Excerpts from The Believer: Sports Books I Have Read or Written

A one-off, sports-issue special.

Books read:

• Football Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power—Simon Kuper
• Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—David Winner
• The Season—Helen Garner

Books written:

• Fever Pitch—me

My book Fever Pitch, a memoir about my then twenty-four-year relationship with Arsenal Football Club, came out in 1992. The relationship, to save you the trouble of counting on your fingers, is at the time of this writing about to turn fifty-seven, and it’s just as turbulent as it ever was. I’d expected it to settle down into staid middle age, but there is still a lot of volatility and swearing. There was swearing the weekend just gone, for example, and an argument with my middle son, who is very much a product of the union between me and the club, in many unhealthy ways.

Back then, in the class-ridden UK, things were very different in the world of sports publishing. There were very few ambitious books about football, and the same two or three were referred to over and over again: Pete Davies’s All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia ’90, an up-close account of England’s 1990 World Cup campaign; Arthur Hopcraft’s 1968 classic The Football Man: People and Passions in Football; and Eamon Dunphy’s Only a Game?: The Diary of a Professional Footballer, a poignant memoir about the end of a professional career. There were lots of good books about cricket, for the most part a gentleman’s sport, but publishers mostly seemed to think that football fans couldn’t read, and therefore wouldn’t even buy the bland, ghostwritten autobiographies of players and managers, so why bother aiming any higher? It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the reason the ghostwritten autobiographies didn’t sell was because they weren’t very interesting. (Fever Pitch was turned down by the publishers of All Played Out because they didn’t think lightning could strike twice: They got away with one book about football, but they didn’t think they’d be able to persuade book buyers to shell out money for another one just a couple of years later.)

I am not attempting to make any extravagant claims for Fever Pitch, its ambitions and its merits, not in public. (Insta me and I’ll make all the extravagant claims you want.) But it was successful, and it has stayed in print, and it was written by a football fan who read a lot and wasn’t afraid to say so in the book. There are references to Jane Austen, and Shakespeare, and Walter Tevis, among other people, all of whom played a part in my cultural life, and these references confused some critics. The game was dying on its feet in the 1980s, poisoned by terrifying hooliganism and the crumbling, lethally dangerous stadiums. (There were two big, fatal disasters in England, in 1985 and 1989.) How could it be that someone who attended matches throughout the decade had read a nineteenth-century novel? The reviews were nice, but nobody could resist an expression of confusion: As far as they were concerned, I was weird, an anomaly.

I wasn’t. I knew when I was writing the book that there were others like me. The burgeoning football fanzine culture of the late 1980s taught me that there were other people on the terraces with a sense of irony, broad cultural interests, and a belief that you could care passionately about a team without having to kick in the heads of those who cared passionately about a different one.

But Britain is complicated. Our literary culture was essentially a private-school culture. Most of our celebrated 1980s novelists—Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Rose Tremain, William Boyd, Graham Swift—were privately educated; so, too, were most of the people who wrote about them and gave them literary prizes. There was nothing unusual about this, because the same was true in every other walk of life: politics, the law, academia.

I have very strong views on this state of affairs, but I’m not going to get into them here. It’s just that Britain’s sports had deeply entrenched and complicated class associations, although you’d have to have lived in the UK for a minimum of a hundred years to understand them. Rugby Union was a posh boys’ sport, unless you were Welsh, in which case it was a working-class sport. In the industrial north, there is a different version of rugby, Rugby League, with different rules and different team sizes. Cricket was and still is mostly a private-school game, although in its international form it is enormously popular, not least with the Indian, Pakistani, and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK. Football was the sport of the people, until its biggest names achieved pop-star status in the 1960s, and then it took over. Those of us who were state-school kids in the ’60s and ’70s then started having kids and books and newspaper columns of our own—the country had become a little more meritocratic, postwar—and our infatuation with football, which we’d had since we were kids, confused our elders. Either we shouldn’t have loved the game or we shouldn’t have been writing books about it. I didn’t know this when I wrote Fever Pitch, but I was walking into a coded class minefield.

One of the reasons I have always felt more comfortable in the world of American books and letters is that a love of sports, any sports, seems to be regarded as a perfectly acceptable cultural habit. Roger Angell was the fiction editor of The New Yorker, but he wrote extensively about his love of baseball, and there was no perceived contradiction. Everything was culture, what we do and make. You guys didn’t tell anyone off, or raise eyebrows, or scratch your heads in disbelief when someone used a quote from Philip Roth to shed light on a Yankees game. As you may be aware, there are a lot of things wrong with the US, but that kind of snobbery isn’t one of them.

One thing I will claim credit for: The sales of Fever Pitch enabled others to write really smart books about football, and publishers could finally see the point of and the market for them. If you are interested, I will point you in the direction of two in particular: Simon Kuper’s magnificent Football Against the Enemy (Soccer Against the Enemy—eye roll—in the US, 1994), and David Winner’s brilliant Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football (2000).

Football Against the Enemy is a book about global politics as much as it is about football: Kuper knows that the game contains stories that shed light on the culture and history of the countries in which it is played. In Berlin, Kuper meets Helmut Klopfleisch, a fan of Hertha Berlin. When Klopfleisch was thirteen, a wall—the Wall—was built between him and the stadium and he could no longer watch his team, so to begin with, he and other East Berlin supporters of the club stood beside the Wall, listening to the crowd noise and cheering along. “Soon the border guards put a stop to this.”

They formed a Hertha Society and met in secret in the back room of a café. Players, directors, and coaches of Hertha would travel to see them and give them information about the club. Klopfleisch saw Hertha play once in three decades, against Lech Poznań of Poland, a country he was in theory free to visit because it was behind the Iron Curtain. Even so, the guards tried to stop him, but he took his mother and told them she’d grown up in Poland, and they were allowed to continue their journey. The Stasi kept a file on him, which the new unified German state eventually allowed him to see. “It’s all about football,” said the official when she handed it over. Klopfleisch, an otherwise law-abiding citizen, had spent nearly his entire life being watched by the Stasi because of his allegiance to a football team. Kuper finds similarly resonant stories in Russia, in Italy, in Lithuania, and in South Africa. Reminding myself of the book again for this column, I saw that it has become a valuable historical document: Germany and Russia after the collapse of the USSR, South Africa just after Mandela’s release, Barcelona before global domination… The world changes, yet football stays right there at its center.

Brilliant Orange is a thoughtful, surprising, and cultured explanation of the almost inexplicable. Since the 1960s, Dutch football has produced generation after generation of world-class players. And yet the Netherlands is not a particularly poor country (Brazil is poor, the argument goes, so the kids are hungrier for sporting success, and they don’t all have iPads that keep them indoors); nor is it a large country, like Brazil (its population is one-third of Britain’s). And yet it has produced Bergkamp, Cruyff, Neeskens, van Basten, Gullit, van Persie, van Dijk, and scores of others. David Winner writes convincingly and stimulatingly about the Dutch relationship with space and perspective, among other things, drawing on Dutch art as well as Dutch coaching methods to illustrate his arguments. Britain’s tabloid sports journalists, the miserable old bastards who think that England’s repeated failure in the World Cup can be blamed on not playing with enough pride in the shirt, would hate it. But then that’s precisely the mindset that has killed us.

Any sentence that begins “There are two/three/nine kinds of _x_” is almost certainly going to contain nothing truthful or intelligent, but I’m not going to let that stop me. I save all the truth and intelligence for my well-paid writing gigs. So there are two kinds of books about sports. There’s the kind that helps you understand it better, and there’s the kind that attempts to explain why it means so much to people. That’s in nonfiction, anyway. God knows what the sports fiction writers are up to. This month I have read one book of each kind, conveniently for my theory.

Christoph Biermann’s Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution belongs in the former category. It’s about the startling developments in statistical research into the game over the past few years, and the practical application of those developments: We are fast arriving at a stage when every kick, every pass, and every movement is watched over and over again by coaches and their data people in an effort to improve the efficacy of their teams. Expected goals (xG) is a stat that has become mainstream: All TV broadcasters provide this information as a matter of course.

And the TV pundits hate it, just as the tabloid journalists would have hated David Winner’s excursions into the world of Dutch art. An expected goal is not, obviously, a goal; it’s simply a metric that helps coaches understand more precisely whether their team deserved to win or should have won, why they lost, et cetera. The TV pundits, all ex-players from a time before the data revolution, are sniffy, and always point out the blindingly obvious: What does an xG stat of, say, 2.3 matter if the team scored 0.0 goals? One of the most interesting things about football is that luck plays a much greater part in it than in any other ball game: As Biermann points out, the best team on the pitch frequently loses.

This isn’t true of basketball, or of American football. There are so many points available that in the vast majority of games, the best team wins. “Football is like chess, but with dice,” one prominent German coach tells Biermann. No wonder, then, that there is an increasing correlation between the stats used by quant-driven gambling syndicates and football clubs. Two Premier League teams, Brentford and Brighton, are owned by men who have become rich through betting, and who use the stats they have available to beat the odds against their smallish Premier League teams, surviving against clubs with much better financial resources. When Brentford were trying to win a promotion to the Premier League, owner Matthew Benham was asked about his team’s chances. “Forty-two point three percent,” he replied. He wasn’t joking.

But we have come a long way since the introduction of expected goals. We are now in the land of “dangerousity,” “perturbation,” “action values,” “packing,” “pre-expected goals chains.” There are even metrics that attempt to come to grips with the value a player has when he doesn’t have the ball, which is approximately eighty-seven and a half minutes of every ninety. I could not, in all honesty, recommend Football Hackers to someone with no interest in football. But it’s the most watched sport in the world, so Biermann shouldn’t worry; I read it with increasing excitement. The next few years are going to be very interesting.

I have written about Helen Garner’s The Season in one of your daily newspapers, but it’s as good an example of a book that tries to explain the meaning of sports as I have come across for years, so it deserves another mention here. Garner, as you may know, is the author of the novel The Children’s Bach and the screenwriter of The Last Days of Chez Nous. The Season is an achingly warm, curious, and sympathetic portrait of her teenage grandson and his Aussie Rules football season. There are no stats—just people, observations, and love. The tabloid sports journalists and the pundits probably wouldn’t like this one much, either. But the truth is that the best books, in any field, are written not by the people who know the most, but by the people with the widest eyes and the sharpest minds. “Knowledge is power,” said Sir Francis Bacon, but he said it in olden times, 1597, before Wikipedia, and before pre-expected goal chains. Everyone has the knowledge and the power, if they know where to look. But not everyone has the soul.

For more essays, reviews, interviews, and more, visit our friends at The Believer.