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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Partizan pleasure, pain and paranoia
by James Moor
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Marcus Haydon
From WSC 322 December 2013

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The collapse of communist-era structures had a profound effect on football in central and eastern Europe, but the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia created even deeper fault lines. Modern-day Serbia, which was home to Europe’s best team 22 years ago, now has the continent’s 25th best (or 29th worst, depending on your perspective) league according to the UEFA coefficients. Its historic powers, Partizan and Red Star Belgrade, perpetually battle for supremacy in a competition whose numbers are topped up by minnows from the country’s provinces and capital’s suburbs.

With the competitiveness of the Yugoslav era gone, the corruption and off-field problems that blight the game seem to carry added importance. Clubs are no longer arms of the state but continue to be exploited for political and commercial reasons. On the terraces xenophobia is a persistent issue, leading to attacks founded on race or, as is more common in this part of Europe, ethnicity. For James Moor, an Arsenal fan posted in Belgrade by the Foreign Office, football presented him with a conduit through which to observe and attempt to decode Serbia’s complexities. Initially it is his way of making local friends – it is they who are responsible for his allegiance to Partizan – but it ends up taking him across the country to experience firsthand the varied ethnic tapestry and supporter culture.

The book is presented chronologically, following Partizan during a season in which they are eliminated from the Champions League qualifiers by Shamrock Rovers, lose three times to rivals Red Star, sack their management team mid-season and see their two main supporters’ groups at constant loggerheads. Oh, and they win the league. Taking his posting seriously, Moor engages quickly with the country and its language, and while his anecdotes about watching Arsenal title successes on television and a clumsy description of the “English Championship League One” can leave you suspicious of his credentials, he makes up for it in the context of his new surroundings with a strong awareness of regional history and contemporary politics. A trip to Novi Pazar, where the population has a Bosniak (Slav Muslim) majority, is carefully framed with valuable non-footballing context and his detailed translations of chants, banners and terrace conversations add cultural currency to what are otherwise just descriptions of Serbian league matches from two years ago.

Despite making a living from diplomacy, Moor manages to avoid the occupational trait of using a great number of words to say very little of note on complex or controversial issues. Equally, he is also not guilty of simply feeding the reader polemics from his terrace acquaintances without first coupling them with some objective analysis of his own. The prose can at times get drawn a little too much into the “banter” of the matchday experience – a questionably large number of things are “awesome” – but the enduring feeling is that it’s heartening to see work such as this published.

As Jonathan Wilson points out in the foreword, this is essentially “a book about the second most famous team in Belgrade” and, accordingly, both Moor and his publisher deserve great credit for bringing it to print at all. Hopefully the knowledge and insight offered in this example will inspire more publishers to show similar faith.

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The approved biography of George Best
by Duncan Hamilton
Century, £20.00
Reviewed by Robbie Meredith
From WSC 322 December 2013

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Despite what Immortal would have you believe, George Best divides opinion in his home country. For each of the tens of thousands who stood reverently in the Belfast rain for his 2005 funeral, there is a counterpart embarrassed and infuriated by the constant scandals and drunken antics. It is a mark of his status, of course, that most people in Northern Ireland still care enough to have an opinion about Best – good or bad – and it is unlikely that Duncan Hamilton’s “approved” biography will change what they think. Written with the blessing of Best’s sister Barbara, the sibling most active in guarding his memory, Immortal has few words of condemnation for even the worst of his excesses, preferring to depict chaos engulfing Best, rather than something he was primarily responsible for.

The early chapters, detailing his rise, are familiar but still thrilling. The shy, good-looking boy from Belfast, spotted by the legendary scout Bob Bishop and a surrogate son to Matt Busby, becomes the fulcrum of an outstanding Manchester United team until Europe is conquered when Best is barely 22. Even in the “el Beatle” years, he lodged in a neat terraced house with the redoubtable Mary Fullaway, and it was a home he would often return to even as things were going wrong in later years.

Yet the hour of Best’s greatest triumph, that 4-1 victory over Benfica at Wembley, is the beginning of a long, drawn-out end. Despite his iconic goal he felt he hadn’t played well in the final, a portent of disappointments to come. In the troubled aftermath the book, echoing its subject, rather loses its way. While we now know much more of the twin afflictions of alcoholism and depression, from which he undoubtedly suffered, I suspect that Hamilton makes more excuses for Best’s behaviour than Best, to his credit, 
actually did.

For, as Hamilton tells it, Best suffered primarily from feeling an excess of love, not for the booze and birds of tabloid tales, but for football and primarily Manchester United. His life does indeed come to resemble a kind of hell – in one telling passage, coachloads of visitors come to picnic in the unfenced garden of his ill-advised modernist home, Che Sera, and turn it into a spectral prison by gawping constantly through the all-encompassing glass.

Immortal becomes a long plea for understanding, and a lament that it wasn’t a quality successive Manchester United managers after Busby displayed in Best’s case. Yet although he was in the grip of twin evils, it is hard to see how Wilf McGuinness or Frank O’Farrell could have made more allowances for him, and Hamilton protests too much when he dismisses Best’s drink-driving, assaults and violence against women in little more 
than a few sentences.

Hamilton is a terrific writer but he seems more determined to be sympathetic towards his subject than Best, in his more reflective moments, was about himself. Immortal is a fine biography and a fascinating portrait of a dawning age of sporting celebrity, but will appeal most to those already inclined to view Best as the last of the doomed football romantics.

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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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