Interview with US website USSoccerPlayers (before I started working for them)
We speak with Ian Plenderleith about treating soccer as fiction
Tell me a bit about the book. Sports fiction for adults?
“Sports fiction for adults” is a good description of the book, and was something I wanted to convey in the sub-title, but was unable to for space reasons. Sports fiction in the UK is something almost exclusively associated with books for adolescents or pre-teens, but I wanted to escape from the formulaic, goal-scoring-heroes kind of story and look at the game’s underbelly, which is why I focused on characters such as club mascots, pushy parents, impassioned fans and Sunday League players. One reviewer said I used football as “a mere springboard in a study of some wonderfully weird lives”, which I thought summed the book up nicely.
How do you think the book would translate for an American soccer fan?
It’s a cliché that soccer is the global game, but I think it’s true that people experience it in pretty much the same way, wherever they are. The fact that most of the stories are set in the UK is incidental, and the themes of loss, glory, pain, corruption, fanaticism and, in some cases, psychosis, that run through the stories will ring true for anyone who loves soccer. I haven’t had any complaints so far from U.S. readers that none of the stories are set in MLS.
What kind of research is involved in writing a convincing piece of soccer fiction?
In my case, none at all. The ‘research’ really comes, for better or worse, from having spent over thirty years watching and playing soccer at every spare moment. If I were to transfer the stories to the baseball park, then I’d have to start doing research.
What is your favorite story?
I probably don’t really have a favorite because I like the stories for different reasons. I like ‘The Man In The Mascot’ and ‘The Night Football Ruined My Life’ because they seem to work well from a humor point of view. ‘Save Of The Day’, which is the only story based on something that happened to me, and ‘Drunk On Success’, about the ambitious touchline parents , seem to have been successful at making people say, “Yes, I’ve been there”. And I feel that ‘The Right Result’ and ‘The Return of the Falcon’ manage to re-create the professional game quite convincingly, even though that’s not something, despite my childhood ambitions, I’ve ever been a part of.
If I had to choose a favorite, though, I’d take ‘Furlington Welfare’s Last Great Orator’ because I’m still quite tickled at the idea of someone going to watch soccer every week solely because they want to shout abuse at the referee.
