and defeats he has witnessed in his many years in the stands.

The best pieces in the collection are those about people who for one reason or another stand on the margins of mainstream society. We sometimes forget that football, in its most basic form, can act as a unifier for communities, or provide a platform for those whose voice is rarely heard. This theme is beautifully summarised in the final entry, a short story by Vinicius Jatobá that provides a fictionalised account of the genesis of Brazilian football and the emergence of Leônidas da Silva in the docks of Rio de Janeiro.

Laced with local patois and references to the art, food and history of the region, the book is, at times, a challenging, even daunting read. Explanatory footnotes would have been a welcome addition. Yet it is still an enlightening and ultimately rewarding excursion into the football and culture of Latin America.

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The meaning and making of English football
by David Goldblatt
Viking/Penguin, £16.99
Reviewed by Alan Tomlinson
From WSC 335 January 2015

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David Goldblatt writes with the authority of a serious academic theorist of the globalisation process, but displays a lucidity and fluency to match the best feature journalists and sport writers. In The Game Of Our Lives he draws on specialist journalism, consultancy reports, arcane academic findings, new media and personal observations to analyse how English football has both mirrored and anticipated the broader neo-liberal agenda over the last two or three decades. Citing JK Galbraith in his conclusion, Goldblatt argues that English football represents the triumph of unaccountable affluence for the few over the many whose experiences and hopes are increasingly defined by the deprivations that denies them access to the game’s new riches.

The book confirms how swiftly the Premier League seized power in the early 1990s, and how timid the FA were in defence of the traditional values of the game. There may have been reviews, commissions and discussion of the need for serious change and modernisation; but the FA never managed to act, beyond the backing of the Taylor report for reform following the Hillsborough tragedy. Yet the consequent modernisation of grounds, in significant levels publicly funded in the name of community and civic goals, was a transformative project that Rupert Murdoch must have thought was a ruse or a booby-trap. But no, here it was on the eve of transnational satellite broadcasting: a cleansed and modernised infrastructure for him to buy into and sell on worldwide. Rarely has any besieged culture handed the battering-ram to the invasive aggressor in such a naive and timid way.

Goldblatt knows the sport too, and this is far from any dry history of the economics and politics of the game. He conveys the enduring cultural appeal of football, the resonance of matchday in the face of the forces of “fragmentation and distraction” that the new mobile media bring to bear in threatening the crowd’s “unbroken engagement and shared experience”. Analyses of the culture of the game, including the lost genius of the flawed Paul Gascoigne and the global profile of the feted metrosexual David Beckham, alternate through the book with vignettes on the political and economic realities of the emerging neo-liberal agenda. He illuminates the meaning of the game in its Premier League phase, balancing an evocation of its excellence and attractions with a critique of its financing and governance, reminding us too of the collective values that originally made football possible in its modern form, and of the game’s capacity to offer models of co-operative endeavour.

In a synthesising achievement of this scale, errors will certainly have crept in, and Burnley’s former chairman Barry Kilby is presented as “benefactor… Barry Kidder”. Wigan Athletic were formed in 1932, not “the late 1970s”, which was when they replaced Southport in the League; England’s “first defeat by a foreign team at home” was not the Hungarian lesson at Wembley in 1953, but a 2-0 loss to Ireland at Goodison Park in 1949. But this is a superb study that will surely inform and sustain debate on the nature and culture of the game, and the impact of the excesses of the Premier League upon football’s rich cultural legacy.

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The story of English football’s forgotten tribe
by Anthony Clavane
Quercus, £17.99
Reviewed by Mike Ticher
From WSC 310 December 2012

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After Jack Ruby shot JFK’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald, he said he’d done it “to show the world Jews have guts”. Almost no one ran with that implausible claim, except the great Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce, who half-joked that “even the shot was Jewish – the way he held the gun”.

Anthony Clavane’s remarkable history of Jews in English football reminded me of Bruce, in that few Gentiles would think of Brian Glanville, David Pleat or David Dein as having had a “Jewish” influence on football, any more than of Ruby primarily as a Jewish assassin. That indifference, or even ignorance, is clearly a good thing if it means anti-Semitism has had little bearing on how such people have been judged (a big if, in Clavane’s view). But seeing them through a specifically Jewish lens is a fascinating and at times confronting experience.

Informed by a commanding grasp of English Jewry’s identity struggle since the great migrations, Clavane argues that football has been a key way for Jews to “become English” and be accepted. The rise of Lord Triesman and David Bernstein in the FA suggests the journey is all but complete.

Clavane’s book is packed with wonderful portraits and sharp insights into Manchester City, Leeds, Tottenham and Arsenal, among others. His research is outstanding, the complexity of his argument deftly handled and his snapshots unforgettable: the 1960s Orient directors Harry Zussman, Bernard Delfont and Leslie Grade handing players cash, tickets to the Royal Variety Performance and their own expensive clothes (defender Malcolm Lucas saved Grade’s reversible lemon/light blue cardigan “for important dos”); Manny Cussins slipping away to work in the local branch of his furniture chain on away trips with Leeds; Pleat’s Yiddish-speaking mother greeting him after every defeat with the words “So, where was the goalkeeper?”.

The author sees the Jews who have flourished in football typically as outsiders who brought “a new vision, a fresh slant” – from Willy Meisl’s 1956 polemical book Soccer Revolution, through Glanville’s groundbreaking journalism to Edward Freedman’s commercial revolution at Tottenham and Manchester United. In this light the Premier League looks startlingly like an all-Jewish production, with Irving Scholar and Dein in the lead and strong supporting roles from Alan Sugar, Alex Fynn and even, inadvertently, Lord Justice Taylor.

At times Clavane is so eager to welcome the growing influence of such “modernisers” that he disregards the wider consequences of their actions. Has the FA’s reputation improved since Jews broke open its cosy elite? Barely. Should we celebrate the influence of Robert Maxwell (mentioned only in passing) or regard the power of Roman Abramovich or Pini Zahavi as a triumph over anti-Semitism?

It’s hard to gauge how fierce that prejudice was, particularly off the field. Anti-Semitism, particularly the polite British variant, often goes unspoken and unwritten and is all the more insidious for that. Clavane often refers to unsourced “mutterings” and “references to a so-called kosher nostra” but direct evidence is sketchy.

He quotes the Burnley chairman Bob Lord, at a Variety Club function in 1974, saying: “We have to stand up against a move to get soccer on the cheap by the Jews who run television.” I’m not sure if that quite amounts to Clavane’s conclusion that “the game’s traditionalists insisted it would be a tragedy if the Football League sold out to a race that was disproportionately represented in the entertainment business”. Lord was a traditionalist in some ways but hardly a typical one – although it’s equally arguable he was the only one willing to say what others thought.

On the field anti-Semitic sentiments were much clearer, though often aimed at general targets (Tottenham above all) as much as the small number of Jewish players. Some of the best material in the book deals with the refusal to accept insults by the working-class boxing and football clan around the Lazarus family, including Barry Silkman and Orient’s Bobby Fisher. Silkman says of his relative Mark Lazarus, scorer for QPR in the 1967 League Cup final: “Lovely fella, didn’t go looking for trouble, but if someone called him a Jew they’d be horizontal.”

Clavane suggests interesting reasons for Tottenham’s association with Jews – including the quirks of London’s transport network and the inward-looking nature of the “natural” East End club, West Ham – although the claim that one-third of their fans in the 1930s were Jewish seems high. He is surely right that the carefree abuse of Tottenham as “yids” was fuelled by Warren Mitchell (grandson of Russian Jews) as Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.

There is a lot to debate here but the depth and warmth of Clavane’s work is a giant contribution to a subject long overdue proper attention.

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How the English Premier League came to dominate the world
by Mihir Bose
Marshall Cavendish Business, £14.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 311 January 2013

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Mihir Bose is an authentic journalistic heavyweight. Before becoming the BBC’s first sports editor he made his mark as Britain’s pioneer of serious sports business journalism. He has been ringside for every major sports story of the past 30 years and ranges well beyond that, with a catalogue including subjects such as Bollywood, the financial crash of 1987-88 and Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation).

So it is hard to think of anybody better qualified to attempt a definitive account of the Premier League. Sadly the attempt rather fails – maybe he knows too much. Some detail, like the reminder that Sky were forced by smaller clubs on the giants, who generally favoured ITV, is highly relevant. Much more is head-spinningly complex and some – such as what was eaten at important lunches – simply unnecessary.

It is oddly structured, with a long diversion into essays on Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. None is bad in itself, and Ferguson is vividly portrayed, but in covering such excessively well-trodden ground the narrative loses a momentum it never really regains.

It starts badly with a chapter on football in the 1980s that fails to address the fact that crowds rose steadily from their 1986 lowpoint, making it possible that the Premier League inherited, rather than created, the upturn, and mentions the 1990 World Cup only in passing. If he is to convince that football was irredeemably horrible then he needs better witnesses than Tim Lovejoy and Piers Morgan. Hearing that a teenage Piers was clocked by a pint of piss at Highbury in 1983 will make more readers cheer than wince.

That typifies a problem with sources. Bose is not an unconditional admirer of the league but he appears not to have read its most cogent critics – the bibliography cites GQ and a welter of biographies but nothing by the Guardian‘s David Conn.

He has little time for organised fans and is critical of Manchester United’s followers, while giving plenty of space to City advocates for the Glazers. Those voices are worth hearing but they’ll have to do better than arguing that “If the Glazers walk away from United tomorrow, United is a sustainable business. You haven’t got an uneconomic club like Chelsea”, entirely ignoring that “a sustainable business” is what the Glazers took over.

Similarly, quoting figures to show that Wigan’s turnover is proportionately closer to United’s than it used to be ignores that one club has risen three divisions while the other stayed where it was. Numbers purporting to prove that the Premier League is outpacing its rivals actually show La Liga and the Bundesliga keeping up in absolute terms and making ground proportionately.

Apparently written in haste, this book desperately needed a rigorous editor. There’s a decent read in here somewhere, probably around two-thirds the length plus the index which, unforgivably for a serious factual work, this lacks.

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Amateurs played a major role in professional football well into the 20th century, argues Peter Bateman

Blackburn Olympic’s FA Cup final win over the Old Etonians in 1883 is often seen as a watershed in the game’s history. The Cup was never again won by the amateur ex-public school teams who had dominated the first decade of the competition. In 1885 the FA bowed to the inevitable and sanctioned professionalism. Three years later the formation of the Football League by professional clubs from the midlands and north confirmed the exclusion of amateur clubs from the highest level of the game.

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