Book Reviews from When Saturday Comes

A Fan For All Seasons by Laurence Marks (Little, Brown, £16.99)

From WSC March 2000

Laurence Marks, the co-creator of BBC sitcom Birds Of A Feather, has written a three-year diary documenting his life as an Arsenal fan. Like most diaries, it would best have been left in his bedside drawer.

As Laurence himself would put it, it is remarkable! Amazing! And flabbergasting! That a respectable publisher has seen fit to bestow upon the world 300 pages of copy that is not only vacuous, inane and repetitive to a degree that takes the work beyond the realm of parody, but is possibly the most self-serving slice of conceit ever to be published outside of the vanity press.

It can only be assumed that the book was published by mistake. My theory is that it came into being as follows: Laurence Marks sneaked into Little, Brown one night (perhaps on a high after the "tumultuous applause" and "huge laughter" he received after delivering the McTaggart lecture), stuck his diary diskette into somebody's computer and then sent it direct to the printer.

Otherwise, a commissioning editor must have been attracted by the following proposal: "How about I write a book full of lengthy reports of Arsenal games that took place four years, punctuated by large passages of false modesty whereby I pretend to be astonished! At the success of my script-writing career?" The editor would then have had to sell the idea to several other people in the company who would all have agreed that this was a goer. No, it's too fantastical.

Having said that, there are passages in this book that indeed provoked "huge laughter" when read out loud to the reviewer's inner circle. The expose of Barry Took's rat phobia was deemed highly amusing, as was the long episode when Laurence goes to watch Lens v Arsenal with Melvyn Bragg (the names drop with the speed and ferocity of ice balls in a hail storm). Laurence and Melvyn are stunned! When the French police fail to greet them with flowers and a hug, and that none of the Arsenal fans on the trip seem to work for the BBC. Luckily, Melvyn writes an article for The Daily Telegraph protesting at this outrage.

There are probably ten-year-olds with scrapbooks of self-written match reports more riveting than Laurence's attempt to recapture the atmosphere at Highbury. "This is the big one. Arsenal are playing Spurs." Crikey. Who does Laurence think should be in the team? What's he going to say to the bloke sitting next to him at half-time? As it turns out, nothing of more interest than anyone says at half-time in grounds across the country, week after week.

If Little, Brown would care to write to me explaining how A Fan For All Seasons came into existence, I would, having suffered from cover to cover, be intrigued to know.

[Note: Little, Brown responded to this request in good spirit:

Dear Mr Plenderleith,

I was very amused by your review of A Fan For All Seasons by Laurence Marks, despite being its publisher, and should you have any plans to write a book yourself I hope you will not be too ashamed of being part of Little, Brown's list of authors to let me know.

Best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Samson, Editorial Director]

Winners & Losers, The Business Strategy of Football by Stefan Szymanski and Tim Kuypers (Viking, £17.99)

From WSC, June 1999

"To many football fans, talk of business and finances is tantamount to heresy," the authors point out in the third paragraph of this book. Read the remaining 316 pages and you will understand why.

Football is a business, the writers explain, and we have to believe them because one is a senior lecturer in economics and the other is a "business strategy consultant". The idea of the book is to explain the business of football in a "systematic, dispassionate fashion". In other words, they have liberated themselves from all those petty, irrational precepts which might make some foolish Walter Mitty love the game for its own sake, and tackled it from the perspective of a level-headed, dalek-voiced businessperson who wishes for only one thing - to find the best way of making money. Or, as our economic doctors put it, to maximise off-field profit and on-field performance.

The two are interconnected, would you believe. These fantastically perceptive academics have discovered that winning on the field can help profits off the field and, what's more, that teams who spend a lot of money on the transfer market can often be successful because they have the best players. They know all this because they've drawn enough charts and graphs with curves and coefficients to prove the point ten times over.

Take a sentence like this, of which there are many: "A simple way of summarising the relationship between changes in profit and changes in league position is through the correlation coefficient". Or, did you know that "demand elasticity for Manchester United fans is estimated to be around -0.2"? Although the authors do explain at length what this actually means, it still does not become any more interesting. For once you've toiled through the charts, the jargon and the business-speak you reach staggering conclusions such as: Manchester United are profitable because they are successful and well supported, or that "a winning history is not sufficient to guarantee future success".

The statutory flannel on the jacket claims that this is a book for both business people and fans. I doubt whether the former will appreciate having ABC economics explained to them in layman terms just to reach hopelessly obvious conclusions, while the latter will hardly wish to wade through pages of Ladybird football history they already know. But if business people are really so ignorant of the game that they need to be told that Jimmy Hill was "a player and later to become a TV pundit" (or indeed that the Liverpool manager is called "Bernard Houllier" or that the League Cup is apparently called the Coca-Cola Cup), then this book at least serves as a wake-up call to discourage such people from investing in football.

Nonetheless, given that no fan in his right mind will get beyond the first chapter, we might as well ask what the besuited human being who's never heard of the Busby Babes will learn from this book. Well, he or she will find out that Brian Clough, for example, was not just a brilliant manager, but a "strategic asset". That means there was only one Brian Clough, and the past successes of Derby County and Nottingham Forest under his leadership were partly due to the fact that, while he was in charge at these clubs, nobody else had him.

After several chapters of similarly dazzling insight, the business person will find the authors rather hurriedly concluding that football may only be a sure future investment when the "inevitable" European Super League is in place. To prevent unpredictable future profit growth, such a league would be better dispensing with the nuisance of relegation. Then, "maximising" profit from TV revenue, around ten UK clubs will play in a US-style, Euro-conference with around sixty teams, while the rest, with no hope of ever making the elite, will perhaps go amateur. These are presumably the "losers" of the book title, and that is about as much treatment as they get besides their role in the vast statistical side-show.

It is particularly galling that the authors do not even stick their necks out and say they think that such a Super League is a great idea, and let's get in there first and bank the euros. They see it merely as one possible way forward based on the "business strategy" they have been tediously expounding for the previous 300 pages. Or they thought, we've written all this bilge and designed all these charts and graphs, we'd better sling out some ill-considered conclusion to tie it all up before the publisher starts getting stroppy.

This is the problem when people with no feeling for the game write about it "dispassionately". Reading about the application of business strategy to football is like having a professor of music analyse the chord and key changes of your favourite song. The result is the most numbing, pointless and repetitious book with the word 'football' in the title since John King's debut novel.

Eighteen pounds for that. It's a funny old business, right enough.

[Dear WSC,

Pointless ‚ sums up Ian Plenderleith's view of my book Winners & Losers. He suggests that reading about the business of football is like "having a professor of music analyse the chord and key changes of your favourite song". Nice analogy, but a rather dangerous viewpoint.

Today football is being shaped by people who view it as a business. You only have to look at the merchant bankers, investment fund managers, media companies, receivers and competition authorities who are all taking decisions which impact on all fans.

Football fans have never had much of a say in the running of football, but in the past at least the decision makers, misguided as they were, had a knowledge and love of the game. In order to have a say in the future, fans must understand how the people and the organisations setting their ticket prices and rearranging their competitions operate. Our book does that.

The recent victory of SUAM in persuading the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (who view football as a business) to block the BskyB/Man Utd deal is an example of fan power of the future. Indeed the competition authorities, both in the UK and, perhaps more importantly, in Europe, might be the fans' only hope in the brave new world of corporate football.

Ian also suggests that people with no feeling for the game should steer clear of writing about it. I can reassure Ian that I do have an "irrational" love of the game. Some of the best times of my life, and without doubt the worst time, have resulted from my love of Liverpool. It is because of this love, not despite it, that I wrote this book.

In last month's WSC, Michael Crick was urging Manchester United fans to buy shares in order to have a say in the future of their club. It may be a rather forlorn request given the enormous stakes held by institutional investors, but at least he recognises the importance of business to the future of the game. Real fans ignore the business of football at their peril.

Tim Kuypers]

The Man In Black -- A History of the Football Referee by Gordon Thomson (Prion Books, £9.99).

From WSC, March 1999

Refs, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Sometimes they make mistakes and we shout at them and, like a lot of players and managers, blame them afterwards for the shortcomings of our own team's performance. You might argue that such scapegoating is an integral part of football's rich and irrational tapestry. Looked at another way you could say it is as irritating and predictable as the Everton fan who once spent a whole evening in the pub bending my ear about a decision Clive Thomas had made against his side a decade earlier.

Perhaps this book would have better approached its subject by questioning fans and those involved in the game why they focus so much of their ire and aggression upon a single, lowly paid volunteer worker. This is because referees themselves, with the exception of the above-mentioned Mr Thomas, have so little to say about their role and their motivation that you might as well listen to chartered accountants talk about why they went into chartered accountancy.

This is not entirely the author's fault, as it appears that most current and former referees refused to speak to him, and those that did said things like: "The majority of us do it because we love the game, or haven't been good enough players." Which should have been his cue to dump this book and write a history of the corner flag instead.

Not that this can claim to be a history book, despite the title. True, the first two chapters dutifully run through the referee's evolution at the end of the nineteenth century, and if you are an official then this may be of some technical interest. But then we get down to what you sense was probably the original idea behind the publication -- loads of stories about scrapping, riots and corruption.

However, once you've read a certain number of stories about a dodgy penalty decision causing some hot-blooded Latinos to drag the ref through the streets by his gonads you begin to lose track of who you're reading about. Was that Atletico Chalaco versus Nacional Iquitos? Or FC Bastardo versus Virtus La Castellana? Do we care?

In between the reader must endure the author's lame asides, which read as if scripted by Colin Hunt from the Paul Whitehouse Show. "Linesmen, like Johnny Cash, walked the line." Real Madrid's President Lorenz Sanz is described as "a man who would sell his grandmother for the right result." And blameless Jordi Cruyff is, for no good reason, "gormless". Are these the "humorous" sections promised on the book's cover?

Maybe we're supposed to be laughing at all those Latinos going loco over a game of football, while of course showing the appropriate moral indignation in "serious" incidents closer to home, like when a linesman is attacked at Portsmouth versus Sheffield United. Or perhaps our laughs are intended to come from the profoundly analytical chapter conclusions, such as at the end of the section on World Cup referees: "One thing is certain. The officials charged with travelling to the Far East in 2002 will be under more pressure than ever to perform." Oh yes.

The acknowledgments section openly admits to having pilfered sections from three other books, and there is neither sourcing nor a bibliography in this "history", but there are plenty of old stories, idle conjecture, poor editing and lots of quotes from Barry Davies, who apparently talked to the author in "some detail" despite being no more of an expert on referees than the fan at the bar. It ends by discussing whether refs should be professional and whether they should have technological aids, but without adding anything new to these issues, over-aired in the media of late.

On the positive side, there are maybe enough good stories to make a decent feature article. And to save you ten pounds I can betray the conclusion to this largely dull and directionless tome, which is that "most would shed a tear if the man in black threw down his whistle, packed up his cards and disappeared down the tunnel never to emerge again." Refs, eh? Can't live with 'em...

Lost in France, The Story of England's 1998 World Cup, by Mark Palmer (Fourth Estate, £14.99)

Lost in France, Frontline Despatches From World Cup '98, by Christian Smyth (Mainstream, £9.99)

From WSC, January 1999

During the 1998 World Cup the team from England played four matches. They won two, and they lost two, exiting the tournament at the last 16 stage. End of story.

OK, there were one or two other stories on the fringes of the main events. These were as follows: Gazza got left behind; Owen replaced Sheringham up front; Beckham ‚ ruined it all, didn't he? But hardly stuff worth writing home about, let alone writing a book on. Unless of course you're some lucky hack who gets accreditation and says to a publisher: "Remember Pete Davies and that best-selling book he wrote about the 1990 World Cup? I could do that too."

Great idea, but difficult to execute given that going out on penalties in the last 16 is not quite as dramatic as going out on penalties in the semi-final. Oh, and another snag, you might actually have to be a good writer and a good journalist too.

There is one key insight in each book which can best be imparted as both a warning to the readers and a fair reflection of the contents as a whole. Palmer writes: "There is a lot of hanging around when you are covering England. And often you're writing utter flam." While Smyth asks after yet another tedious Hoddle press conference: "What was the point of having these question-and-answer sessions if the material never got above the intellectual grasp of a five-year-old?"

Or, one might ask, if the contents of these press conferences were so mind-numbing, why do both books bother quoting huge chunks from every single one, not to mention numerous bland and dated interviews with players and officials, the contents of which might also fail to challenge a toddler's thinking capacity.

That both books bear the same title is perhaps less than a coincidence. Not only does it testify to the lack of effort and imagination that have been put into their pages, it also illustrates that essentially they are almost exactly the same book, telling the same story in the same chronological sequence. Occasionally this is amusing, as when Palmer tells us how he was accosted by a Tunisian on the mean streets of Marseille and, asked if he is from England, escapes by pretending he is from Italy. Cut to Smyth: "... A gangly Tunisian draped in a red flag enquired menacingly if I was 'Engleeesh'. I told him I was American and got out of there sharpish."

But that's about as tense (or as funny) as it gets. The only moments of laughter in Palmer's book come when he quotes first, a News of the World caption competition and second, a cartoon in a French newspaper. It's littered with journalese and ill-considered metaphors ("the striker is the first violinist in the orchestra"), although for what it's worth, it's marginally better written than Smyth's effort.

The latter would have better spent his World Cup driving a black cab around London. Hooligans "should be locked up or flogged in public", then later on locked into a cage, while England should be banned from international football and (a belated realisation this, but compared to the rest of the book it is Smyth at the zenith of his analytical powers): "France 98 is all about money and corporate bollocks."

Still, at least you'll get a laugh out of it. In one encounter on a train Smyth is pleased to meet some England fans who are "neither coarse nor racist nor sexist". Just four paragraphs later he relates meeting a woman in a tourist office "wearing a low-cut floral dress, just enough to reveal a cleavage" (cor!), before we are treated to a finale recounting England's last game with "the scumbag Argies, the cheating bastards". Best of all, however, is saved for the very end. Without giggling in the least, Smyth opines that the sporting, charming, tough-but-fair Paul Ince has, during the course of the tournament, "become a role model for a generation". Let's hope so.

Unless you spent last summer up the Mississippi on a steam-boat then you will find absolutely nothing new or enlightening in either of these books. That such lazy works ever made it as far as the printing press shows that publishing's love affair with Anything Football is not yet over. But these shamefully poor books are surely a sign that it's about time the two embarked on a trial separation.

Moving The Goalposts - Football's Exploitation by Ed Horton (Mainstream Publishing, £14.99)

From WSC, January 1998

The football industry probably doesn't want Ed Horton's new book any more than it wants the return of terracing, cheap tickets and cut-price replica shirts. But there is no doubt that it needs this book more than it needs the Diary of a Reformed Thug, the reminiscences of Addled Hudson or how to get quality haggis and chips at Inverness Clachnacuddin. In short, it needs this book more than any other football book published in the last five years.

Regular readers of this magazine will be no stranger to Horton and his views. Even among a presumably left-of-centre readership his pieces always provoke healthy discussion on the following month's letters page. But whether or not you agree with his self-confessedly idealistic vision of the game's way forward, he deserves every credit for the questions he throws up in this savage indictment of football's treacherous current pact with greed and commercialisation.

You don't have to be a convinced Marxist to share the author's suspicion that the current boom is going to be followed by a slump, that fair-weather fans with a Sky dish and a Chelsea shirt could vaporise as quickly as they first appeared (though if that includes Mellor and Banks, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad...), that the City and the sponsors could drop the sport like a sinking Maxwell the moment they get wind that football's once parturient teat has been milked to shrivelling point. And you probably already know the answers when he confronts you with questions like: "As a result of all the new money in football: is football cheaper for supporters? Is there any more of it? And has that money brought us better football?"

Horton pinpoints shark-led share issues, avaricious chairman, the predictability of the Premiership, the Manchester United monopoly and the Murdochisation of televised football as the central roots of a disease which has created a football elite and which has spared no thought for either the fans or the lower end of the game. Well, nothing surprising there. But like any good polemicist, he sweeps you along by heaping argument upon argument until you have to concede that his portrayal of the contemporary game is depressingly accurate. The game isn't booming after all, it's in crisis, and the only people who can understand this and do something about it are the fans.

Citing various fan protests, in particular the Football United demonstrations at Brighton last season, Horton concludes that football's salvation lies in the potential power of the crowd (given that nothing is likely to change under the non-interventionist Blair Party). He calls for the release of football "generally" from private ownership, with poorer clubs to be subsidised by public money (like opera is) raised by taxing the richer clubs, or even by the National Lottery. Clubs would be run democratically by members, like county cricket clubs.

You sense the author does not believe this will happen any more than most people believe that the current government is going to turn Britain into a socialist paradise. But, not unreasonably, he maintains the right to dream on the grounds that "morally we own the game already."

Just a couple of quibbles, though. Horton telling us that his three years at Oxford University were "appalling" is irrelevant to the book and smells of an unnecessary attempt to gain kudos with the people on the Manor Ground terraces. And don't expect a barrel of laughs, even in the chapter devoted to demolishing Man United. The reader is already warned in the introduction that there is no humour in the book in case this is misinterpreted as "cause for optimism". Cripes, we couldn't have that, although I suspect the real reason is that Horton - cogent and intelligent writer that he is - does not possess much of a feel for comic prose.

Nevertheless, this book is the best possible present to darken any football fan's Christmas.

Left Foot In The Grave? by Garry Nelson and Anthony Fowles (Harper Collins, £14.99)

From WSC, November 1997

Garry Nelson's second book, very much like his first, is a depressing documentation of life at a less than glamorous professional football club. If 'Nelse' thought he had it bad at Charlton Athletic, then a year as assistant coach at Torquay United soon has him hankering for the relative splendour and opulence of south-east London, and we do not begrudge him his comfy new office position at the PFA come the end of a thankless campaign in which the champagne highlight is avoiding the drop to the Vauxhall Conference by securing an away point at Hereford.

Many fans like to think of themselves as the sort of people who would watch any game, any time, anywhere. They might rethink their philosophy if, like this poor bugger, they spent an entire season travelling back and forth across the south of England watching reserve games in the hope of finding someone going cheap on loan to fill in up front for a few weeks. Most of these trips ended without reward and a long drive home to the west country through a cold and foggy night.

Behind every move Nelson and co-coach Kevin Hodges make lie hard economics. It's the old story of low gates, poor results and a chairman with a tight wallet whose pet enthusiasm has changed from keeping a football club to keeping exotic birds. Each morning the club has to phone the council to see where they can train, and off they go in their mini-bus, battery permitting, with the metal goalposts tied to the roof. And everyone gets injured too, except for 'senior pro' Jon Gittens, who keeps throwing tantrums and getting sent off.

Given this working environment Nelson holds appropriate underdog views on agents, share issues, feeder clubs and rampant commercialism and how it all means the thumbs-down for eternally marginalised clubs like Torquay and long term professional football in Britain. It's nothing that observers of the bottom end of the game haven't been saying for a long time now, but maybe this honest account of daily demoralisation from someone on the inside could serve as a Fashanu's elbow to faces higher up. However, I trust that 'Nelse' no longer maintains the illusions he held on May 1st, when he proclaims: 'Bye bye, David Mellor. Hello Tony Banks. Let's hope the BSkyB and Premiership boys get the message.' Unless he was being sarcy.

This is doubtful as humour is not the book's strong point. In fact large sections are rather dull and a decent editor would have scalped about a hundred pages, including most of the pre-season section, the detailed descriptions of matches and training sessions and the superfluous and sometimes rather pompous commentaries on football at large. His tales of Torquay's struggle are sufficient by themselves to damn the greed-based echelons of the game, while the diary form loved by 'year-in-the-life-of' players and fans alike has long since been over-killed, even if recording the day-by-day drudgery accurately reflects the reality of the teams they play for and follow. Another coach trip to Darlington. Yeah, we've been there and back several times now, and it's not very exciting, is it?

Worse still is when the co-writer tries to stamp his mark on the book with some shocking journalese: "Penalty. Johnny Walker stepped forward and scotched all hopes he might bottle it." Or, more clumsily, when Torquay's St Vincent and the Grenadines international striker Rodney Jack produces a display "less that of a player on song than the St Vincent's Choral Society thundering out a reggae version of The Messiah." The frequency of such aberrations mercifully subsides as the season goes on (the usual metaphor fatigue which comes with the heavy pitches), but serve to highlight that the book is at its best in its descriptions of Plainmoor parsimony and the fight to field a team of eleven fit and semi-able players.

So, onward ho to A Year in the Life of a PFA Commercial Representative. He could call it Left Foot On The Gravy Train.