BOOK OF THE DAY: CONOR O'CALLAGHANreviews Football Nation: Sixty Years of the Beautiful GameBy Andrew Ward John Williams Bloomsbury 436 pp, £20
SOME TIME in the late Nineties, a Newcastle fan, interviewed about his shifting experiences in the Toon Army, described his last time at St James’s Park. When Newcastle scored, he and his mates cheered and jumped around. To his amazement, one of the security staff cautioned them for “over-celebrating”.
Football Nationis about the rise of the beautiful game after the second World War and its gradual gentrification from working-class preserve.
Andrew Ward and John Williams, a sports writer and an academic sociologist, have compiled a fascinating and entertaining study. It documents how football’s power base drifted from north to south in direct proportion to the gradual collapse of England’s traditional industrial base, and how in the post-war decades, it supplanted both cricket as the national game and organised religion as the primary form of Sunday worship.
Their collage, gleaned from autobiographies and statistics and contemporary accounts and oral histories, is studded with marvellous trivia. Did you know that one professional, so bored by unemployment in the recession of the early 1980s, offered his services to local farmers as a scarecrow? Did you know that of the 39 fans crushed to their deaths in the Heysel stadium in 1985, one was Irish?
Ward and Williams are especially astute on the major thresholds that reshaped the game, tracing seemingly isolated tragedies back along historical fault lines. They show how the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death live on television in an overcrowded Sheffield stadium, was prefigured by an almost identical disaster in Bolton in 1946.
They suggest that the Munich air disaster did much to create football’s cult of personality, giving Manchester United, a great club, the added aura of tragedy and international support.
In 1966, the FA commissioned its first independent study on the state of football. The findings of the Chester report, led by Oxford don Sir Norman Chester, proved prescient and far-reaching. In an age that saw attendance numbers and club revenue dramatically eroded by colour TV, the report even predicted a system of pay- per-view screenings of big games.
Much of Williams’s previous work has centred on the allure of hooligan culture. It is not surprising, then, that Football Nation offers an insightful account of that otherwise depressing phase of the English game. Never blind to the harm it did, the book nonetheless argues that its appeal of comradeship was inevitable at a time when England’s social fabric, in particular the traditional family unit, was disintegrating.
Similarly, the authors are alive to both the pluses and losses inherent to football’s present incarnation. Its great cathedrals are now safer places to be, and that is unarguably good, but they are eerier places too.
Thirty years after the Chester report, Tony Blair’s government commissioned a similar study that approached the game and its fans in terms of product and customers. The all-seater, prawn sandwich brigade had taken over.
At times Football Nation is too instructive for its own good. The hooliganism chapter is punctuated with a series of italicised single- sentence summations. Similarly, several other passages begin in bold, adding unnecessary emphasis to already obvious points. But these are minor quibbles of an engrossing and informative book. As accounts of one sport’s pivotal role in society go, this would be hard to beat.
Conor O'Callaghan's Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil Warappeared in 2004.