I delivered the following paper at TU Dortmund University on July 13, 2018, as part of a two-day conference on the theme of 'Writing Football'
Nick Hornby once said in an interview words to the effect of, "Who needs football fiction when the game throws up so many of its own stories?" But that's like asking, "Who needs novels and movies when so much happens anyway in real life?" Sometimes a true story can be more effective when removed from the context of actual names and real events. Based on real events, but not enslaved by them. In this paper I want to look at three different ways that football narratives are presented through writing, and to argue that the most dynamic and engaging form of football writing is one that has yet to be properly exploited or appreciated - adult football fiction.
What we get, 1: True Stories morphing into Unreal Fiction. As Hornby remarked, every game throws up degrees of sporting drama. When the purely sporting side of football is converted into fiction, it quickly tends towards a banal recreation of events that are much more exciting in reality - in that sense, his initial quote is fair enough. These narratives focus on football's most obvious stories - goals, trophies, comebacks, mavericks, and so on. They are, however, inherently meaningless. Re-produced for fiction, they become regurgitated cliché. Decades of boys' comics and lame feature films re-tread a variation on the same story line - the sensational last-minute winner in the cup final scored by the (anti-)hero. The team of misfits, deviants and layabouts beaten into shape by an unlikely coach - ultra-hard but ultimately human - overcoming multiple obstacles, also to score a sensational last-minute winner in the cup final.
This is football's escapist equivalent of romantic literature, full of the good, the evil and the triumph of the best and most deserving, but not necessarily reflecting the way that the majority of people experience the game or what it means to them. The truly exceptional real-life experiences that eventually make football rewarding for the patient, long-suffering fan or player are translated into the expected, trite normality in the realm of juvenile fiction. That is, the last-minute winner you may experience as afan only once every five years, you will experience every week if you read 'Roy of the Rovers'.
These same plots are often insultingly aimed at adults in the form of feature movies, with the centric commercial imperative being that a film where the hero loses will not sell. 'Escape To Victory' (1981), 'Mean Machine '(2001), 'Kicking and Screaming' (2004), 'Goal' (First of the Fifa trilogy - 2005) all head towards that last-minute winner with varying degrees of watchability. Even the best football movie ever made, 'Bend It Like Beckham', sets up a dramatic final match with the heroine arriving late etc.
What we get, 2: Fictitious Reality. This covers the player autobiographies and history books that are pepped up to boost sales under commercial pressure. To give you an idea of how much money is at stake here, my first editor at a publishing house commissioned football books and once told me that Niall Quinn - an interesting character but not the greatest player in the game's history - was touting his memoirs around (or, most likely, his agent was) for £130,000, and this was around 2001. "How can publishers pay so much cash for such crap?" I wanted to know. The reality was that the book would likely sell enough copies in Ireland and to Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland fans to make the cash advance justified. I had no such fan base. It didn't necessarily matter what was inside the book, the name on the cover would see it into Christmas stockings. Published in 2002 as Quinn retired, its selling point focused on the 2002 World Cup and Roy Keane walking out on the Irish squad, and Keane was big news at the time. His name might have sold as many copies as the name of Quinn.
Publishers pay a big advance to a player and his agent and they naturally want dirt, exclusives and controversy in return for their investment. But it's not just that the past is distorted and exaggerated to sex up the text. The players themselves may not really remember incidents as they actually happened. We all tell edited anecdotes of things that have happened to us, and we will modify, curtail or embellish them depending on our audience. Footballers are no different.
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| "That movie was full of shit. It's all bullshit." Bob Iarusci |
I was told some other good stories that research proved to be false. And a number of former New York Cosmos players complained that a documentary film about their team, Once In A Lifetime, was, to quote one player, "bullshit". They were happy that my book was not focusing on the obvious sex and glamour angle of Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer hanging out in Manhattan with Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger, but trying to tell the actual story of the team, which was interesting enough in itself. But then again, I wasn't there, so who knows how accurate my narrative - based on the seemingly sincere testimonies of a number of lesser-known New York Cosmos players - really was?
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| "I started to find this literary illusion of Zlatan Ibrahimovic..." |
"I started to read ghost-written football books and I must say I’ve never read such boring books in my whole life. I said to myself, ‘I can’t do it.’ Then – I shouldn’t really admit it – I decided to write it as a novel. I didn’t really quote him. I started to find this literary illusion of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and then I got into writing it. The first thing he [Ibrahimovic] said [after he read it] was: “What the f--- is this? I never said this!’ But after a while I think he understood what I was trying to do. Nowadays he thinks it’s really his story."
How many other ghost-written player autobiographies serve merely to mythologise their subject? How many players thoroughly read back what their author has penned and care enough to tell him or her that half of it's nonsense? It's just a product designed to shift a few thousand copies before Christmas. With the exception of some players who, especially in recent years, have commendably opened up about their addictions and struggles with depression, the genre 'footballer's autobiography' is a literary graveyard.
What we need: Realist Fiction. So if football's historic reality veers - through distorted memories and commercial pressures - towards the fictional, this leaves realistic fiction as an alternative to explore and exploit the game's narrative richness. That is, the novels, films and plays that use football as a base are the best medium to analyse crucial issues affecting either the game or the human condition.
Let's take some examples. A number of writers early on in the game’s history were pre-occupied with the nature of the crowd and the effect of a mere game on the soul of man:
Arnold Bennett: ‘Callear’s Goal’ (1909)
Bennett’s short story about how an ambitious young politician exploits football to help his mayoral campaign describes two professional football clubs in “the five Towns” (what is nowadays Stoke-on-Trent, and back then was an amalgamation of six towns known as The Potteries), one in the first division (Knype), and the other (Bursley) “only in the second”. The first division club was “struggling along fairly well, but the Bursley club had come to the end of its resources. The great football public had practically deserted it. The explanation, of course, was that Bursley had been losing too many matches. The great football public simply sulked. It did not kick a man that was down; it merely ignored him, well knowing that the man could not get up without help. It cared nothing whatever for fidelity, municipal patriotism, fair play, the chances of war, or dividends on capital. If it could see victories it would pay sixpence, but it would not pay sixpence to assist at defeats.”
From ‘The Matador of the Five Towns’ (1912)
In this short story the (southern) narrator attends a game for the first time, a relegation battle between Knype Town and Manchester Rovers. "The host of the fifteen thousand [crowd] might have just had their lives saved, or their children snatched from destruction and their wives from dishonour; they might have been preserved from bankruptcy, starvation, prison, torture; they might have been rewarding with their impassioned worship a band of national heroes. But it was not so. All that had happened was that the ball had rolled into the net of the Manchester Rovers’ goal. Knype had drawn level."
In both these extracts, Bennett draws parallels between the apparently exaggerated importance of football and its relation to the real world. In 1909 he had already nailed the fickle nature of the football crowd. In 1912 he recognised that the way people reacted to a mere game was completely out of proportion to its importance, when considered rationally in contrast to bankruptcy, starvation, prison, torture. Already, football literature was intuiting that this was something more than a game.
From Henri de Montherlant’s ‘Football Lessons in the Park’ (1934)
A 25-year-old First World War veteran talks to a 15-year-old junior player after watching him play and reflects philosophically on the game, life and war in a series of magnificent monologues. For example, when he cites Aristotle on the sportsman’s need to take into account an accepting spirit:
“Through an hour and a half’s play, what else have I done if not accept? Accept with a free and masculine heart, that’s to say accept with regret and approval. […] I resigned myself that the wind should blow when it was against us, and drop when it would have been with us. […] I resigned myself to effort and fatigue which I knew to be useless, like chasing a man faster than myself, for the sole moral satisfaction of having tried as hard as I could. I resigned myself to Beyssac scoring a goal, being shaken by the hand, earning the smiles of the ladies and having his name on the stadium scoreboard, when it was I and I alone whose switch of play let him score. I resigned myself to ten occasions when the referee forgot to use his eyes, or used them wrongly, to our disadvantage, and I said nothing.”
In this passage, the speaker is drawing stoical life lessons from what he's experienced out on the field. Chasing a man faster than himself "for the sole satisfaction of having tried as hard as I could". There's his story - he didn't participate in the game because he thought he was good enough, for his "effort and fatigue" he "knew to be useless". He did it for the very sake of the participation. To say he was there, to say that he tried. You could imagine an old man on his death bed saying the same thing about life.
From JB Priestley’s ‘Watching Bruddersford’ (1928 - from his novel 'The Good Companions')
How can 35,000 working men afford to pay a shilling to watch Bruddersford United (likely a pseudonym for Priestley's native Bradford, or maybe for Huddersfield Town) when so many of them can not strictly afford to? “To say that these men paid their shillings to watch 22 hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art…”
There's not much more to say to that - an early recognition 90 years ago that football is a combination of conflict and art. I can't think of anyone who's used only three words to describe the game better since.
For literary football fiction, take this early passage from Brian Glanville’s1963 novel ‘The Rise of Gerry Logan’, where the narrator – a reporter called Brian Glanville – describes how he first picks up on the hero Logan’s discontent with his current club, the fictitious Jarrow City: “A month later, I was to be told, told as one was told so many things, in the Great Terminus Hotel, hard by King’s Cross Station. In its stuffy, over-heated corridors, its prosaic meals, its cosy obsolescence, the Great Terminus always seemed to me a home from home for cautious clubs from the North, unwilling to commit themselves by venturing farther into the glittering treachery of the metropolis. Here, the very whistling and shunting of the trains assured them that escape was near at hand.”
This feels like a real description within a fictional setting. Any reader would have known that Glanville in real life was a football journalist who's been to The Great Terminus several times, and it's obviously made an impression on him. Did clubs consciously choose that hotel so that they could escape quickly back north from London? Probably not, but Glanville's fictitious description seems to hold a certain truth - that is quality football writing.
Robin Jenkins, ‘The Thistle and the Grail’ (1954)
“Saturday was a fine day for football match and funeral. The sun shone in a pale, beneficient sky; grass sparkled and mud became firm earth again; boots bound in new white laces could swiftly in exhilaration pursue the ball, while shoes could step from the side of the grave undefiled by blobs of clay. Five attended the funeral in the nearby cemetery; over seven hundred journeyed to the match in Carrick; and the seven hundred included one of the five.”
What a stunning juxtaposition of life and death! Five go to the funeral of a 12-year-old girl, 700 go to the game, including the father of the girl who's arranged the funeral time for noon especially so that he can get to the match at 3. There's no sense of moral condemnation for the man. It's more like there's a tacit understanding for his action. Life goes on. Who would not choose a life-affirming football match over a funeral?
Diego Trelles Paz, ‘Football and Plague’ (2014)
The narrative jumps between the radio commentary of the deciding game in the Peruvian championship between Sporting Cristal and La U (Universitario de Deportes), and the viewpoint of a failed pro, now a junkie and involved with a bunch of hoodlums in a plot to assassinate the editor of a right-wing newspaper. They are listening to the commentary on their way to the assassination, and as much pre-occupied with the game as they are with their task.
So in my view, the most successful writing about football, in literary terms, focuses somewhere just beyond the game. Where football is an integral part of the world, but not in itself the whole focus. Where football is important, but not of sole importance - it cannot be taken without its social, political or personal context. It views universal truths through a fictitious veil, and presents football as a sounding board for thoughts, ideas and imaginative narratives.
There's an economic aspect to all this that's worth mentioning. As I was (un)lucky enough not to be writing Niall Quinn's autobiography, my own football short stories (current amazon ranking: 1,467,405) had the luxury of being focused on the following themes: a mascot suffering an existential crisis inside the guise of a toucan; a team of fourth division journeyman facing the temptation of £25k per man to throw a game that was technically meaningless to them; a player haunted by missing a stunningly easy chance in the last minute of the FA Cup Final; an amateur player in his 30s who still lives with his mum, but wakes up on the morning of his first ever cup final to find that she's died in the night; and political activists at a left-wing conference discussing the coming revolution, but distracted by an England World Cup qualifier.
I was paid £5,000 for my book of football fiction (a sum I would never be offered nowadays for a similar work - those were comparatively heady times for authors) by the publisher who'd been offered (but didn't take) Niall Quinn's memoirs for £130k. Meanwhile, 17 years later, I still owe my publisher half of that meagre advance against royalties, and the editor who commissioned it was never allowed to commission fiction again. It's wise not to overlook the role of simple capitalist mathematics when we examine why thoughtful, probing or politically oriented football fiction has been a relatively quiet-to-absent medium over the past century. Unlike last-minute goals from 40 yards and sensationalised life stories of the stars, it simply won't sell.
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