The pain. The penalties. The hairsplitting VAR decisions and astounding off-field politics. From ageing titans to miraculous goals, the FIFA World Cup brims with drama and athleticism.
Where to turn when it’s all over? Some fine authors have explored the complexity of the beautiful game, from Albert Camus to Karl Ove Knausgaard. We asked six football tragics to nominate their favourite books about soccer.
The Faber Book of Soccer, ed Ian HamiltonThe obvious choice in light of my generation, gender and origin is Nick Hornby’s autobiographical Fever Pitch, which spawned films in Britain and the United States (the latter repurposed for baseball).
However, I favour, on grounds of greater scope and historical resonance, author-poet Ian Hamilton’s self-described “panoramic football-fest” anthology. Published in the same year as Hornby’s book (1992), it coincided with the first season of the globally game-changing English Premier League.
In his introduction, Hamilton challenges the common wisdom that “‘Thinking’ books about soccer have no market because soccer fans don’t think”. His distinctly thought-filled collection encompasses chapters by heavyweight writer-intellectuals, revered sports journalists, managers, players, fans and ANONs.
The eye-catching contributions by celebrated literary figures like Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis, George Orwell and Harold Pinter do most to unsettle the cultural snobbery surrounding soccer and popular culture in general.
The Faber Book of Soccer has all-too-apparent deficiencies, most conspicuously its total maleness and predominant Whiteness and...
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