Simon Kuper on Best Football Books in English

Your first book is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, about an obsessive Arsenal fan. Isn’t it a bit depressing?

It’s not depressing! It’s very funny and was also almost the book that started this all off. Actually, the book that started it all off was Pete Davies’s All Played Out. That came out in 1990, and has been called the John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus. Because when Pete Davies’s book did well, publishers realised there was a literate football fan audience out there, and then Nick Hornby came and proved it with a vengeance in 1992. It was just when memoirs were coming into fashion, about the same time as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? And you could say that Fever Pitch really launched the genre of serious football books. 

Nick Hornby doesn’t revel in, ‘Oh I’m such a football geek, isn’t that funny?’ He treats it as something suspect. And he describes how he uses supporting Arsenal to escape his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and lots of things like that. It’s also a bit of a social history of England from the 60s through to the 80s. And nobody had written a book like it – it was completely original. Nick Hornby was a not very successful, lower-middle-class bohemian, and when he was telling friends at the time, ‘Oh I’m writing a book about being an Arsenal fan,’ his friends all thought, ‘Oh God! Poor Nick.’ Nobody expected this book. It’s completely honest and it’s very funny. The only problem with it is that it’s a little bit formless: it’s a book to dip into, rather than to read through. It doesn’t quite have a narrative, but every little bit is brilliant.

And is it on your list partly because it captures what it’s like to be a fan? Is it true for a lot of people?

There are definitely moments of recognition. I’m not an obsessive fan of one club, and I hope I haven’t used football to escape life. But there are definitely strong moments of recognition, of football as this place of safety. Life is complicated but when you’re a football fan you’re gathered with others who are like you, and nobody judges you. It’s like being a member of a family, where there are no standards, where the only criterion is, ‘Are you an Arsenal fan?’ and then you’re accepted. Outside the Arsenal stadium life is scary, you have to be adequate, but as a football fan you don’t have to be adequate and that’s a great joy. What I’ve discovered more and more is that when you watch football and support your team, it is all a game. And that’s a terrific release, because as adults we have children and responsibilities and pressures, but when you’re just a supporter, you don’t.

Tell me more about Pete Davies’s All Played Out. It’s about the English team going to the Italia 90 World Cup...

This book is just being rereleased now, 20 years on, as One Night in Turin and it’s also been turned into a film. Pete Davies really started off English football literature, and when I was going around London publishers in 1991, trying to sell them my first football book, people said to me, ‘Oh yes, we know football books sell, because Pete Davies wrote this very good book called All Played Out.’ Before Davies, ‘football book’ was sort of an oxymoron, and then Davies made it happen. 

Davies was a little-known novelist, and the then English manager Bobby Robson said, ‘Why don’t you spend the 1990 World Cup, as a sort of writer-in-residence for the England team? And you can live in the hotel, and have complete access to the players, and we’ll shut out the nasty journalists.’ Davies got the players to trust him, and he interviewed them seriously and sensitively, as if they were sentient human beings – which at the time nobody suspected footballers were. He also ventured out into the World Cup, he got out of the hotel, he met hooligans and other fans, and tabloid journalists – there are all these wonderful character portraits in the book. It’s an account of the hysterical football industry at its most hysterical moment during a World Cup. And even 20 years on, you feel some of the tension and the excitement of the World Cup: will England do it, won’t they? And it’s a book that has lived on and survived. And interestingly, like Nick Hornby, Pete Davies never wrote about football again. This was the book he wanted to write, and then he moved on.

It’s quite gripping, I gather from the reviews.

It’s gripping and it’s written in a very sort of populist, laddish style, but it works. The characters make it work, and the setting of Italy during the World Cup. It doesn’t matter that that World Cup is now history.

Let’s go on to Brilliant Orange, by David Winner, presumably about the Dutch team.

This is about Holland and Dutch football and what makes it special. I grew up in Holland, so I have a particular tie to this book. Actually I was in Amsterdam the winter that David Winner was there writing his book. We were both writing books and we’d occasionally meet for dinner. And I got to know David and I really liked him, but I thought ‘Poor old David, he’s going to write a book about Dutch football, and nobody’s going to read it.’ Also I grew up in Holland, and I thought, there’s nothing he can tell me about Dutch football, it’s all going to be old hat or he won’t get it right.