Football in Fiction: A History [1 ed.] 0367361329, 9780367361327

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Football in Fiction

Football in Fiction represents the most comprehensive historical mapping and analysis of novels related to association football (soccer). It offers a theoretically informed field guide, a scholarly cartography of football fiction’s uncertain, and – until now – only partially explored terrain. Combining an extensive search for texts with up-to-date academic research, journals, surveys, catalogues, and reviews, the book demonstrates a topographic perspective of the field – one that captures and establishes its breadth, depth, and distinctive identity. The book uses and adapts two distinct reading models of abstraction, in conjunction with closer textual analyses. Together they assist in realising a set of demonstrable conventions, outline a taxonomy of fictive types, establish the genre’s current state of play, and advance the football novel as a form with its own literary history and traditions. This book is a valuable resource for those studying and researching in the areas of the social and cultural aspects of football, sports fiction, sports writing, creative writing, and literary and genre studies. Furthermore, related industry professionals will find this a fascinating read, particularly football writers, fans of the sport, and those interested in sports history and cultural phenomena. Lee McGowan is Researcher at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Besides critical football studies in women’s football and football fiction, his research focuses on generative narratives and community engagement. He is currently researching the social history of Australian women’s football.

Critical Research in Football Series Editors: Pete Millward, Liverpool John Moores University, UK Jamie Cleland, University of Southern Australia Dan Parnell, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Stacey Pope, Durham University, UK Paul Widdop, Leeds Beckett University, UK

The Critical Research in Football book series was launched in 2017 to showcase the inter- and multi-disciplinary breadth of debate relating to ‘football’. The series defines ‘football’ as broader than association football, with research on rugby, Gaelic and gridiron codes also featured. Including monographs, edited collections, short books and textbooks, books in the series are written and/or edited by leading experts in the field whilst consciously also affording space to emerging voices in the area, and are designed to appeal to students, postgraduate students and scholars who are interested in the range of disciplines in which critical research in football connects. The series is published in association with the Football Collective, www.footballcollective.org.uk. Available in this series Fan Activism, Protest and Politics Ultras in Post-Socialist Croatia Andrew Hodges Football, Fandom and Consumption Oliver Brooks Football Fandom, Protest and Democracy Supporter Activism in Turkey Dagˇhan Irak African Footballers in Europe Migration, Community, and Give Back Behaviours Ernest Yeboah Acheampong, Malek Bouhaouala and Michel Raspaud Football in Fiction A History Lee McGowan For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sport/ series/CFSFC

Football in Fiction

A History

Lee McGowan

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Lee McGowan The right of Lee McGowan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-36132-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34405-3 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This is for and because of Mick, Mags, Brian, Baz, Michala and Clare.

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: a long ball game

viii ix 1

1

Before Fever Pitch: a true history of football fiction

15

2

Current form: the contemporary landscape of football fiction

43

3

Line-markings: the topography of football fiction

73

4

‘Rules for the simplest game’: conventions of the football fiction genre

103

Two halves: differentiation between adult and young adult football fiction

118

‘Play the whistle!’: a conclusion of sorts

143

They think it’s all oeuvre . . . a catalogue of football fiction

148

Index

167

5

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 5.1 5.2 5.3

Historiography of football fiction Mainstream football fiction Young adult male football fiction Speculative and fantasy football fiction Crime-related football fiction Hooligan fiction Literary football fiction Women’s football fiction Young adult female football fiction Representative sample Distance from the pitch Gender of protagonist

78 80 82 85 86 87 89 91 93 124 125 127

Acknowledgements

It’s my Uncle Brian’s fault. He stepped into the breach when my old man left and gifted my soul with the destructive, reparative, uplifting, joyful, familial love of football. Not simply a team. The club we support is more than that, means more than that. Not simply a sport either. Brian took me to my first Cup Final and even though we lost, I fell deeply in love. Not with Glasgow Celtic Football Club, in love with what it is to be a Celtic Supporter. Football and its stories have had a profound impact on my life. The universality of its language, the friends, the patter, the team of Scots and English immigrants who returned glee to a heart darkened by homesickness. I write about football stories for what they have done for me. The title of Adrian Searle’s anthology of Scottish football fiction, The Hope That Kills Us (2002), is still the most fitting description of my relationship with the sport. Annually, I allow a football team to do worse to my heart than I have ever allowed a person. An exaggeration obviously, but the pull of a made-up story, with all the drama of the real thing and more, and a safety net thrown in for free is rather powerful. Talk of a safety net brings me to the apologia. There are two key factors the reader should be aware of before continuing. As a writer, I am neither a trained historian nor a cultural theorist. The work may be poorer for it; however, following Eduardo Galleano’s lead, as a passionate fan of the football novel, I hope my enthusiasm can compensate for a lack in particular skillsets. The theoretical framework employed here is drawn from narrative, literary and genre theory. A keen desire to learn more about football, particularly in novel form, coincides with a want to tell others about them, which is driven by annoyance at their continual dismissal. Two frustrations must also be noted: the speed at which the field is expanding; and omissions. The contemporary rate of publication makes it a little more difficult to keep track of new works, particularly self and independently published texts, let alone provide analysis. In the process of the research, important authors and works may be absent, while it has been necessary to make omissions, unforced omissions will also have occurred. I only speak one language for example. Mistakes, errors and glaring oversights are entirely my own. A project of this scope will always be the result of more than one person’s efforts. The best I can do here is offer my gratitude to all of you. A list would be

x

Acknowledgements

invidious, but I would note that I stand in awe of two texts in particular. David Wood’s stunning work is worthy of every praise offered (though I believe Jeff Hill nailed it). It turns assumptions made about the scarcity of South American football writing in English speaking countries on their head. Initially fearful that Peter Seddon had done my PhD for me, I now stand in awe of his book’s collection. To have been so comprehensive without contemporary lightning-speed search tools and the affordances of digital publication I do not know how you managed it, I’m just grateful you did. Those studies and people, whose work is so key to the research alongside the novels that inspire and fuel my wonder for and of the football narrative, are acknowledged along the way. Like Bill Shankly (Liverpool F.C. Manager 1959–1975), I believe football is a form of socialism, its success is dependent on a collective effort, people working together for each other. I’m in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to thank my colleagues for their welcome, fierce and continuing support. I am especially grateful to Donna Hancox and Helen Klaebe for their guidance and undaunting mentorship; to the beta-readers Tim Highfield, Fiona Crawford (who played backie-goalie on editing); and Liz Ellison. Jean Williams and John Hughson, you lead the way and are the very best of Professors. Your generosity and kindness are appreciated a great deal more than you know. For your undaunting and incredible efforts to get texts, and the joyous encouragement, I thank the amazing QUT Library team. Ellen Thompson you are a bloody marvel. I must also thank editors Simon Whitmore and Rebecca Connor at Routledge and series editors Peter Millward, Jamie Cleland, Dan Parnell, Stacey Pope and Paul Widdop for including this work in the series. The Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology provided much needed professional development leave for me to complete the text and for the funding to travel to football museums and conferences which made the initial and the ongoing project possible. Finally, my most amazing, incredible wife, Leah, and Hannah and Harper (a pair of eedjits [I love you more for it!]), you three must accept my deepest, deepest gratitude. For the support, the tea and biscuits, the patience and the encouragement, without you, none of this, or the stuff that happens around it, would ever happen. Thank you.

Introduction A long ball game

The success of the first dynasty of English football, Preston North End (PNE), is no more than the result of geography. Formed in 1875, still playing out of Deepdale, their first and only home ground, the club took out the first ‘Double’, winning the already prestigious FA Cup (1889) and the inaugural English Football League competition (1888/89) without losing a game. Scotsmen looking to play for pay, a wage found only at English clubs at the time, hopped on trains bound for London. After sitting in a carriage for hours too long for their patience, they disembarked in the largest train station after Glasgow. As a result, the Preston club found itself fielding an ‘invincible’ playing squad. The story echoes with the characteristics of a classic football story, the romance of winning the Cup, the fortune in good circumstance and a deserved, if subversive, victor. The story may even be true.1 The staff member at the Scottish Football Museum who recounted it was less interested in veracity (Russell 2004, 244) than national identity, cultural boundaries and football rivalry. At the time of telling, the primary functions were the amusement of the listener, to patriotically underline the Scots’ significant hand in the game’s early development and to lend stature to the storyteller’s depth of knowledge. Typical of the wellspring of stories that football culture thrives on (Piskurek 2018, 84), the Preston story illustrates the line between football insight and entertainment. This book is a story of football stories – specifically, the story of one form and its content. A malleable form, it can run the line balancing insight with entertainment. It can split defences; provide the reader with more of one than the other; and, at its worst – a 4–6–0 formation – languish in mid-table mediocrity. Alongside poetry, plays (screen and theatre), short stories, journalism, comic books, fanzines and that South American marvel of the imagination, the crónica (Wood 2017, 7), the novel is one strand in the narrative weave of football literature. Perceptions of its form tend to focus on its slim stature, its lightness of foot and it not enjoying much time on the pitch. There are genuine fears for, and brusque dismissals of, its place on the team, but it has pedigree, a wide range of movement and international sensibilities. With a little less grace than an average football novel, despite the footwork, this book establishes foundations for a genre. The work presented in its pages is the

2

Introduction

result of an enduring search, which may well have concluded a decade ago with a doctoral thesis that surveyed and mapped (with hindsight) a limited subsection. Instead, the continuing work has led here, to a broader, more detailed topographic perspective, one that more closely captures and establishes the breadth, depth and distinctive identity of the field. To dispel, all too commonly held notions of a lack of quality in the football novel, Football in Fiction brings together and acknowledges the work of writers, academic researchers, collectors, historians, ‘football culturalists’ and fans. In doing so, it has become a theoretically informed, field-guide, a scholarly map of an uncertain and, until now, only partially explored terrain. Over 500 texts from a period of close to 140 years have been considered. Development of a comprehensive historical perspective has enabled their mapping, organisation and categorisation. A theoretical framework drawing from and overlapping narrative theory, genre theory and literary analysis has been applied to gain a measure of behaviours within and across the texts, to create new knowledge of, and from, the composition of their corpus. The study of football fiction, and its generic distinction, is informed and influenced by the relatively small and valuable number of studies that have sought to examine the relationship between football and literature (May 2018, 928) and those, still fewer in number, that have sought to understand the football novel, beyond the scope of an individual text and its place within a broader context. Their aggregation is colligated with the finding and reading of as many more football novels as are accessible – through purchase, library loans, print availability and language barrier negotiation. The reading is supplemented with cross-referenced analyses, reviews, conference papers and journal articles, previous surveys and catalogues, essays and academic research ranging from an examination of one novel to an investigation of football literature across a whole continent. The Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football (1999) by Peter Seddon and The Encyclopedia of British Football (2002) by Richard Cox, Dave Russell and Wray Vamplew established base camp. Two articles on historical and taxonomic aspects have been substantially redeveloped (McGowan 2017, 2015). Relevant essays by DJ Taylor (2017, 1997), Will Buckley (2005) and Stephen O’Donnell and McGowan (2015) sit alongside conference papers (Plenderleith 2018; D’Arcy 2007), analyses on individual texts (Bairner 2011, 2009, 2000; Hill 2006, 35, 73, 113) and work on individual authors, such as Irvine Welsh (May 2018) and Sydney Horler (Harding 2015). There are those that capture a broad range (Stead 2013) and those that detail specific periods; Alethea Melling’s work on the emergence of women’s football fiction between 1915–1925 (1998) and Steve Redhead’s examination of the emergence of literary football fiction (2007), and fiction related to hooliganism (2004), in the 1990s, for example. While Cyprian Piskurek’s focus on English football fiction and film since the 1990s realises a contemporary view of the field in one country (2018), Andy Mitchell’s work highlights and asks questions of the history of football fiction in Scotland (2015). Analyses based in other geographic regions have furthered the studies’ reach and offered opportunities to consider works in languages other than English (inaccessible to this author otherwise), which include: Alexis Tadié’s

Introduction

3

work on football literature and English, Irish and Hungarian football writing (2012); Julian D’Arcy’s translation of a Danish novel; the Bengali football novels noted by Kausik Bandyopadhyay (2011); and the Australian football literature considered by Paul Mavroudis (2013). The largest area covered is the David Wood’s study of poetry, prose, theatre, culture, politics, history and the game in the remarkable Football Literature in South America (2017). The presentation of a holistic picture of one form of football writing necessitates omission across several levels – geographically inaccessible and unexplored territories, for example. For the purposes of clarity, comparison and the containment of scope and scale, other forms of football literature are rarely noted, and discussions of broader aspects of football culture are entirely neglected. This is regrettable as there are so many fascinating studies on football culture. Work led by Gertrud Pfister and Stacey Pope, Pete Millward, Paul Widdop, Jamie Cleland and Dan Parnell, for example; emergent researchers such as Alex Culvin and Hanya Pielichaty; and those inspirational leaders in their fields Jean Williams, John Hughson, Jeffrey Hill, Jayne Cauldwell, John Bale, Richard Guilianotti, Richard Haynes and so many more. The Football Collective, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe (FREE) and the Sports Literature Association and their affiliated research projects and publications also offer rich football research and territory to explore. There are also many studies on other forms of creative response to the game in art (Long et al. 2013; Hughson 2011); on film (Glynn 2018; Piskurek 2018) and in poetry; short stories (Wood 2017); and painting, sculpture and drama (see May 2018, 926), which are not considered here either. Two things to note before we kick off: First, football fiction may have preceded the modern version of football, or at least its contested initiation in 1863 (Curry 2014, 2159; Harvey 2013, 2154; Goldblatt 2006, 31). The discovery of the world’s oldest football (late 1540s) in the bedroom of Mary Queen of Scots in Stirling Castle in Central Scotland (Williams 2012) and reports of the same Queen stopping to watch a match as she travelled to London in 1568 (Hessayon 2015) suggest the round-ball game was being played in advance of its inclusion in the work of William Shakespeare (Galeano 1968, 59; Happe 1995, 157).2 A boon for any argument about the genre’s longevity, were we to include theatre, but the advent of football’s fiction is more likely to have arrived after the modern game’s formalisation, in England in the late 1870s; and second, the preferred term for the sport at the centre of this book and the stories it is concerned with is ‘football’, and the game will be referred to as such throughout. There are instances where its other common name, soccer, is employed, particularly around texts from the USA, Canada and Australia. The terms ‘football’ and ‘soccer’ should be taken as interchangeable. The remainder of the introduction will outline and define the field and present an overview of the text.

Football fiction Nick Hornby’s memoir, Fever Pitch (1992), is regarded as a watershed moment for football writing – most notably for aspirational literary football writers. The book’s informal treatise on the perils of fanaticism, in this case, supporting the

4

Introduction

Arsenal Football Club, remains immensely popular, despite questions regarding its authenticity as autobiography (Piskurek 2018, 9). Reverence for the text within the field of football writing has waxed, waned and, at times, pained even Hornby (Hill 2006, 119). Debates about fabrication aside, or its equalisation by dint of great storytelling, Fever Pitch indelibly changed the football writing industry. Novel-length works of non-fiction now examine every aspect of football, from following non-league clubs to national cultures, from stadium safaris to forensic examinations of tactics, from revisiting key matches and tournaments to looking at kit and unpacking powerful moments – Maradona’s hand is one example (Burns 2010).3 Football magazines and journals, including When Saturday Comes (Ticher 1986), The Blizzard (Wilson 2010) and Nutmeg (Palmer and Watson 2016), offer success stories in their own right. Writers such as Barney Ronay, Jonathon Wilson, Sarah Edworthy, Sid Lowe and Joe Gorman carry on traditions established by Don Davies (The Guardian), Geoffrey Green (The Times) and Hugh McIlvanney (The Observer, The Sunday Times). The autobiography, in particular, is pervasive in football writing (Tadié 2012, 1776). They exemplify an interest in writing on every aspect of every level of football imaginable and, according to Joyce Woolridge, have elevated construction of dominant, consensual, and shifting and emergent ideals around masculinity (2008, 7). Demand for the autobiography, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović (Ibrahimović and Lagercrantz 2013), forced the Swedish national library network to make significant changes to their systems management (Skåne 2011; Granlund 2012). More exceptional still, the book is not an autobiography. During a Literary Festival in Wales in 2015, its ghostwriter, David Lagercrantz, admitted making the whole book up. His approach, Plenderleith notes, was very much like writing a novel (2018, paras. 9–11). Rather than affect the book’s sales or the player’s reputation, the revelation simply adds to already overly mythologised notions around the footballer. Yet the game’s actual undisguised fiction has been dismissed for its lacking of good novels, good writing and that one example of a very good, let alone great, football novel. In 1961, Terence Delaney, editor of The Footballer’s Fireside Book, asserted that football had nothing to call a literary tradition (1961, xv). Brian Glanville, one of football writing’s most important figures, highlighted a scarcity in his own anthology, The Footballer’s Companion (1962). In the same book, Glanville noted the view that still dominates discussion on good football writing today – that the very act of writing about an essentially working-class pursuit immediately discounts the work from literary consideration (Braunias 2001, para. 17; see also Stead 2013, 240–241). Thirty years later, while editing the Norton Book of Sports, George Plimpton reinforced Delaney’s view that football had no important literature (1992, 14). Ian Hamilton, editor of the 1992 Faber Book of Soccer, made similar commentary (1992, 1). John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab correctly berate Plimpton and Hamilton for their stance (2008, xi). Unfortunately, their otherwise groundbreaking anthology of international football

Introduction

5

writing, The Global Game (2008), imitates previous collections where examples of non-fiction far outnumber those of fiction. More recently, and importantly for this research, there appears to be an increase in the publication of football fiction (Piskurek 2018, 4). In a 1997 essay, author and critic D.J. Taylor underlined football’s effectiveness as the backdrop for a novel (1997, 97) but noted that good football fiction was rare and of limited quality. As few as six novels, he suggested, could be legitimately regarded as literature (1997, 80). In a more recent article, Taylor acknowledges an upswing in interest and publication of football literature since the 1990s and is measurably kinder with regard to early works (2017 paras. 1–3). While his views have softened, they still echo long-standing attitudes toward the genre’s visibility and level of quality. These dismissals of course neglect the genre’s origins, the inclusion of radical woman’s football fiction in the 1920s (Melling 1998) and the powerful work emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, in England and elsewhere. The requirement of amorphous, relatively subjective literary qualities a text must carry to be considered or valued seems at odds with football’s more accepting, more embracing broader culture. While distinctions made between ‘high’ and ‘low’, or popular, forms of culture have been repudiated for being unhelpful in the analysis of cultural production (see May 2018, 924–926), an interesting counterpoint emerges in between dismissals of football’s fiction and developments in the game. The rise and initiation of celebrity footballers that took place in the early 1960s when Delaney and Glanville were making their respective cases re-emerged, or was more affluently aggrandised, in the 1990s when Plimpton, Hamilton and Taylor made their views known. These periods of significant change in the game aligned with growth in the middle-classes correlate to the abrogation of football fiction. It is possible these ‘new’ fans who sought football writing commensurate with their established reading habits and literary expectations were disappointed. Sports writing is often accused of condescension and anti-intellectualism. Sport, it seems, is for the physically active, not the thinkers (see Piskurek 2018, 83; Glanville in Braunias 2001). Or it could just be that football writers, attuned to their audience, smarted at being told by the intellectual their work could benefit from erudition or at having their game changed or wrestled away by clever blow-ins.

Definition While determinations are subjective and open to interpretation (Bale 2008, 14), a degree of certainty can be ascribed as to how much, or at least what level of sport, in this case football, is necessary to make a novel a football novel. The purpose of this study is a nuanced view of the inclusive corpus described as football fiction, with a specific focus on the relatively narrow form of the football novel. A work of football fiction will be regarded as one that significantly relies on football as a central, pivotal or substantive element; this can and should include more than one of the following: narrative structure; narrative situation; point of view;

6

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voice; language use; setting; and character development. This definition is clearly not free from subjectivity and is open to interpretation. The following will therefore demonstrate how the definition is arrived at and its purpose within the study. Arguments regarding the lack of quality in the genre tend to neglect the vast majority of football fiction. Reflecting the actual game, small numbers of highquality literary works sit within a much larger body. The works in this non-literary majority may lack originality, self-aware experimentation with form or stylistic innovation that would mark them in a literary sense, but they were/are popular (popular in the sense that large numbers have been sold and or read by relatively large numbers of people) and would be regarded as football fiction. New works will be identified, our understanding of conventions will be refined and relationships across texts will be explored. Discussion on and comparison of the relative merits of a given text are not of primary interest, though they will occur. What is known of football fiction, and within the genre, the football novel, is advanced and significantly expanded upon as a result. Taylor, among others, argues that football novels are rarely about football (1997, 79). Are crime novels not more often concerned with the investigation of a crime, rather than the crime itself? Even when a football novel is not primarily concerned with football, they will inform the reader’s perspective on the game (Bale 2008, 14). Where a character’s involvement, participation or observation in or of football is pivotal to the narrative, the novel can be seen to contribute to the genre, their inclusion of the game axiomatically changes the genre and the ways other texts in the genre can be coded and recognised – this discussion is presented in greater detail in Chapter Four. Work by Albert Camus and Vladimir Nabakov, who drew on their time as amateur players in their work (Turnbull 2010, 19), have been excluded. The Plague (1991, c1947), for example, makes a number of fleeting references to a match played by those sealed within Oran city walls, but they are not significant enough to warrant its inclusion. The Second Curtain (Fuller 1953) briefly describes a football stadium in the resolution of its murder mystery, and Incendiary (Cleave 2005) depicts the destruction of a sizable section of London’s Emirates Stadium. They are excluded on the same grounds as The Plague. However, texts that make significant use of the game, even where they were not intended to be read as a football novel, have been included. Football is rarely witnessed in, and footballers are completely absent from, The Football Factory (J. King 1996) and its sequels, but the texts are included in the study as a result of their frequent reference to English football. Barry Hines’ novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), contains a single, narratively significant, 20-page football scene (in a book of 159 pages). Decisive development of the protagonist and a central secondary character occurs within a match during school hours. Due entirely to this scene, the novel is included in several surveys and reviews on football fiction, a consideration which enables a further degree of its qualification as a football novel (Cox et al. 2002, Taylor 1997, 97 and Seddon 1999, 487). Debates of this nature bring us closer to determining parameters of the field. Examinations of fiction related to other sports have also provided informed and

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7

invaluable guidance. Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (Messenger 1981) and Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (Oriard 1982) make significant contributions to discourses of determination in the fields of sports fiction analysis. While broad ranging – Michael Oriard notes 1845 works of fiction across a wide range of sports – the latter draws on the work of genre studies theorist John G. Cawelti and folklorist Richard M. Dorson in its methodological approach to categorisation and is therefore influential in the formulation of the working definition used in this study. The Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature (2008), highlighted by John Bale, are also applicable, and arguably essential, particularly where Bale builds on and sharpens Oriard’s definition of sports fiction. In Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930s Through 1960s (2010),4 Michelle Nolan notes established, long-standing traditions in fiction related to the participation in and observation of baseball, basketball and the American version of football. In addition, these novels are accompanied by an equally plentiful field of academic research exploring the relationship between the sports and their respective literatures. Nolan, who also focuses on novels, highlights bodies of fiction relating to athletics, hockey, golf and tennis (2010, 1). Cricket (Bateman 2009; Mannathukkaren 2007; Bright-Holmes 1990) has been the subject of multiple books, as well as running (Robinson 2003). A special issue of Sport in History (edited by Hill and Williams 2009) included papers on cycling (Griffin 2009), surfing (Wood 2009) and Olympians (Bale 2009) and is an important publication in the widening range of sports fictions that have undergone academic scrutiny. A book-length work of football’s fiction is therefore timely. Alethea Melling defines football fiction by drawing on its roots in workingclass, factory or what she describes as dialect fiction (1998, 102). In contextualising their brief historical perspective, Cox et al. (2002, 199) follow her lead. Steve Braunias (2001) and Will Buckley (2005) assume use of the phrase without regard for its origins. It is, after all, the ‘natural’ and most fitting description. In discussing the collective body of works (with equal measures of nostalgic love and prickly hesitation), Seddon offers a loose-fitting definition in that substantial or significant reference to football is sufficient for qualification (1999, 486). Arguing that fiction and other forms of football-related writing are incompatible, Seddon may have defined a place for football fiction in broader terms (1999, 487). However, South American writers have found compatibilities in all forms of football writing for many decades (Wood 2017). Working from and adapting Bale’s sharpened view of Oriard’s definition of sports fiction, which argues for the indispensability of sport in the overall effectiveness of a work and that the protagonist and their narrative situation be located within the sport (1982, 6), this study has adopted the definition noted above. A passing episode or reference is not sufficient for inclusion (Robinson 2003, 215),5 the football novel should yield insight that could not be discovered through other forms of commentary or analysis (Horvath and Palmer 1987, 3). This refinement of a most recent definition provides suitable and accurate distinction and consistency in the consideration of

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Introduction

the treatment of, or a significant reliance on, football in a novel.6 The qualification (or disqualification) of a given work is dependent on its contribution to the field. The definition is key to facilitating the organisation and categorisation of the genre. To resist use of the existence of a large body of work to make broader claims, an appropriate theoretical framework will also be applied to the study.

Approach Football fiction can be described as a genre, but it is a more complex issue to qualify the statement and more challenging to establish and underline its generic qualities. While limited historiographic and taxonomic assemblies have been explored (McGowan 2017, 2015), this study underlines football fiction’s formal identification in generic terms. The three bodies of related theory informing key aspects of the book are noted briefly. The first two chapters of the book split the linear narrative history of football fiction into two distinct pieces. Chapter One determines the genre’s origins and charts its historical development across the first century of football fiction, up to the 1980s. Exploring the formulaic short novels of the early 1920s, the ongoing relationship between crime and football and the emergence of realist fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a composite of books, essays, articles and previous research augmented by reading and observation of the field and affirms the genre’s growth, breadth and depth and provides a basis for the analysis and identification of commonalities and conventions. Beginning with Hornby, Chapter Two continues the history from the 1990s, it outlines the contemporary status of football fiction and identifies several emergent trends and issues. They include the growth of literary fiction, a burgeoning proliferation of young adult fiction for those who identify as female as well as the genre’s traditional male target readership and the significant numbers of self-published football novels available. These chapters take narrative and narrative structure, or the narrative statements that make up its structure (Chatman 1978: 31), to be defined and described as the succession of fictional events (Rimmon-Kenan (1991: 2) that make up its dualistic components, the story (content, events, actors, spatial and temporal conditions) and its discourse (the ways the story is told). Both chapters draw on elements of narrative theory, commonly used to examine the distinctive nature of narrative, and its various structures, elements, uses and effects. In his influential work Narrative Discourse (1980), Gerard Genette’s uses the term ‘voice’ to designate the combination of effects contributing to what we know as narrative situation (1980, 212) – who the storyteller is, his/her point of view, his/her distance from the events and how he/she knows what is being told – are all factors. Henry James’ essay The Art of Fiction (1888) first outlined concerns with achieving greater reality through literary and, more specifically, narrative methods. Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921) developed James’ ideas on how plot and character are related to the position of the ‘centre of consciousness’ within the narrative, the reader’s place is with, in or around this ‘centre of consciousness’

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as the story is ‘told’ (Keen 2015, 8). In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth revised Lubbock’s positioning of narration. His resulting model offered three modes of narration: the ‘implied author’ which has no distinct narrator and works as a kind of hands-on stage management; the ‘undramatised narrator’, where the story passes through the consciousness of the storyteller – the author and narrator are separate entities – offering the finessed and sophisticated intellectual experience; and the third mode, the ‘dramatised narrator’, based on Lubbock’s adaptation of James’s notion of character as reflector, offers the closest view of the narrative (Booth 2005, 87). Genette has since clarified the role of the narrator, the narrative instance, from the role of the writer, the writing instance. Freeing traditional constructs of the roles of, and relationship between, the author and narrator, he distinguishes between the time of writing and the time of narration, when the events being described are purported to have taken place (Genette 1980, 213). A story, regardless of how it is told or who is telling, can happen without a specification of place whereas the story must, he argues, be located in time, specifically, the time of the narration (Genette 1980, 215). While this discussion is relevant to chapters unpacking the genre’s history and illustrates the theory underpinning determinations around the elements of individual texts, the field of narrative theory will not be discussed at length in the book. This discussion is noted here to highlight terms and references applied and the theory underpinning textual analysis taking place across this book. Describing, framing and presenting a detailed historiography of football fiction’s codified landscape, Chapter Three combines distant reading, specifically the models of abstraction developed by Franco Moretti (2013, 2005), and close reading textual analysis. The model is used to develop, refine and revise a previous timeline and build on the taxonomy developed in previous research (McGowan 2017). In line with Moretti’s argument, the relatively large volume of works that feature football would preclude close reading of every individual text (2005, 67). Rather than foreground Moretti’s theories on distant reading, the model of abstraction is employed in this chapter to organise an otherwise unwieldy number of texts for the purposes of deeper analysis. The models assist in the interpretation and realisation of a clearer sense of their social context within the genre. A majority of the texts included have been read, though not all closely. Familiarity with the content enables a high degree of accuracy in their population of the model. Some detailed textual analysis will be included; however, the taxonomic approach determined for Football in Fiction is designed to observe and interpret trends and patterns, pragmatic consideration of the genre and a wider, more informed ‘cartographic’ assessment of as many football novels as possible. Football fiction is characterised by recurring patterns and identifiable structures and conventions. Football novels are predisposed to respond to (Devitt 2008, 573) and provide the narrative grammar that reinforces reader expectation (Gelder 2004, 2). Where genre constitutes a tacit contract between writer and reader, use of recognisable elements encourages efficient communication, offers ideological closure and limits the meaning of a given text (Chandler 2014, 3).

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Their representation and repetition are primary requirements in situating a football novel within the field. Football fiction also exhibits the fluid, continuously transformative movement seen in more established genres. Football novels are just as dependent on generic traditions, and common use of literary techniques and devices such as setting, character and plot and their presentation has continued to evolve and change. If commonalities and conventions can be discretely identified (even where they overlap with other genres) and noted as having impact across several texts, the body of work can be perceived as a field of restricted production (Bourdieu 1993, 62). Chapter Four draws on genre theory to explore and identify the definitive elements used to reinforce, soothe and subvert reader expectation. The narrative grammar, or morphological arrangements, of a football novel includes the role of the sport in a text, the story’s setting, football’s influence and impact on the protagonist and the use of language, the football vernacular. Young adult and adult football fiction narratives are inherently related. They are about football; the game itself; players; individual matches; and the consequences of a win, lose or draw, but, while they are closely tied through these factors, there are clear and distinct divergences in the presentation of their narratives. Chapter Five adopts a second distant reading model of abstraction to present a cartographical perspective of significant divergences in the presentation of their narratives. Close textual analyses elucidate the conventions and characteristics highlighted in Chapter Four as they occur within two specific texts and in doing so illustrate the basic narrative grammar of the football novel in operation. Given that new, original and innovative football novels continue to be produced and discovered, the presentation of a fixed list of individual novels, series, and other long form football fiction is problematic. The notion of creating what might be seen as an exhaustive repository, the act of capturing and categorising an entire range of texts as a static formation runs counter to the tenets of genre studies. However, a list gathered through an expansive process of consultation, one that speaks to the practicality of stating a position and demonstrating the scope and scale of the field has been deemed useful for the purposes of guidance and illustration. Following the book’s conclusion – “Play the whistle!” – the final section of the book is a catalogued list entitled, “They think it’s all oeuvre . . .”, which gathers and organises the novels noted throughout the book and includes those discovered that have not been discussed. This book constructs a narrative of the football novel. It notes how the form has been stretched and pulled the way a back four defensive unit would against the current Barcelona front line. Marking recognisable conventions and characteristics, demonstrating historical longevity and understanding its evolution is borne of processes of abstraction that require a step back and analysis that requires a step forward. Familiarity with the body of works as well as the individual units underscores their merit and significance. The literary is considered alongside the popular; it does not stop the former from standing out and ensures the latter are not dismissed too early – it is a team effort. The broad picture of the

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football novel is more than a sum of its parts, yet the whole story is located within the measure of that thin line between insight and entertainment, between regard for veracity and great storytelling.

Notes 1 Interview. Kenny Strang. Scottish Football Museum, 2010. 2 In Act Two, Scene One of The Comedy of Errors (1592), Dromio of Ephesus asks, ‘Am I so round with you as you with me, That like a football you do spurn me thus?’ In Act One, Scene Four of King Lear (1606), the Earl of Kent kicks and taunts Oswald with the line, ‘Nor tripped neither, you base football player’. 3 Maradona: The Hand of God (Burns 2010) a biography built around the Argentinian star’s life and his famous goal against England in the Quarter-Finals of the 1986 World Cup. 4 Another great source of discussion on sports fiction is the Sport Literature Association, which has an annual conference (usually held in the USA). Initiated in 1983, the organisation produces the journal, Aethlon. Though it must be noted that football or ‘soccer’ has not prominently featured. As Anthony May notes in his analysis, only 38 of the 1731 critical essays and works of fiction published in the journal relate to football (2018, 926). 5 In Running in Literature (2003) Roger Robinson discusses ‘running’ novels. John Bale discusses Robinson’s definition, adapts it and applies it to the much broader category of ‘sport’ (2008, 14). 6 A simpler definition was developed in McGowan (2015), following reasonable critique in May (2018, 925), it has been adapted and refined for the purpose of this study.

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Braunias, Steve. 2001. ‘There’s a Writer of the Field.’ Reuters Foundation Fellowship. Green College Archives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bright-Holmes, John, ed. 1990. Lord’s and Commons: Cricket in Novels and Stories. London: Penguin. Buckley, Will. 2005. British Obsession with Football. www.britishcouncil.org/arts-literatureliteraturematters-nov05-willbuckley.htm. British Obsession with Football. no longer available. Burns, Jimmy. 2010, c2001. Maradona: The Hand of God. London: Bloomsbury. Camus, Albert. 1991, c1947. The Plague. London: Vintage. Chandler, Daniel. 2014, c1997. An Introduction to Genre Theory. http://visual-memory. co.uk/daniel/Documents/intgenre/chandler_genre_theory.pdf. Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Cleave, Chris. 2005. Incendiary. London: Simon and Schuster. Cox, Richard, Dave Russell and Wray Vamplew. 2002. Encyclopedia of British Football. London: Routledge. Curry, Graham. 2014. ‘The Origins of Football Debate: Comments on Adrian Harvey’s Historiography.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 31 (17): 2158–2163. doi: 10.1080/90523367.2014.913573. D’Arcy, Julian. 2007. ‘The European Soccer Novel: Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s “Fodboldenglen” and David Peace’s “The Damned Utd”.’ In Conference on Sport and Physical Culture in European Literature. Budapest, Hungary March. Delaney, Terence, ed. 1961. The Footballer’s Fireside Book. London: William Heinemann. Devitt, Amy, J. 2008. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Fuller, Roy. 1953. The Second Curtain. London: Derek Verschoyle. Galeano, Eduardo. 1968. Su majestad el fútbol. Montevideo: Arca. Gelder, Ken. 2004. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. New York: Routeledge. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse, translated by J. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, from Figures III (1972), Paris: Ed du Seuil. Glanville, Brian. 1962. The Footballer’s Companion. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Glynn, Stephen. 2018. The British Football Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldblatt, David. 2006. The Ball Is Round. London: Viking. Granlund, John. 2012. ‘The Zlatan Book Can Stop the Libraries’ e-Books.’ Aftonbladet. 8 March. www.aftonbladet.se/a/7lmxkW. Griffin, Brian. 2009. The Romance of the Wheel: Cycling, Fiction and Late NineteenthCentury Ireland. Sport in History 29 (2): 277–295. doi: 10.1080/17460260902872693. Hamilton, Ian. 1992. The Faber Book of Soccer. London: Faber & Faber. Happe, François. 1995. ‘Fiction vs Power: The Postmodern American Sports Novel.’ In Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, 157–175. Amsterdam: Rodopli. Harding, John. 2015. ‘Reel of Fortune.’ The Blizzard. 1 March. www.theblizzard.co.uk/article/ reel-fortune. Harvey, Adrian. 2013. ‘The Emergence of Football in Nineteenth-Century England: The Historiographic Debate.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 30 (18): 2153– 2163. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2013.839551. Hessayon, Ariel. 2015. ‘From Mary, Queen of Scots to the FIFA Women’s World Cup: A Brief History of Women’s Football.’ History Extra. 25 June. www.historyextra.com/period/frommary-queen-of-scots-to-the-fifa-womens-world-cup-a-brief-history-of-womens-football/.

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Hill, Jeffrey. 2006. Sport and the Literary Imagination: Essays in History, Literature, and Sport. Bern: Peter Lang. Hill, Jeffrey and Jean Williams. 2009. ‘Introduction.’ Sport in History 29 (2): 127–131. doi: 10.1080/17460260902872578. Hines, Barry. 1968. A Kestrel for a Knave. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hornby, Nick. 1992. Fever Pitch. London: Gollancz. Horvath, Brooke K. and William J. Palmer. 1987. ‘Preface.’ Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1): 3–7. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v033/33.1.horvath.html. Hughson, John. 2011. ‘Not Just Any Wintry Afternoon in England: The Curious Contribution of C.R.W. Nevinson to “Football Art”.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 28 (18): 2670–2687. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2011.611929. Ibrahimović, Zlatan and David Lagercrantz. 2013. I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović. London: Viking. James, Henry. 1888. The Art of Fiction. In Partial Portaits. New York: Mac Millan. https:// public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html. Keen, Suzanne. 2015. Narrative Form: Revised and Expanded. Second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. King, John. 1996. The Football Factory. London: Vintage. Long, Jonathan, Jim Parry, Doug Sandle and Karl Spracklen. 2013. Fields of Vision: The Arts in Sport. Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association. Lubbock, Percy, c1921. The Craft of Fiction. London: Jonathon Cape. www.gutenberg.org/ files/18961/18961-h/18961-h.htm. Mannathukkaren, Nissim. 2007. Reading Cricket Fiction in the Times of Hindu Nationalism and Farmer Suicides: Fallacies of Textual Interpretation. The International Journal of the History of Sport 24 (9): 1200–1225. Mavroudis, Paul. 2013. ‘Against the Run of Play: The Emergence of Australian Soccer Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 30 (5): 484–499. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2013.782856. May, Anthony. 2018. ‘The Relationship Between Football and Literature in the Novels of Irvine Welsh.’ Soccer & Society 19 (7): 924–943. doi: 10.1080/14660970.2016.1267631. McGowan, Lee. 2015. ‘Marking Out the Pitch: A Historiography and Taxonomy of Football Fiction.’ Soccer & Society 16 (1): 76–97. doi: 10.1080/14660970.2014. McGowan, Lee. 2017. ‘Football and Its Fiction.’ In Routledge Handbook of Football Studies, edited by John Hughson, Kevin Moore, Ramón Spaaij and Joseph Maguire, 222–235. New York: Routledge. Melling, Alethea. 1998. ‘Ray of the Rovers: The Working-Class Heroine in Popular Football Fiction 1915–1925.’ International Journal of the History of Sport 15 (1): 97–122. doi: 10.1080/09523369808714014. Messenger, Christian. 1981. Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner Messenger. New York: Columbia University Press. Mitchell, Andy. 2015. ‘The Search for a Great Scottish Football Novel.’ 28 August. British Society of Sports History, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. www.scottishsporthistory.com/uploads/3/3/6/0/3360867/bssh_talk_scottish_novels_-_ illustrated.pdfscottishsportshistory.com.au. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps and Trees. London: Verso. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso. Nolan, Michelle. 2010. Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930s Through 1960s. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. O’Donnell, Stephen and McGowan, Lee. 2015. ‘Scripted Drama: The Long Wait for Football to be Taken Seriously as a Literary Subject.’ The Blizzard (16): 116–125.

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Oriard, Michael. 1982. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Palmer, Ally and Terry Watson. 2016. Nutmeg. Edinburgh: Palmer Watson. Piskurek, Cyprian. 2018. Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures: Slum Sport, Slum People? London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8. Plenderleith, Ian. 2018. ‘Football Stories: From Fictitious Reality to “Real” Fiction.’ In Writing Football Conference. Germany: Dortmund University, 12–14 July. Plimpton, George, ed. 1992. Norton Book of Sports. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Redhead, Steve. 2004. ‘Hit and Tell: A Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir.’ Soccer and Society 5 (3): 392–403. doi: 10.1080/1466097042000279625. Redhead, Steve. 2007. ‘This Sporting Life: The Realism of The Football Factory.’ Soccer and Society 8 (1): 90–108. doi: 10.1080/14660970600989525. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith.1991, c1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. New York: Routledge. Robinson, Roger. 2003. Running in Literature. Jackson, TN: Breakaway. Russell, Dave. 2004. Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Seddon, Peter. 1999. Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football. Second edition. Boston Spa: British Library. Stead, Peter. 2013. ‘Brought to Book: Football and Literature.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Football, edited by Rob Steen, Jed Novick and Huw Richards, 240–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tadié, Alexis. 2012. ‘Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (12): 1774–1790. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2012.714944. Taylor, David John. 1997. ‘“Rally Round You Havens!”: Soccer and the Literary Imagination.’ In Perfect Pitch 1) Home Ground, edited by Simon Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Taylor, David John. 2017. ‘A Football Novel Is Never Simply about Football.’ The Guardian. 27 May. www.theguardian.com/global/2017/may/27/football-novel-boys-schoolstories-modern-fiction. Ticher, Mike. 1986. When Saturday Comes. n.d. www.wsc.co.uk/about-wsc. Turnbull, John. 2010. ‘Alone in the Woods: The Literary Landscape of Soccer’s Last Defender.’ World Literature Today (84): 19–22. doi: 10.2307/27871126. Turnbull, John, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab. 2008. The Global Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Williams, Huw. 2012. Get ‘Up Close and Personal with the World’s Oldest Football.’ BBC Scotland, May 19. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-18119054. Wilson, Jonathon. 2010. The Blizzard. London: Blizzard. Wood, David. 2009. ‘On the Crest of a Wave: Surfing and Literature in Peru.’ Sport in History 29 (2): 226–242. doi: 10.1080/17460260902872669. Wood, David. 2017. Football and Literature in South America. London: Routledge. Woolridge, Joyce. 2008. ‘These Sporting Lives: Football Autobiographies 1945–1980.’ Sport in History 28 (4): 620–640. doi: 10.1080/17460260802580669. ‘Zlatan makes an e-book success.’ Skåne. 8 November 2011. www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/ skane/zlatan-gor-succe-som-e-bok.

Chapter 1

Before Fever Pitch A true history of football fiction

Nick Hornby once said he never wanted to read a football novel. He couldn’t believe in a fictional team like Melchester Rovers or their players; for him, there is enough drama in the real thing (2006). Revered Mexican author Juan Villoro (2016) highlighted what little room he thinks is left to the fiction author when the game, with all of its comedy, tragedy and epic plotlines, has so much already (in Wood 2017, 217). Listening to football on the radio led Turkish author Orhan Pamuk to describe the game as being faster than words (Speigel 2008, para. 9). He noted the ekphratic impact, the slight delay arising in descriptions of action observed, a tense interlude between events playing out on the pitch and their conveyance by the commentator. Irrespective of the broadcaster’s ability to transport the listener, the spoken word simply cannot keep pace with the ball. Drama, plotlines and tension. Rather than see them as obstacles, writers have sought to capitalise on these qualities, to use them to underpin the sport’s natural, possibly romantic, propensity to be put into words. Throughout its history, the football novel has been exploiting Pamuk’s delay, creating space for the reader’s imagination between open play and its capture on record. This chapter tells the story of football’s fiction in the 20th century. It begins with those first novels to exploit the interlude, to convey lessons, celebrate the sport, make use of it as a vehicle for narrative. The development of crime-related football fiction is highlighted, as are prolific authors, the emergence of literary football novels and a brief and important spell of women’s football fiction. The chapter and the story bring us to one of the field’s most important works: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992). The dramatised memoir of a football fan’s fixation played into the economic, political and cultural elevation of the English Premier League. Its unprecedented success prompted acclaimed sportswriter Marcela Araujo to carve football writing into two categories: everything before Fever Pitch and everything after (in Braunias 2001, para. 19). Her demarcation guides this book’s two opening chapters, which construct a linear narrative across the span of football fiction’s longevity. As the first uneven half, this chapter consolidates an extensive primary research, the author’s previous work in the field (McGowan 2017) and the texts,

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surveys, journal articles and analyses by academics (Wood 2017; Stead 2013; Cox et al. 2002; and Melling 1998), writers (Taylor 2017, 1997) and fastidious historians (Seddon 1999).

Origins The first football stories appeared in short novels, comics and periodicals in late 19th century, which suggests the genre originated in the late 1870s. They were written with speed, in volume, and most often featured or took place within the environs of an exclusive public school (Cox et al. 2002, 200; Taylor 1997, 84). Their portrayal of the game, codified by middle and upper classes, was aimed at working- and lower-middle-class readers who wanted to see the game they enjoyed on the page (Taylor 2017, para. 5). These early novels, informed and influenced by the plot and story construction typical of schoolboy stories in comics and journals, established narrative structures, situations and patterns that would be employed across football fiction for decades afterwards. These drew on archetypes from the game itself, including underestimation of a player as a result of their appearance, the presence of midfield meastro, a natural but reluctant team leader and an against-the-odds-last-minute-cup-final winner. Moral lessons on the importance of participation were obligatory. Victorian boys’ journals and magazines, such as The Boy’s Own Paper (1879– 1967), featured pictures, short stories and comic strips on a range of subjects and sports, including football.1 Many similarly formatted comic books followed the success, style and format. Chums (1892–1934), The Boys’ Realm of Adventure and Sport (1902–1927) and Adventure (1921–1961) frequently published stories featuring football characters. These stories included Fred Reckless: Amateur, The Team that Shook Division 2 and Podge Parks, which was about an 18-stone goalkeeper. Comics are noted across the genre’s history to highlight the continuation of the original form. They signal significant change and, because they set of a range of stereotypes for football fiction’s cast of characters, their limited variants and the range of possible outcomes. The earliest example of novel-length football fiction discovered to date is: The Boys of Highfield: or, the Hero of Chancery House (1878) by H. Frederick Charles, republished in 1908 and in 1917.2 The next discovered in the course of this study is Bright Sunset – the Last Days of a Young Scottish Football Player (Riddell 1884), an overtly religious morality tale of a schoolboy who, having suffered a football injury, bravely faced his resultant slow and early death (Mitchell 2015, para. 4). The book proved to be very popular (12 editions published), possibly due to William Riddell, the story’s protagonist, being a real person. His fictionalised story is presented as an epistolary between a sister in Canada, and his mother, who in a possible nod toward credible verisimilitude, is credited with co-authorship. Apart from the knee being badly hurt during the game and the cover drawing depicting the sport itself, there is little football in the book, except where it underlines the apparent dangers in the game’s pursuit. Both texts were published by the Religious

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Tract Society in London with a clear moralising purpose. Other early examples include: Football in Coketown: or, Who Shall Be Captain? (Burrage 1893), with its central conflict contained in the title; Desmond Coke’s The School Across the Road (1910), which focuses on the school team’s seasonal plight; and Blair, the Half Back Ranger (1910), a maudlin tale of a football-loving boy who dies young while finding salvation in religion. Achieving success, and leaning on the traits of early football fiction, A Mother’s Son (Fry 1907), a sports memoir disguised as novel, includes football at several points in its narrative.3 These books characterise football fiction’s early development; they contain what is best described as limited football content, make appropriate use of the game’s vernacular and use the sport to convey or further conflict and its resolution and motivate character interaction. Due to Arnold Bennett’s standing as a writer and his normalisation of football as a populist activity, Peter Stead (2013) is among those who suggest the origins of football’s literature begin with The Card (Bennett 1910). The story features a mayoral candidate’s bid to win the vote of the patronage of his local football club – he sees and wants to exploit the club’s sizable community. The novel offers wit and discerning commentary on links drawn between politics and sport. Detailing a match between local rivals Knype and Bursley,4 it manages to capture the lives of what we now know to be the forerunners of football as a profession. Echoing the Preston North End story, Bennet’s professionals are mostly Scots players. Bennett’s astute observational fiction also drew on football in a number of short stories in his collection The Matador of Five Towns (1912). These including the title story, which features the same local teams noted in The Card and a very good Manchester Rovers side. In the same collection, Three Episodes in the Life of Mr Colinshaw, Dentist, features a match between Hanbridge F.C. (formed from the remains of the recently bankrupt Knype) and Tottenham Hotspur, a fictionalised version of the real team. Bennett was not the only writer during the era to use football or a real team for reference. Two pieces of fiction, as well as high regard in literary circles, see PG Wodehouse appear in a number of surveys of the field (Taylor 2017, 1997; Stead 2013; Seddon 1999). D.J. Taylor asserts that it is likely that the real game’s growing popularity and potential sales may have prompted Wodehouse to opportunistically insert football into Mike and Psmith (1910), (Taylor 2017, para. 3). Originally published simply as Mike in 1909, the narrative follows its bank clerk protagonists Psmith and Mike Jackson who fake a passion for Manchester United to improve their fortunes with their boss (Taylor 2017, para. 3). Prior to the novel, Wodehouse published Petticoat Influence (1906), a short story featuring a young woman who has her brother clarify the differences between association football and rugby while he wins his Oxford Blue for the former. As well as shrewd insight on Wodehouse, Stead offers engaging argument for the inclusion of the D.H. Lawrence short story Strike Pay (1934, c1913).5 A match between rivals Notts County and Aston Villa – two teams still operating today – involves a colleague of the story’s main characters enabling the incorporation of the game into its characters’ working day (Stead 2013, 241).

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The two novels and four short stories from Bennett, Wodehouse and Lawrence, prominent members of the literary establishment, draw on football to establish setting, drive conflict and develop character. They highlight football’s early appearances in literary fiction and counterpoint the short-range stories captured in comics published across the period. The books featured in the next stage of the genre’s development reflect a pivotal shift in the game. Celebrations of the gentile amateur nature of football in exclusive private schools (Cox et al. 2002, 201) gave way to more realistic depictions as an increasingly professionalised game took on its increasingly prominent position on the British cultural landscape.

The 1920s and 1930s: women female footballers and the genre’s first prolific author Abundant and popular football fiction in inexpensive pulp fiction and serials marked the peak of 1920s football fiction. The decade is one of the genre’s most vibrant. Before they were shut down, female footballers made the most of the limelight; Sydney Horler contributed as many as 20 entries to the field, and football got mixed up with crime. First though, we must note the continuation of schoolboy football stories and the lessons they would learn from the game. There was no diminishment in the employment of football as a vehicle for the inculcation of lessons on team spirit and class (Taylor 1997, 90). Strickland in R.A.H. Goodyear’s Strickland of the Sixth (1922) led his teammates on a mission to teach a rough group of mercenary apprentices a few lessons in football and civility. Fair to middling expectations were sufficient for Jock McPherson’s Stick It Ginger! (1922), a shallow, rags-to-riches bildungsroman about a romanticised football hero. Herbert Hayens’ Play Up Kings! (1930) is a fish-out-of-water take on football as a great leveller reinforces the unparalleled civility of the upperclass boys’ team. Despite their interwar publication, these stories lost little of the innocence lamented by Philip Larkin in MCMXIV.6 Between them, the 88-novel series the Aldine Football Library (Oldham 1925–1931), aimed predominantly at young male readers, and the 566-volume Amalgamated Press series The Football and Sports Library, aimed at older readers, produced hundreds of formulaic football novels. Conservative advocates for clean living and non-radical support of the patriarchy, the series hosted a plethora of formulaic football hero and heroic team stories. Clubs on the brink of liquidation would win against surmountable odds. Down-and-out coaches made the most of second chances. Star strikers, unearthed or revived from the unlikeliest of places, would score last-minute cup-final winners. Their heroes were courageous, honourable and athletic (Huggins and Williams 2005, 29). Plotlines were repetitive; the good, the honest, the hard-working and moral would always prevail (Seddon 1999, 486). The central ingredients holding these elements together were consistent, too: winning football, comically villainous antagonists, and some self-serving over-zealous nationalism. The texts borrowed character types,

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conventions and narrative formulae from the schoolboy story format and tended to emphasise amateur traditions (Cox et al. 2002, 201). Authors, such as Kay Gray, P.W. Bottom and Harold Graham,7 spiced their narratives with criminal subplots and devices such as kidnapping and blackmail that were contemporaneous to crime fiction at the time. This study, and the collection gathered in the book’s final section ‘They think it’s all oeuvre’, will note and reference a number of individual texts that are representative of the larger body of these two series. Sydney Horler is one of the most important and prolific contributors to the genre. Following an unsuccessful run of novels on tennis and boxing, the former sports journalist perceived a lack of fiction on what had become England’s national game. His recollection of a boyhood visit to Craven Cottage, the home ground of his favoured team, Fulham F.C. (Harding 2015, para. 30), inspired the first of as many as 20 football novels. Horler would go on to be credited with writing at least 157 novels. His first novel, Goal! A Romance of the English Cup Ties (1920), is a vibrant, almost grown-up take on schoolboy traditions. A young, down-on-his-luck player revives his career after a chance reconnection with a former mentor. After helping the club gain the league title and the cup, he wins over the romantic lead and puts a stop to the underhand dealings of the nefarious club owner, who also had designs on the romantic lead. With the conflict embodied in the clean-cut virtuous footballer outwitting the shadowy villains, it offered few new or innovative ideas to the genre, but it was heralded as ‘a first’ in newspaper reviews and sparked the deluge of football novels and film (Harding 2015, para. 25). Horler’s titles, Love, the Sportsman (1922); The Legend of the League (1923a); and The Ball of Fortune (1925), were among those syndicated and serialised by the News of the World newspaper (Harding 2015, para 32). Horler would also return to several characters on numerous occasions, including the stoic pastor-like Scots manager, Angus McPhee.8 Twelve novels featured football star and international spy Tiger Standish, who scored goals on Saturdays and spent the rest of the week engaging in espionage. The work of Home Goal (The Worst Team in the Army 1928) and J.O. Standish (Leader of The League 1928)9 – two authors who feature regularly in the Football and Sports Library (Amalgamated Press) – adopt a strikingly similar style, word choice and story structures to each other and to Horler. The use of the name ‘Standish’ is also suggestive of Horler’s influence or direct input. Without further necessary research, claims with regard to pseudonyms are anecdotal. On rare occasions, accepted and dominant ideologies around moral standards and conformity to expectation were challenged. Stories featuring feminist, socialist women presented sharp contrast to the genre’s majority. In a window between 1920 and 1922, stories situating ‘the football heroine’ at the centre of the narrative highlighted women playing great football and fighting for their rights and their place in the workforce, including profit-sharing and cooperative structures (Melling 1998, 98). Reflecting the social context around real women’s football teams, they told stories of Ray Lester, Bessie Booth and Meg Foster and were included in the Football and Sports Library collection.

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Ray Lester, the protagonist in Ray of the Rovers (Hinckes 1922), moves to Liverpool to work in the Rinsford Draper’s shop and to play for the highly acclaimed Rinsford Ladies Football team supported by the store. As a result of her own abilities and her confidence in her teammates, she wins ownership of the shop in a challenge match and uses her authority to change the work culture and bring equity to the store’s operation and distribution of profits. In Bess of Blacktown (Grey 1922), the eponymous Bessie Booth forms a works team despite the protestations of a malevolent management structure. The team quickly becomes the catalyst for collective action against the nefarious, capitalist factory owner and his treatment of the workers. Bessie and the team thwart the factory owner by moving wholesale to a rival mill – a mill they help revive with a deal for a share in the profits. Meg Foster, star of a trilogy (Meg Foster Footballer 1921; Captain Meg 1922; Football Island 1922), forms a team independent of a workplace (a rarity for women’s teams) and leads the team on a range of adventures, including an international tour. The trilogy echoes actual events in women’s football such as the Lady Florence Dixie’s British Ladies, who toured the United Kingdom in the 1890s, and the Dick, Kerr Ladies who took their tours internationally.10 Sadly Ray, Bess, Meg and a handful of peers proved to be exceptions among the short novels (80–100 pages or so) featuring female teams. They subversively maintained an artifice of the romance of the traditional football stories and simultaneously presented an overtly political stance, offering a dynamic and instructive approach to young working-class women wrestling with their newfound post-war status (Melling 1998, 99). Alethea Melling’s (1998) detailed account of these texts and their cultural context should be consulted. The novels also reflect the changing workforce and the explosion of interest in the women’s game in Britain and Europe. They underline the devastating social, political and economic impact brought about by the subjugation – a 50-year ban, based on spurious accusations of misappropriation, which began in late 1921 – of women’s football in England. The subsequent scarcity of female characters and women’s football is acute and tangible in football fiction’s history. Stable formulae and conformity to expectation were also being challenged in a number of other works, works that would be regarded as having a much stronger literary pedigree. Sorrell and Son (1925), Warwick Deeping’s speculative fiction (it closes in the 1940s) about a father and his son, is a conscientious meditation on class, family and women’s rights. Held up as the first football novel with literary aspiration (Cox et al. 2002, 200), J.B. Priestley’s The Good Companions (1929) underlines the importance of the local club to factory workers. His description of their attendance at a Bruddersford United match recognises the fulfilment popular culture afforded the working classes and locates football within the novel in terms of nation’s democratic future (Stead 2013, 242).11 Yuri Olesha’s novel Envy, first published in Russian in 1927, includes a character, Volodya, who is the

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Russian national team’s goalkeeper. Olesha also incorporates a detailed description of an international match between Russia and Germany, which contrasts the success of collectivism over individualism in the eyes of a successful industrialist, one the novel’s key characters. The football in these three works is not what would be described as substantive; however, the work of Deeping and Priestley is included in a number of other surveys and while Olesha’s work is not, as a highly regarded work of Russian literature it warrants inclusion. David Wood notes the oldest Brazilian novel with football content as Esphinge (‘Sphinx’), Henrique Maximiamo Coelho Neto’s 1908 novel, which offers a rare glimpse of a European footballer in South America (Wood 2017, 45 and 46). Coehlo Neto, one of the most influential people in the development of the Brazilian football, also wrote Mano, livro da saudade (‘Mano, A Book of Emotional Longing’, 1924) after his son passed as the result of an injury sustained while playing football. In addition to uncovering these works, Wood highlights the writing of Mário de Andrade, including his cultural landmark novel Macunaíma (1928), and Gracioliano Ramos, which document the social and political changes the writers were witness to in the late 1920s in Brazil (Wood 2017, 54–57). Their use of football as a means to bring light to matters of political discourse would echo in works we see emerging in the 1950s and early 1960s. Novels by Anton Lind suggests the schoolboy-style story found in comics and early football novels continued to be popular in the 1930s. Lind wrote two series that featured football fiction. In Rags, the Invincible (1937), Rags becomes ‘invincible’ through playing for the local private/public-school team. As well as being an excellent footballer, Rags participates in a range of activities, including flying an aeroplane (Rags, the Airman 1937). Lind’s second football novel featured in the series Dingy and Pips Ltd. Detectives (Lind 1939). The two lead characters investigate trouble related to the local football team by joining the squad. Alongside the continuation of the simplistic football narrative, football novels had begun to show signs of growing up. The transition from these wholesome, incredulous heroics to equally incredulous, violent narratives and far more dangerous villains is perhaps exemplified in the development of Horler’s work. The hero in Goal! (1920) is knocked out by henchmen who want to prevent his obviously vital participation in the cup final. The hero in The Legend of the League (1923) is deliberately knocked out on the pitch and then a second time during his kidnapping. The romantic interest is kidnapped and threatened with slavery by her captors. In their various attempts to fix matches, the villains also bribe the keeper. Fixing the odds and outcomes of matches leads the villains to knock out the hero in The Ball of Fortune (1925) then drug, kidnap and sedate him. His friend is also kidnapped and almost dies in a hanging, and the father of the romantic lead finds himself being blackmailed after being seduced (Harding 2015, para. 28). Following this pattern of escalation, the football novel would soon divest itself of many of the charms of romantic perspectives and moralistic lessons.

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The 1940s, the 1950s, rising crime and the emergence of adult football fiction By the early 1940s a clear juxtaposition had formed in football fiction’s publication. The simplest form of football fiction, such as those found in schoolboy narratives, would continue to be published as novels and in comics. At the same time, two key themes would affect and reshape football novels produced between the 1930s and 1960s: the incorporation of real teams, players and events, and – consistent with the influence of hard-boiled crime novels reflecting the more dangerous intent of their characters – a dramatic turn toward bloodier and more violent crime. The dogged demand for comics and novels ensured the perpetuation of the formulaic characteristics established in early football narratives. Comics were immensely popular, particularly those with football stories as their mainstay. Publications such as The Rover (1922–1973), The Hotspur (1939–1959) and Tiger (1954–1985) were at their most successful in the late 1940s and 1950s (see Tomlinson 2017; Riches et al. 2009). Helen Pryde’s family comedy series included publication of McFlannels United (1949), which contains a full chapter on a game at Hampden, the Scottish national stadium. Village life is disrupted in Eric Simon’s The Whistle Blew: A Football Final (1951) when the local side Maye F.C. make the cup final against bitter rivals, Thorny Huddlestone. In James Lee’s The Big Shot (1960), Sandy McSporran takes his lowly fourth division team, Muggleton United, and his unstoppable shot all the way to FA cup final glory where he scores the winner in the dying seconds of the match. The republication of Horler’s first novel about the grumbling Scottish coach McPhee as The Great Game (1945) offers some indication of sustained interest in narratives formulated in the 1920s. Despite these examples, as we see in the following, the genre does begin to exercise a little more sophistication during the 1940s and 1950s, including the incorporation of the real game into fiction. Leonard Gribble was afforded unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to write the acclaimed and triumphant Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939). He spent a great deal of time at Highbury, Arsenal’s home ground, with the players and club staff, who are all included in the narrative. The book’s renown is attributed to its veracity, the ‘real-life’ and not simply realist conventions. The success of including real people and places in an otherwise fictive and suspenseful narrative sparked an equally successful film that also featured the Arsenal team. With the club’s further cooperation, the author was pressed to revisit and rework the book as an appropriately, if not innovatively, titled sequel The Arsenal Stadium Mystery: The Replay (1950). He quickly followed the second with another real player-orientated crime novel, They Kidnapped Stanley Mathews (1950). Mathews, one of England’s greatest footballers, has a starring role and is credited as a contributor. Another iteration of this trend, the murder mystery Cup Final Murder (1950), offered a fictionalised account of the 1949 FA Cup final. Author Brendan Newman utilises Wembley, the teams (Leicester City (1) and Wolverhampton

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Wanderers (3)) and the players as setting and dramatic backdrop. Newman’s intent on realism stretches to include himself and his publisher as characters, too. Though entertaining, and a little romantic, these works’ grounding in elements of realism signalled a need to build on the real game’s increasing popularity and in recognition of the game’s commercial potential. Crime in football novels became markedly more visceral, and the game’s presence in popular culture is reflected in its almost obligatory use as a setting in any given prominent detective series. Three novels highlight the question of qualification as a football novel: Gerald Verner’s The Football Pool Murders (1939) is one of 12 featuring Detective Robert Budd; Inspector West Kicks Off (1949) is the eighth in the detective’s series by John Creasey; and Professional Jealousy (1960) is one of many cases tackled by Inspector Cuthbert Higgins and his sidekick Sergeant Brownall, Cecil Freeman Gregg’s regular detective team. As Budd investigates the deaths of three Football Pools winners, the novel wanders around football, pointing out the problems of commercialism, but rarely takes a good look at a match. Inspector Robert West closes his case – a murder and robbery – on the turf in front of a stadium full of Fulham fans. The club, it seemed, was riddled with criminals. Good in a fight and happy to bend the rules if it means getting his man, Higgins of Scotland Yard clears up a murder at the English league’s top (fictitious) side, Kelbourne F.C., while he reviews the media’s burgeoning fascination with top-tier professional footballers. These detective novels are less romantic, more mature, more complex versions of the crime novels of early football fiction. Budd, West and Higgins were established characters written by prolific and popular authors. Each stories’ inclusion of football reflects the game’s general levels of popularity rather than innovation in generic terms. The novels’ commentary on and inclusion of the game makes their place in the genre less problematic but does not negate the question. They are crime novels. However, football provides their narrative setting, the conflict and a range of key characters. They exemplify ‘football-related crime fiction’ (Cox et al. 2002, 201) and speak to generic overlap discussed further in Chapter Three. The increasing prominence of violent, sexual and profane material led Richard Cox, Dave Russell and Wray Vamplew to suggest the first football fiction aimed at adult readers, which arrived with the Hazell series (1974–1976) in the 1970s (Cox et al. 2002, 202). Their point regarding adult content was made in an effort to separate potentially offensive from innocuous content. The delineation neglects the emergence of serious football fiction and the growing diversity in popular football novels, including those more violent crime novels noted above, that infer football fiction had been a little dark for younger readers for some time. Remarkable, intelligent and subversive, if formulaic, texts that sought to question patriarchal ideals had been produced in the 1920s (see Melling 1998). Novels with literary characteristics and aspiration were produced before and after. The unambiguous turn in football fiction arrived with the publication of Robin Jenkins’ The Thistle and the Grail in 1954. Set during the interwar years in the West of Scotland, the novel charts the fortunes of Drumsagart Thistle Football

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Club through the eyes and actions of club president Andrew Rutherford. His small-town team makes it to the prestigious Scottish Junior Cup Final (Junior refers to the non-league level of football, not the age of the players).12 On the surface, tropes of conventional David and Goliath contests appear to be at play, but this is much more than the story of a football team. Drawing on the kailyard traditions of Scottish fiction, which through their sentimentality allude to escape, or at least relief, from heavy industry, this cutting examination of a man’s soul and the culture within which it grows restless and uneasy offers ferocious commentary on the damaging force of football in Scotland. It is a wise, humane and remarkable piece of fiction filled with religious, political and social critique balanced with equally captivating sequences of football. Rightly held up as one of, if not the great football novel, it has been fully and compellingly interrogated by Alan Bairner (2009) and Jeff Hill (2006). Such was Jenkins’ ability to capture the culture, the times and the people that his novel has been used by sports historians for its provision of insight in, around and beyond the world of football (Bairner 2016, 2000; Harvey 2013; Hill 2006). Another text with the potential to be seen as opening the turnstile for literary football fiction is The Earth Cries Out (1950) by Harold C. Wells. Arriving two years before Jenkins’ novel, it is set in the burgeoning ‘soccer scene’ growing out of the coalfields in northern New South Wales, Australia. In line with Scots and northern English football fans and players, for the immigrants in Wells’ text, football is as much a part of the working-class environs of mining as drinking and gambling (Mavroudis 2013, 487). A South American literary novel that draws on football in the same era is Los ríos profundos (‘Deep Rivers’) (1958), by acclaimed Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas. David Wood’s study of Peruvian football literature offers rich analysis on the football stitched through Arguedas’ clash-ofcultures story about two competitive young men (2005, 268–269). ‘The Match’, a piece of short fiction from The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (Sillitoe 1959), is often noted alongside Thistle (Taylor 1997, 92; Cox et al. 2002, 201) for its perspective on the relationships the northern English working classes have and have had with football. In the same way Wells and Arguedas set markers for football literature in the novel on their respective continents, Sillitoe’s story offers a glimpse of the significant presence football would gain in literature published in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Their work, along with those who follow, stamps a pronounced literary authenticity on the genre.

The 1960s, Brian Glanville, Barry Hines and other angry young men Possibly the most robust decade in football fiction history, the 1960s is distinguished by relatively high levels of literary output and enterprise, its documentation of significant social and political changes, balanced with a depth of knowledge of the game. Brian Glanville’s multifarious contributions to football writing made him one of the world’s most important, most prolific authors, including a number

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of novels and short stories. Resonant realist fiction and opposition to the establishment is perhaps best characterised in the work of Barry Hines. Gordon Williams makes a significant contribution, and there are more works from Australia and South America. Themes already noted in previous decades are refined and expanded – the mimetic use of real football references, for example. Football novels featuring strong female characters during this period are yet to be discovered. This is not surprising given the EFA ban was still in place. Writers from the working classes carved out opportunities for exploration of their own social context where football had become an intrinsic aspect of life. Football matches and participation in a club take a central role in novels by Sam Hanna Bell, Brian Glanville and Barry Hines. Clubs, culture, vocal expression of the sport and the pitch all offered place, setting, characters and dialogue for these writers to engage with experiences gained watching, playing and living with football. This lent the writing of football legitimate attested authentic representation (Taylor 1997, 93). Northern English writers, described as the ‘Angry Young Men’, contributed to national recognition of regional literary works in the 1950s and 1960s. They were embraced by literary circles and accepted by the working classes as one of their own. David Storey’s anti-sport novel This Sporting Life (1960), about a rugby union player, is often cited and seen as a challenge to football writers (Stead 2013, 245). The same tensions, anger and resentments that sit beneath the surface in Storey’s text are as acutely present between the lines of Sam Hanna Bell’s novel The Hollow Ball (1961). Set amid the economic deprivation of 1930s Belfast (Bairner 2000, 32), the novel watches over David Minnis, a textile warehouse employee, as he progresses from the factory floor to play for an English Division One team to eventually earn a jersey for Northern Ireland, his national team. Minnis’ ability on the pitch lifts him from the ordinary, even if it is just for the duration of the match. David and the football are lights against the dark background of the novel’s examination of its setting and socialist politics in Northern Ireland. The more obvious religious conflict is left on the bench (Bairner 2000, 32). In keeping with Bennett, Gribble and others, The Hollow Ball references real teams – Tottenham Hotspur, for example – to add realist texture to its football. This level of intimacy between football’s fiction and the real game appears to haunt the 1960s. The trend is paralleled with far more damning effect in the 1970s, when real footballers more regularly put their names in the author’s line. Stanley Mathews aside (he only earned a role as contributor), the trend arguably kicked off with The Golden Boots (1967). Credited to the famous striker Denis Law and a co-author, Kenneth Wheeler, this tale of familial discord and the untimely death inspires young Johnny to play in his late father’s ‘Goldero Golden Boots’. The attachment of a footballer aside, the novel represents the continuation of schoolboy football narrative through another decade. The collections of short stories in Bill Naughton’s The Goalkeeper’s Revenge (1968, c1961) and Brian Glanville’s Goalkeepers Are Crazy (1964) do the same. While not novels, they are commonly nominated as fiction with some distinction and should be

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noted in any comprehensive history of the genre. Revenge, a stand-out example of realist football fiction, collects northern English stories about playing football in the street, as well as fishing, fighting, going to school and looking for work. The 23 stories in Goalkeepers Are Crazy are aimed at younger readers and are reputedly rooted in the writer’s own experiences as a young player. The short fiction followed Glanville’s first realist, literary football novel, The Rise of Gerry Logan (1965, c1963). The novel describes the journey of a fictitious professional footballer from playing in his hometown, Glasgow, to the bright lights of London and on to the glamour of playing in Italy. It mirrors the real-life story of Danny Blanchflower, a close friend of Glanville’s (Stead 2013, 244). Crafted in Glanville’s curt documentary style, it is regarded by most critics and writers as one of the foremost literary works of football fiction (Taylor 1997, 99; Seddon 1999, 487; Braunias 2001, para. 19;13 Stead 2013, 244; Harding 2015, 39). Glanville is widely and roundly revered in the football writing community. He is known for a very straightforward approach and for the non-fiction commentary and reportage he produced on every level of football across at least six decades (he attended 12 World Cups). Glanville’s start as a writer came after convincing his father to pay for the publication of a ghostwritten biography of Arsenal icon Cliff Bastin, called Bastin Remembers (1950). On the back of it, he quickly established a prodigious talent experimenting with, and excelling in, most every kind of football writing. Despite returning to football fiction a number of times, he never attained a commensurate level of success. An editorial role on the football-writing anthology The Footballer’s Companion (Glanville 1962) belied an early lack of confidence in his own or any other football fiction to be seen as significant. Glanville gathered what he felt were the most literary examples of football writing, so the collection included very few examples of football fiction and one short story of his own. The collection is well-regarded but only served to underline his ill-informed convictions on the paucity of football’s fiction. Writing about football, he felt, would always be secondary to participation in what is essentially a working-class game and could therefore only ever be incongruent to the act and craft of creating literature. This view, despite the genre’s overt reach for literary status throughout the 1990s, remained unchanged until at least 2001.14 The novels of Barry Hines offer the best of literature, football and raw, often strained, depictions of the working classes. Hines’ first novel, The Blinder (1966), is the quintessential working-class football novel. A visceral exploration of Lennie Hawk, a frustrated, insubordinate, repressed, marginalised individual and his relationship with social and economic forces outside of his control or understanding (Forrest and Vice 2018, 17), it is made more fascinating for its embrace of football. Hines’ experience of playing at a reasonably high level and football’s significance to his personal life is borne out in The Blinder and A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) (Forrest and Vice 2018, 18–20). These novels’ moving examination of football’s place in society alongside Hines’ own views on education and class are underpinned with a deep appreciation from ‘inside’ the game. Hines’

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work is given full and fascinating investigation in Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond (Forrest and Vice 2018). In Australia, in the same year as The Blinder, David Martin’s novel The Young Wife (1966) differentiates from and dissects opposition to the round-ball game from more popular local codes of Australian rules football and rugby league (Mavroudis 2013, 488). A year later in South America, Mario Vargas Llosa’s published the short novel Los cachorros (The Pups), a disarming modern fable about a boy whose accidental castration is significant in his continuing playing career. While his childhood teammates move on, grow up and become spectators, he is viewed as a child trapped in adult’s body. Not included in the collection, two South American short stories should be noted. The theme of football as common ground and unifier plays out in Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s 1968 short story Su mejor negocio (‘His Best Deal’), from his own collection Huerto cerrado (‘Closed Orchard’). Esse est Percipi (‘To exist is to be seen’) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1998, c1969) is an Argentinian short in which the authorities have replaced football broadcasts of fictional live radio reports. Translated into English for the first time for Simon Kuper’s journal Perfect Pitch 4) Dirt, it is a story that asks questions about football and perceptions of reality. Despite being shortlisted for the first Booker Prize in 1969, Gordon Williams’ novel From Scenes Like These (1968) was only rescued from obscurity during the resurgence in interest in literary football in the 1990s.15 As the story of a farm hand, it can be read as a poignant description of the breakdown of Scottish rural life. Combined with Williams’ skilful authorship, including experimentation with perspective, football’s figurative and literal gravity on the narrative make this a powerful piece of literature about relationships with sport and sport’s place in, and effect on, local communities. In splitting the narratorial point of view during a match between an autodiegetic and limited third person or free indirect discourse, Williams places the reader inside Duncan ‘Dunky’ Logan’s head while simultaneously watching him huff and charge around the field. A greater level of literary experimentation is delivered in The Unfortunates (1969). B.S. Johnson’s novel was published as 27 interchangeable sections and 2 fixed ‘book ends’ served up in a book-shaped box. Unfortunately, the writing – where moments, events and actions tend to be sealed within their own sections – and the football – extended coverage of a match – are relegated to foreground presentation. That the elements of the book can be read in any order may be a wonderful piece of paratextual experimentation, but it offers its own problems in terms of story world construction, structural cohesion and narrative fragmentation. The combination of literature and social commentary, the distance between young adult short stories and the South American literary discourse highlight the football novel’s growth and maturity as an innovative and imaginative genre. The 1970s would see the form build on the established tropes and traditions and leap forward in a number of new directions.

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The 1970s, the cult of celebrity and international football fiction As the appeal of commercial opportunities, player budgets and endorsement grew, the 1970s also marked a broadening of the football fiction genre. Adoption and adaptation of enduring football fiction standards, unlikely heroes and underdog teams, continued to inform and be upheld in comics and novels aimed at young male readers. The ban on women’s football was officially lifted in 1971 but had very little effect – women’s real football stories, let alone their inclusion in fiction, remained relatively undiscovered and untold. Football-related crime novels pursued increasing levels of violence, and football fiction emerged in new languages. The commercial production of dedicated football comics and magazines peaked in the 1970s with Score ‘n’ Roar (1970–1971), Scorcher (1970–1975) and Roy of the Rovers (1976–1993). Outside of football comics, the young adult fiction market delivering often hard-hitting stories of characters facing poverty, abuse and other serious social problems was experiencing exponential growth. Young adult football fiction aimed at male readers sought to incorporate some of these more sophisticated characteristics. Brian Glanville’s second football novel, Goalkeepers Are Different (1971), is an excellent example. Protagonist Ronnie Blake, the teenage goalkeeper at local side Borough United, manages to seize the No.1 jersey and help his team progress through the First Division. On its own, this story line would be enough for previous iterations of football’s fiction for young adult readers. Glanville’s work, however, informed by an incredible knowledge of the game and intricate understanding of the issues, charges the story with challenging intelligence, soul-searching emotion, and deep-seated honesty. References to real teams are frequent as the work offers an illustration of the continuing – though in this case a little more complex – presence of the schoolboy formula for football stories. In stark contrast, Glanville’s final football novel, The Dying of the Light (1976), is a languid and at turns morose study of the fall of former professional goalkeeper Len Rawlings. Delivered across three points of view – that of Len and each of his two children, a son and a daughter – the novel paints a broad picture of Rawlings’ playing career, while foregrounding his life post-football. As a character study, it brings a sombre burn to its meditation on the grim reality of life for ex-professionals outside the limelight (Tadié 2012, 1777–1778). In crafting his characters’ struggles, Glanville appears to reach for literary status unburdened by associations with football. As a work of football fiction, it is a masterful period piece. A very different player-related text, The Footballer (1974) by Derek Dougan highlights the opposite end of the spectrum of players’ involvement from Denis Law in football fiction. Dougan, a successful player in the English First Division and a Northern Ireland national team player, wrote a number of nonfiction works. The Footballer, his only novel, fictionalises the actual breakdown of his relationship with his manager at the club Wolverhampton Wanderers.

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Dougan’s work does, however, stand out as one of the few well-written novels contributed to the genre by a former player. Another literary contribution from a prolific football writer is Body Charge (1972), the first of Hunter Davies’ two football novels. Franko, a London cabbie, gets himself involved in a murder investigation. The victim, a gay man, was a very recent passenger. Davies’ novel is not a thriller. There is little mystery in the outcome of the police investigation. Rather it focuses on the park-footballplaying Franko, an unusual take on game participation in football fiction, and the examination of his own sexuality that is sparked by the investigation. A key secondary character, Shug, is a professional footballer. Set largely in a London cab, the novel relies on the vernacular of football and its culture for key character development. A number of football-related crime novels are worthy of note. They reflect continuation of the tropes of their predecessors in previous decades, but they also highlight innovation in the field. Final Score (1975) by George Douglas is the epic, expansive 1970s version of those novels written by Horler and his peers in the 1920s. In Final Score, Bentfield United players are killed in a car bomb, and witnesses are drowned in canals. The book grants the football crime novel the swashbuckling grandeur of airport fiction. It is also noted here to demonstrate the continuing trend of crime authors setting novels in football clubs. Three other texts that should be noted are: the hooligan-focused Skinhead, the first in Richard Allen’s four book series (1970–1974);16 the painfully titled Death Penalty (1972) by Alfred Draper; and Dick Morland’s Albion! Albion! (1974).17 Like many of the hooligan-focused texts that followed, Skinhead shares the trials and tribulations of its brutish central character Joe Hawkins. Hawkins and his peers are always there, in amongst it, when trouble erupts. The texts reflect those involved in the phenomenon occurring in football grounds and reported in newspapers around the country as it began to appear in fiction. While Hawkins and his crew attend matches, the books are far less interested in football than in sex and violence. Ben Clegg, the racist thug at the centre of Alfred Draper’s novel, is a little different in that he coerces his friends into the revenge murder of a referee after a late – and, as it turns out, incorrect – penalty decision puts their beloved Rovers out of the F.A. Cup. The juxtaposition of the clean-cut, conformist and sporting referee Barry Hudson with Clegg’s abrasive and often uglier mentality elevate this little-known hooligan fiction from its peers. With football providing the story’s catalyst and setting, Death Penalty manages to pre-date Terrace Terrors (Allen 1975), the fourth in Allen’s 18-book series about Skinheads, and the anarchic menace and violence of Albion! Albion! (1974). The latter is a defining text in hooligan football fiction. Hill’s extremely violent and inventive dystopian novel tells of football club supporters who collectivise their violent action and force the dissolution of the parliament. The novel chisels into the fraught relationships of football and politics as the revolutionary hooligan leaders take over and divide the country and devise a system of citizenship regulation in accordance with football team affiliation. These texts fictionalise the emergence

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of a much-contested aspect of football fan culture (see Redhead 2004; Thornton 2003; A. King 2002) and lay the ground for the explosion of football-related hooligan fiction and memoir that occurs in the 1990s. Besides the sensationalism of violence on the terraces, the advent of 1970s tabloid journalism swayed football fiction in other ways. Top-level professional players found their lives in the spotlight of audiences outside of traditional football communities. The hyperbolic nature of the red-top press inspired the P.B. Yuill crime series (the joint pseudonym for the collaboration between football manager Terry Venables and novelist Gordon Williams).18 Combining gritty humour, cockney slang and gratuitous violence with a little football, The Bornless Keeper (1974) was later televised by the BBC. The ‘keeper’ in the title is a crazed killer and not a player protecting a goal. A little later in the decade, Philip Osbourne’s novel The Winners (1976) combines the story of a fictionalised football star and some low-level criminal activity with soft-core pornography to draw a readership. It arguably softened the turf for the even more exploitative series by journalist and prolific author Norman Giller and former player Jimmy Greaves discussed a little later. The P. B. Yuill series was highly successful, but Williams and Venables’ first novel, They Used to Play on Grass (1971), would stretch to idealism and the prophetic and achieve cult classic status. Built on a common narrative structure – in this case a British Cup tournament – the novel referenced real clubs from Scotland, England and Wales. Incidentally, the home team, the Commoners F.C., at the centre of the novel have the same name as the team in the pair’s earlier ‘collaboration’. The installation of plastic pitches and all-seater stadiums to furnish the novel’s ‘near’ future setting offered a rare moment of speculative football fiction in the genre. Current debates around hybrid and plastic pitches in the real game and the transformative effect of all-seater stadiums in the wake of the Taylor Report on the Hillsborough disaster (Home Office 1990) are some testament to its forward thinking. In terms of quality, thanks to Williams’ considerable skill, this is a rare text that seems to bridge the literary and the popular. Another novel navigating this liminal space, J.L. Carr’s How Steeple Sinderby Won The F.A. Cup (2005, c1975), uses contemporaneous vernacular to recapture the nostalgic football story of 1920s and 1930s.19 Perhaps a response to and relief from a majority of the football novels of the period, Carr’s football novel is set in 1933. In recalling the football stories of an earlier era, it reinforces its perpetuation of the ‘romance of the Cup’ narrative at its centre. The book has been reissued three times. Set between the First and Second World Wars, Robin Jenkins’ second football novel, A Would-Be Saint (1978), takes on theology amid working-class poverty and politics. Protagonist Gavin Hamilton is equal parts reverend and footballer. He wants to be, and see, the good in everything, but he is destined to be undermined by his own actions and weakness. An excellent player, he turns out for his local Junior side. But, fearing the sport’s effect on his moral well-being, he quits as his career is on the rise. As a conscientious objector, he is sent to work on a rural

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farm where, despite his overt reluctance, he is persuaded to turn out for the local team. His ‘cowardice’ is overlooked when he is instrumental in their beating their rivals. The football and decisions taken in playing or not playing define his life. Where political ideology burns through The Hollow Ball, religion and sin drive A Would-BeSaint. These works highlight the tensions in the game being positioned as a means of self-advancement and escape at sharper edges of class struggle. In contrast, and possibly not a football novel by definition, literary author Keith Alldritt celebrates Sir Edward Elgar’s keen support of Wolverhampton Wanderers in his novel Elgar on the Journey to Hanley (1979). In the most elegant terms, the narrative presents a fictionalised account of Elgar’s real-life relationship with the much younger Dora Penny, the local rector’s stepdaughter, during a stop in Wolverhampton. The women in the three football novels tend to be positioned as bystanders, commentators, lovers and staid wives. In the case of The Hollow Ball, they see football as an unnecessary celebration of masculinity. For Gavin Hamilton’s mother, the game is a frivolous distraction from the serious business of being a responsible adult within the strictures and structures of a Christian framework. In Elgar, Dora Penny is part ingénue, part muse and politely (com) passionate companion. In the 1970s in Kolkata, India, where football is secondary to cricket, a wealth of football literature was produced in Bengali (Bandyopadhyay 2011, 249). Two short novels by Moti Nandy, published in1973 and 1974, instigated the region’s sports fiction as a whole. They are still regarded as some of best and most popular of the immensely successful author’s work; Striker (1973) focuses on a young footballer establishing his career as a striker and looking ahead to his future. Almost as a response, Stopper (1974) focuses on an old defender contemplating, looking back on his career from its end. The oppositional forces at play in these books – the attacker versus defender, exuberant talent versus tired, experienced legs, and optimistic speculation versus morose reflection – mean they offer scarce insight of popularity of football’s development in a setting where it held something akin to exotic charm. These novels were unrivalled in commercial success and critical acclaim and led to a surge in the publication of short football story collections across the 1970s and early 1980s (Bandyopadhyay 2011, 249–251). Two literary football novels from Peru published during this 1970s are most significant here. Both are discussed at length by David Wood (2005, 271–274). One is La tía Julia y el escribidor (‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter’) by great Mario Vargas Llosa, published in1977; and the other, published a year later by Peruvian sports reporter Guillermo Thorndike, is entitled El revés de morir (‘The Opposite of Dying’). The Vargas Llosa novel is an intricate interplay between its two main characters, Varguitas and Camancho, in which the author teases out tensions related to the creation and consumption of the low-brow popular radio soap opera, included in the text, versus high-brow literature and associated cultural works. The novel is based on events in the author’s own life and, as he is an ardent football supporter, the game is dissected as part of its discussion. Thorndike’s novel is a hagiographic

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biographical novel based on the life of Alejandro ‘Manguera’ (‘Hosepipe’) Villanueva, a renowned black player from the 1920s and 1930s. Wood notes that the author’s reverence and sympathy for a player experienced abhorrent racism and discrimination (2005, 273). His occupation may also have influenced the narratorial delivery, which switches from a distant third-person perspective to more typical of match commentary where it describes on the pitch action (2005, 273) The dual level harks back to ‘Dunky’ Logan’s story, but given the subject is a real player, this novel may have set an early precedent for David Peace’s influential treatment of Brian Clough 30 years later. An excellent, and much more thorough, analysis on both South American texts can be found in David Wood’s exemplary work (2005, 271–274). A decade ago, The Global Game (Turnbull et al. 2008) astutely identified a discerning selection of football writing published in languages other than English. While the book broadened understanding of the field, three examples are noted here. The remainder are listed in this book’s final section. The first sees footballer turns narrator and observer in accomplished Austrian author Peter Handke’s novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (‘The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick’) (1970). The player experiences a series of brief connections with women, one of whom he murders. He does so without remorse or even emotional recognition of the crime. The ghoulish act forms the backdrop to a morbid and fascinating perspective on existential questions arising out of a penalty kick, where the goalkeeper must defend a teammate’s error in order to protect the collective. The protagonist, a goalkeeper himself, observes the game he should be playing in and discusses the keeper’s role in waiting to defend a moment with no ability to influence how and when it will arrive. Comparisons with and references to Albert Camus and his work, a former goalkeeper, are not the only aspects that qualify this text as literary. Israeli author Ephraim Kishon’s The Fox in the Chicken-Coop: A Satirical Novel (1971) is about local politics and the complex power relations in a small mountain village. The novel offers a Swiftian assessment of the village hierarchy through team selection for the village football matches (Turnbull et al. 2008, 154). Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta’s novel Soñé Que la Nieve Ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning’) (1975), translated into English in 1985, takes the view of an aspirational young footballer from a small regional town as a lens for the final days of the Allende government in Chile and the military coup that stopped the country’s democratic process. The new government was installed with tanks in the streets. The national football stadium was turned into a centre for torture and captivity of dissidents. Football is woven through the narrative, which includes a chilling dialogue between two TV pundits who allude to a penalty being awarded and taken on the pitch when what they are looking over is the stadium’s transformation into instrument for government control (See Wood 2017, 104–109; and Turnbull et al. 2008, 80). These works, which carry the existentialism, the frustration, the emotional disrepair and angry sentiment associated with football in the culture and work of their Scots and English counterparts, represent some of the more contentious

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football novels to date. Their themes, social commentary and evocations of broken systems run counter to the rigidity in the formulaic schoolboy stories of the genre’s origins and reflect the distance football fiction has travelled across its first century.

The 1980s, the distance between two novels and a touch of football Very few football novels of the 1980s are as political, thought-provoking or contentious. The decade offers a something of a calm before the extensive activity and diversification that follows in the 1990s. Comics and magazines diminished relatively to a point where they almost disappeared, but young adult football fiction aimed at male readers, such as Michael Hardcastle’s Mark Fox series, which began with Breakaway (1976) and continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and the author’s standalone works such as One Kick (1986), highlight the continuation of at least one football fiction staple. Young women were not yet as openly playing football, and this is mirrored in the production of novels aimed at their readership. Literary football novels are also difficult to locate. In an attempt to differentiate their football crime thriller, Pelé and Herbert Resnicow set World Cup Murder (1988) at an unconvincing ‘near’ future World Cup event. There are more issues with the book than the inclusion of poorly written training-ground workouts and matches. While there were a small number of South American works of note, the spectrum of publications during this period is perhaps best illustrated in the contrast between two novels published in 1980: literary author Stan Barstow’s A Brother’s Tale (1980) and The Ball Game (1980) by Giller and Greaves. Barstow’s novel illustrates the weight of and on family, of the responsibility we have to them and ourselves, and the ways the frailties of individual success can affect relationships. The novel captures the depth of disruption Gordon Taylor, a happily married teacher, experiences with the arrival of his brother, Bonny, a famous First Division footballer. In trouble with his club, the fans and almost everyone around him, Bonny’s breakdown, the impact of fame and a loss of talent come to light. He looks to Gordon for refuge and forgiveness. The characters, their flaws, concerns and troubles are poignantly realised. The internal and external pressures of football culture at a time of significant change in the game are examined and richly depicted. It is astucious work from an author operating in the latter half of a distinguished career. Conversely, The Ball Game (1980), directed primarily at the adult male heterosexual reader, sits very much at the imagined mainstream end of football fiction’s scale. As famous for his drinking as he was for his playing ability, Greaves only stopped playing lower league football two years before. He was on the cusp of becoming a television ‘sports personality’ when his ‘writing career’ commenced. The second in their four-part series, The Ball Game situates their regular protagonist, Jackie Groves, at its centre. With a cover featuring a strategically positioned but clearly naked woman holding a

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machine gun, it’s one of 20, mostly non-fiction, books the pair collaborated on. The cover of the first novel in the series, The Final (1979), has a naked woman strategically positioned next to a giant FA Cup. The images intimate the nature of stories – Giller was also responsible for the novelisation of a number of Carry On stories. Jackie Groves is a cardboard-cutout ‘maverick American-born’ player whose alcohol-fuelled, sexually explicit misadventures culminate in his tackling a group of ‘militant feminists’. Where A Brother’s Tale highlights the gritty, emotive and literary qualities of the football novel, The Ball Game breaks no new ground and repeats a well-trodden formula with lazy tropes and titillation, upholds patriarchal ideals and is utterly dismissive of an entire gender. While Barstow’s novel represents the fluid nature of and makes a serious case for the genre, Giller and Greaves underline the constraints of expectation and reinforce the reasons it has been dismissed out of hand. In the same year in Peru, Jorge Salazar, La ópera de los fantasmas (‘The Opera of Ghosts’) (1980) frames the 1964 Estadio Nacional disaster, where a moderately estimated 328 fans were crushed to death leaving an international match between Argentina and Peru (see Wood 2005, 274). The football-related event is a platform for a number of narrative strands to drift away as they follow people impacted by the disaster. The novel pre-dates Laurent Mauvignier’s novel In the Crowd (2008 – noted in Chapter Two), which has a similar structure and a stronger connection to the tragic catalyst for its narrative. In 1984, Isaac Goldemberg’s novel Tiempo al tiempo (‘Time to Time’) uses an imaginary football match between Brazil and Peru as a study of social integration and institutional racism in the latter. The novel is structured in two halves and is expertly analysed by Wood (2005, 275). Worth noting here is Alan Bleasdale’s novel Scully and Mooey (1984) which is based on a character the writer developed in a series of short plays. As in the previous work, Bleasdale uses the character to reflect on masculinity, identity and oppressive institutional structures. This social critique is based on class and includes imaginary interactions with real footballers. Two novels by James Kelman, A Chancer (1985), which includes a graceful account of football game in the park in Glasgow, and A Disaffection (1989) and two Julian Barnes’ novels, coincidentally published in the same years – one written in the name of his alter ego Dan Kavanagh – touch on football. Putting the Boot In, originally published in 1985, has ‘Duffy’, Kavanagh’s bisexual detective, investigate a third division football club while dealing with the possibility of his having contracted HIV. The second, A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters (1989), features a Leicester City Football Club-related dream sequence in its reimagining of Noah’s Ark. London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis includes a number of sly references that indicate an interest in parodying football culture as presented by UK tabloid press rather than declare an authorial interest in the sport (Taylor 1997, 98). The works by Kelman are not football novels; they make mention of football, but it would be difficult to depict the working-class culture in the west coast of Scotland without doing so. While the first Barnes novel is set in and deals with issues around a football club, the second novel, the

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work of Amis, does not sit as comfortably within the parameters of a working definition of football fiction.

Closing remarks With an identity drawn from the constant of the comic, the schoolboy story and the pulp fiction stands, all the way to pages penned by literary authors, the football novel has developed its own distinctive swagger. Shaped by the forces of popular fiction and the pull of culture around football, its body of work has developed into a diverse array of disparate forms connected through their shared and divergent perspectives on the game. Cast in ignominy, the earliest crimerelated football fictions brought us Sydney Horler and with him McPhee and Tiger Standish. They led to The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, its sequels and those crime writers who saw the benefit in using the game’s popularity as the setting for their bloodletting. Literary novels and writers have reflected football’s place on the cultural landscape since its earliest development. Lawrence, Wodehouse and J.B. Priestley are accompanied by Olesha and Coelho Neto. A brief and important spell of women’s football fiction in the 1920s foreshadows those writers of the 1950s and 1960s who charged their novels with fierce, uncompromising perspectives on the less than beautiful side of the game. Jenkins, Hanna Bell, Hines, Vargas Llosa, Williams and Wells ground their work in explorations of class, identity and masculinity. Sadly, with the exception of those few works of the 1920s, female characters are poorly treated, often poorly portrayed and very rarely get within close proximity of a football pitch. By the chapter’s close, football novels have emerged in Russia, Brazil, Austria, Australia, Denmark, Israel, India, Peru and Chile. In England, a focus on the prolific and prodigious talents of Brian Glanville overshadowed Davies and Barstow. Football is used as a vehicle to explore everything from the humour found in the grim reality of living in a northern English housing-estate under Thatcher to the trauma of life in an emerging dictatorship in Chile. Yet there remained a tendency to distil the genre’s literary worth into a handful of works of significance and overlook the majority. It is understandable where that majority are concerned with football player and football club stories, but closer inspection reveals distinct types of football novel, perhaps best illustrated in the distance travelled between Barstow’s tense and sorrowful tale of a burnt-out footballer and the splashy innuendo of The Ball Game (1980). The chapter’s central argument is in its presentation of the grand scope of the football novel. It underlines the misplacement of prior emphasis on spurious, though well-targeted football, sex and gags, novels that remove effort from the genre’s dismissal. It underlines those most commonly missed, the Barstows and the Hanna Bells, and acknowledges the broad church of the football novel. By 1990, the genre already has a substantive body of works with diversity, from the literary to the pedestrian and the political to the light entertainment. There is rich texture and global reach and considerable evidence of substantive interest

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in the writing and reading of novel-length football stories. The first century, and more, of the history of the football novel has been unpacked to this still limited, though more detailed than previous, level to inform discussion on identifiable characteristics and attributes that will take place later in this book. It should make the explosion of activity and interest in the 1990s less of a surprise to the reader than it was to those writers at the time. The BBC’s operatically themed coverage of the 1990 Italian World Cup (Pavarotti’s version of Nessun Dorma was used as the soundtrack) foreshadowed a wave of new literary football writing, the middle class embrace of the game and the success of one book in particular.

Notes 1 As noted by Tadié (2012), the lineage of the schoolboy football novel can be traced back to public schoolboy novels, such as Thomas Hughes’ classic Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). The novel is set in the 1830s and features some ‘football’, but its description in the early part of the book is of a game of what we now understand to be rugby. 2 The 1903 bookplate in the version read for this study noted the presentation of ‘6th Prize for 4th Class’ by the School Board of London to student Harold Wood of Santley Street School. The book was published again prior to 1917. This is not critical evidence but indicates the book’s popularity over a relatively sustained period of time. 3 Author Beatrice Fry’s husband, Captain C.B. Fry, a relative of TV celebrity Stephen Fry, was a famous cricketer and long-jump world-record holder who also played football for Corinthians, Southampton and England. 4 Cox, Russell and Vamplew speculate that these teams represent the real, and once fearsome, derby between Stoke City and Port Vale (2002, 199). 5 Strike Pay was first published in September 1913 in the Westminster Gazette and was formally published in the D.H. Lawrence collection Modern Lovers, which was published posthumously in 1934 (Poplawski and Worthen 1996, 271). 6 The poem also makes mention of Villa Park, home ground of the Aston Villa Football Club in Birmingham, England. 7 Kay Gray wrote a number of works, including In the Final (1926) and Larrington Crack Shot (1927); P.W. Bottom wrote Dan of the Rovers (1927), The Speed-King Centre (1928) and several others; and Harold Graham’s works include Benton’s Great Year (1926) and The Door to Victory (1928). 8 One novel, McPhee: A Football Story, was published in 1922 and republished four more times under three different titles between 1926 and 1945: McPhee: A Football Story (1923b); The Man Who Saved the Club (1926); McPhee: Prince of Trainers (1930); The Great Game (1935 and 1945). 9 The Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football (Seddon, 1999) lists these and all the other works published in the Aldine Football Novel series. Unfortunately, a recent trip to the British Library only allowed for a relatively small number (around 80) of these texts to be examined more thoroughly. 10 Lady Florence Dixie’s team and the Dick, Kerr Ladies. See also Williams 2017, 2003; Melling 1998; and Newsham 1997. 11 Stead offers depth and insight on J.B. Priestley’s engagement with the sport across a number of works of fiction and non-fiction (2013, 242). 12 The Scottish Junior Football Association is affiliated with the national body governing football, the Scottish Football Association, in Scotland. The closest description to this level of football in the English set-up is Non-League.

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13 Steve Braunias’ research paper for his Reuters Foundation Fellowship, There’s a Writer on the Field, highlights the journalist’s view of good football writing, singling out Hugh McIlvanney and Simon Kuper as great football writers alongside the main topic of his work, Brian Glanville. He also notes Sinderby and the two Glanville novels and one short story collection in terms of fiction. 14 In an interview with Steve Braunias (2001), Glanville is unremitting in his opinion. 15 Williams is more famous for his later novel The Siege at Trencher’s Farm (1969), which became the film Straw Dogs (1971). 16 Richard Allen is the pseudonym of the late Canadian author, Jim Moffat, who lived in Sidmouth, England. He was 55 years old when he wrote the first Skinhead novel. 17 Dick Morland is the pseudonym of prolific crime writer Reginald Hill. The novel was later published in his own name with an alternative title, Singleton’s Law, in 1997. 18 Venables allegedly offered Williams a piece of paper with a blunt outline for a novel: ‘There’s a naked blonde on the bed. Dead. And underneath the bed a suitcase stuffed with a million nicker [Pounds sterling]. All yours, Gordon’ (Buckley, 2005). In Hazell Plays Solomon (1975), the private eye visits the offices of the lawyers ‘Venables, Venables, Williams and Gregory’ – Gregory being the lawyer Hazell deals with and the firm obviously being the tongue-in-cheek refence to the novels’ writing team. The name Yuill was selected as it was the name of family members of both authors. 19 Carr is more famous for A Season in Sinji (1967), widely regarded as one of the great works of cricket fiction (Taylor 1997, 98).

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Jenkins, Robin. 2006, c1954. The Thistle and the Grail. Edinburgh: Polygon. Jenkins, Robin. 1978. A Would Be Saint. Edinburgh: Polygon. Johnson, B. S. W. 1969. The Unfortunates. London: Panther (Secker and Warburg). Kavanagh, Dan. 2014, c1985. Putting the Boot In. London: Penguin. Kelman. James. 1985. A Chancer. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kelman, James. 1989. A Disaffection. London: Secker & Warburg. King, Anthony. 2002. The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s. London: Leicester University Press. Kishon, Ephraim. 1971. The Fox in the Chicken-Coop: A Satirical Novel, translated by Jacques Namiel. Tel Aviv: Bronfman. Larkin, Philip. 1964. ‘MCMXIV.’ in The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber & Faber. Law, Dennis and Ken Wheeler. 1967. The Golden Boots (Sportaces Novels). London: Pelham. Lawrence, David Herbert. 1934, c1913. Strike Pay. Esquire. June Issue. https://classic. esquire.com/article/1934/6/1/strike-pay. Lee, James. 1960. The Big Shot. London: Oliver & Boyd. Lind, Anton. 1937. Rags, the Airman. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Lind, Anton. 1937. Rags, the Invincible. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Lind, Anton. 1961, c1939. Dingy and Pips Ltd. Detectives. London: Purnel. Martin, David. 1966. The Young Wife. South Melbourne: Sun Books. Mavroudis, Paul. 2013. ‘Against the Run of Play: The Emergence of Australian Soccer Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 30 (5): 484–499. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2013.782856. McGowan, Lee. 2017. ‘Football and Its Fiction.’ In Routledge Handbook of Football Studies edited by John Hughson, Kevin Moore, Ramón Spaaij and Joseph Maguire, 222–235. New York: Routledge. McPherson, Jock. 1922. Stick It Ginger! London: Oldhams. Meg Foster Footballer. 1921. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. Melling, Alethea. 1998. ‘Ray of the Rovers: The Working-Class Heroine in Popular Football Fiction 1915–1925.’ International Journal of the History of Sport 15 (1): 97–122. doi: 10.1080/09523369808714014. Mitchell, Andy. 2015. ‘The Search for a Great Scottish Football Novel.’ 28 August. British Society of Sports History, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. www. scottishsporthistory.com/uploads/3/3/6/0/3360867/bssh_talk_scottish_novels_-_illustrated.pdfscottishsportshistory.com.au. Morland, Dick. 1974. Albion, Albion! London: Faber and Faber. Nandy, Moti. 1973. Striker. Calcutta: Ananda. Nandy, Moti. 1974. Stopper. Calcutta: Ananda. Naughton, Bill. 1968, c1961. The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and Other Stories. London: Puffin. Newman, Brendan. 1950. Cup Final Murder. London: Gollanz. Newsham, Gail. 1997. In a League of Their Own: The Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club. London: Scarlet Press. Osbourne, Peter. 1976. The Winners. London: Plenhurst. Olesha, Yuri. 2004, c1927. Envy, trans. M. Schwartz. New York: New York Review. Pelé and Herbert Resnicow. 1988. World Cup Murder. New York: Wynwood. Poplawski, Paul and John Worthen. 1996. D.H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Priestley, John Boynton. 1962, c1929. The Good Companions. London: Heinemann. Pryde, Helen. 1949. McFlannels United. Glasgow: Nelson.

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Redhead, Steve. 2004. ‘Hit and Tell: A Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir.’ Soccer and Society 5 (3): 392–403. doi: 10.1080/1466097042000279625. Riches, Adam, Tim Parker and Robert Frankland. 2009. Football’s Comic Book Heroes: Celebrating the Greatest British Football Comics of the Twentieth Century. London: Mainstream. Riddell, Charlotte Eliza. 1884. Bright Sunset, the Last Days of a Young Scottish Football Player. London: Religious Tract Society. The Rover. 1922–1973. Dundee: DC Thomson. Roy of the Rovers. 1976–1993. London: Fleetway. Salazar, Jorge. 1980. La Opera de los Fantasmas (The Opera of Ghosts). Lima: Mosca Azul/ Ediciones Treintaitre. Scorcher. 1970–1975. London: IPC Magazines. Score ’n’ Roar. 1970–1971. London: IPC Magazines. Seddon, Peter. 1999. Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football. Second edition. Boston Spa: British Library. Sillitoe, Alan. 1994, c1959. ‘The Match.’ In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London: Flamingo. Simon, Eric N. 1951. The Whistle Blew: A Football Final. London: Werner Laurie. Skármeta, Antonio. 1986, c1975. Soñé que la nieve ardia (I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning), translated by Malcolm Coad. London: Readers International. Speigel Online International. 2008. Orhan Pamuk. Int. April 6. www.spiegel.de/international/ europe/0,1518,557614,00.html. Standish, O. J. 1928. ‘Leader of the League.’ In Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. Stead, Peter. 2013. ‘Brought to Book: Football and Literature.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Football, edited by Rob Steen, Jed Novick and Huw Richards, 240–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Storey, David. 2018, c1960. This Sporting Life. London: Penguin Vintage. Tadié, Alexis. 2012. ‘Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (12): 1774–1790. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2012.714944. Taylor, David John. 1997. ‘Rally Round You Havens!: Soccer and the Literary Imagination.’ In Perfect Pitch 1: Home Ground, edited by Simon Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Taylor, David John. 2017. ‘A Football Novel Is Never Simply about Football.’ The Guardian. 27 May. www.theguardian.com/global/2017/may/27/football-novel-boys-schoolstories-modern-fiction. Thornton, Phil. 2003. Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion: The Story of a Terrace Cult. Lytham: Milo Books. Tiger. 1954–1985. London: IPC Magazines. Tomlinson, Barrie. 2017. Comic Book Hero. London: Pitch. Turnbull, John, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab. 2008. The Global Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1967. Los cachorros (The Pups). Barcelona: Lumen. Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1995, c1977. Aunt Julia and the Script Writer (La tía Julia y el escribidor), translated by Helen R. Lane. London: Penguin. Verner, Gerald. 2015, c1939. The Football Pool Murders. London: Wright. Villoro, Juan. 2016, c2006. God Is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World’s Favorite Game (Dios es Redondo), translated by Thomas Bunstead. New York: Restless.

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Wells, Harold C. 1950. The Earth Cries Out. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Williams, Gordon. 1968. From Scenes Like These. London: Black and White. Williams, Gordon. 1969. The Siege at Trencher’s Farm. London: Secker & Warburg. Williams, Gordon and Terry Venables. 1994, c1971. They Used to Play on Grass. London: Penguin. Williams, Jean. 2003. A Game for Rough Girls? The History of Women’s Football in Britain. London: Routledge. Williams. Jean. 2017. ‘Standing on Honeyball’s Shoulders: A History of Independent Women’s Football Clubs in England.’ In Football and the Boundaries of History: Critical Studies in Soccer, edited by Brenda Elsey and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 227–246. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. doi: 10.1057/978-1-349-95006-5_12. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. 1906. ‘Petticoat Influence (“A Football Story”).’ Strand Magazine. no. 182, March issue. http://arthursclassicnovels.com/wodehouse/petcot10. html. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. 1910. Mike and Psmith. London: Adam and Charles Black. Wood, David. 2005. ‘Reading the Game: The Role of Football in Peruvian Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (2): 266–284. doi: 10.1080/ 09523360500035925. Wood, David. 2017. Football and Literature in South America. London: Routledge. Yuill, P. B. 1974. The Bornless Keeper. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P. B. 1975. Hazell Plays Solomon. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P. B. 1976. Hazell and the Three Card Trick. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P. B. 1977. Hazell and the Menacing Jester. London: MacMillan.

Chapter 2

Current form The contemporary landscape of football fiction

With all the precision and timing of a crucial penalty-box tackle, Fever Pitch (Hornby 1992) arrived at, and defined, the moment football became an acceptable subject for literature. Football boots were still monochromatic, teams had to win the League to compete in European football’s most prestigious tournament, and there was no transfer window. The club revenue pipelines from cable sports channels were being primed, and the cultural tastes of traditional football fans were broadening (see Piskurek 2018, 95–100; Hill 2006, 113–131; Williams 2006, 97–98). At the same time, supporting or ‘having’ a football team became imperative to middle-class social identity (Cox et al. 2002, 202). Hornby’s debut played a persuasive part in making the game desirable to those outside the stereotypes of working-class men’s clubs and irrevocably contributed to the blurring of the rectangular lines marking football’s position in popular culture. Within a year of its publication, Hornby found himself unwittingly and reluctantly cast as the new Godfather of football writing. The accolade is not completely undeserving – Fever Pitch is remarkable. Neither a novel nor the best example of football writing, it became a publishing phenomenon (Cox et al. 2002, 202). Hornby was invited to edit and contribute to the anthology My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing (1993), which gathered the likes of Simon Kuper (1994, 1997), Harry Pearson (1994), D.J. Taylor (1997) and their peers. A spate of genteel existential confessionals followed. Football writing underwent what has been regarded as its most significant cultural shift – a period described by John Bale as an ‘embourgeoisement’ (2008, 4). Within a decade, football fiction’s broader range gained recognition. Roy of the Rovers retired, but female characters grew into the game through new roles. The first female football team since the 1920s hit the page. Blood and thunder hooligan memoirs became best-sellers, and characters depicted in the fiction of Irvine Welsh and John King cleverly and forcefully presented the traditional football fan’s perspective (Redhead 2004, 394). Hornby and his contemporaries,1 were characterised as middle-class men who sought to find their sense of individual identity in a stronger alignment to the game’s more grounded masses (Cox et al. 2002, 202), but the soccerati’s words and actions irreversibly elevated the status

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of football writing and, with it, demand for the football novel. Their pedestal, though a largely self-constructed and self-congratulatory pie hut on a concrete terrace, was torn down to make way for plastic seats and themed packaging on more diverse and voluminous content than could ever be consumed. In the three decades since Fever Pitch, the power of the agent and the import of sponsorship and television rights have fed the rise of entitled ‘divas’ – mercenary Croesus (Maume 2001) whose week-to-week income is a multiple of the yearly salary of most ‘consumers’ buying the match-day experience. These and other cultural shifts in football have been explicated by writers living within the contentions of the (re)appropriation of the ‘working man’s game’. In the last decade in particular, top-flight writing has grown proliferate and more vibrant and emerged in a growing number of countries, in an increasing variety of styles and form. It has also returned from serious and often sombre examination to its earlier open-heartedness, to find romanticised joy in the game (Taylor 2017, para. 1). Before exploring the period of football fiction history that comes after Hornby (Araujo, in Braunias 2001, para. 25), this chapter discusses Fever Pitch as a defining text, the crowbar used to leverage the game from the people it had belonged to for almost a century. Significant authors, key texts, trends, tensions and developments in the genre will then be considered. Three recent themes have been identified as being demonstrative of continuing growth in interest and readership, including: the popularity of biographical novels; the affordances of digital platforms such as self, vanity and small independent publication practices; and the ‘discovery’ and re-publication of older works.

Hornby, after Hornby, and the soccerati Unfortunately, correlations of literary and perceived worth persist in, and even underpin, arguments presented by writers, such as Marcela Aarujo (in Braunias 2001, para. 25) and those who follow Taylor’s earlier lead (1997, 97), believing that no more than a handful of works of note existed before the arrival of Hornby’s first book. While the previous chapter details a sizable body of work that disputes these assumptions, there are detractors to the book’s position of prominence. A handful of writers, with Simon Kuper leading the charge, argue Pete Davies’ All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia ’90 (1990), a non-fiction novellength analysis of an England World Cup campaign, is actually the transformative moment for football writing. Playing into Steve Redhead’s figurative hands (see below), Kuper described Davies’ book as ‘John the Baptist’ to Hornby’s ‘Jesus’ (in Roell n.d., para. 2). Leaning hard into the cultured writing responsible for the groundswell of interest in football fanzines (see Haynes 1995; and Millward 2008), Fever Pitch did more for football writing than Davies’ book, particularly where it spoke of as well as to the fan. Presented in a diarised structure, with chapters related to specific matches, Fever Pitch offered a cultivated view of contemporary obsession from the

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perspective of a fan. A fan who happened to be an excellent writer, so the reading experience centres on, and dynamically bridges the gap between, narratorial voice and reader – one fan talking to another. Sharply observed, emotive, funny, depressing and skilfully crafted, its confessional dissection of a supporter’s often absurd behaviour sits neatly within the wider context of autobiographical sports narrative traits (Woolridge 2008, 620–640). The narration eloquently and sensitively presents insight on, and an insider’s view of, the internal machinations of a match-day football stadium experience to those in the suburban middle classes who’d always wondered. To those holding the experience, like scarves above their heads, it engagingly captures the all-too-often pedestrian activity of watching live football as member of a crowd (especially as an Arsenal supporter in the 1980s). Part homage to the destructive hope and fragile happiness of supporting a club, part meditation on the realities of mundane suburban masculinity (Williams 2006, 97), it sits in direct contrast to those more aggressive strains more often captured in news headlines reporting anti-social behaviour. Hornby’s book is woven through with erudite deconstruction of English football culture at a decisive time in the contemporary game’s development. Fever Pitch expanded its readership and impact beyond fans of Arsenal, the club it focuses on, by offering an authentic and in-depth knowledge of the terrain, the pain of being a fan. Hornby also provided expert perspective from the thick of what was fast becoming the authorities’ misguided response to rampant football hooliganism. The book’s heart-aching account of the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, where 97 Liverpool supporters lost their lives due to poor policing and failures in crowd management control,2 was heartfelt and far more sympathetic than most had seen in the press. The text’s storytelling mode enables the author to fold in personal insight and narrative, emotional complexity and tension to interactions, anxieties and events and to its positioning within the landscape of football writing. It also brings with it a number of concerns. The level of detail regarding fixtures, dates and results is almost too convenient and too precise to not be at least partially fictionalised (Piskurek 2018, 85; Hill 2006, 129). Fond recollections are made with unrealistic certitude, key narrative events are twisted to align with the arc in a structure that too closely resembles the tenets of a bildungsroman (Piskurek 2018, 86). These characteristics contributed to Jeffrey Hill’s assertions that the work is more akin to similarly inferred fictions, particularly those texts This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (Wolfe 1989) and A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir (Exley 1968), which Hornby cites as influences (Hill 2006, 130). It remains the genre’s most discussed and influential work (Stead 2013, 248), despite its credibility as autobiography or fiction still being critically assessed (Piskurek 2018, 94). Brian Glanville thought Fever Pitch was boring (Braunias 2001, para. 32). Hornby reputedly hates that the novel became a touchstone for football’s transition from a working-man’s passion to a middle-class dinner party accessory (Hill 2006, 119). His publisher and his peers, as would be expected, absolutely loved it (Braunias 2001, para. 26). Fever Pitch’s place on the landscape of football and

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football writing (Piskurek 2018, 84–95), the timing of its publication (Haynes 1995, 5) and its integral role in transitionary change in English football culture (Williams 2006, 96) are key to prevailing academic discussion on the text. The novel’s role in signalling the demise of football as a wholly working-class concern (Hill 2006, 118), its instigation of a wave of literary football writers (Redhead 2004, 294) and the volume and variation in quality of football writing that came with them have also been critically assessed (Stead 2013, 248; Cox et al. 2002, 202). The relative and comparative frequency of debate around its content – even where its categorisation is hampered by ambiguity – was the catalyst for a shift in generic form and an indicator of the impact of football on the literary consciousness (Taylor 1997, 84). Alongside Davies’ description of the 1990 FIFA World Cup, Hornby’s provision of a well-worn model for writing as and about fans (Tadié 2012, 1776), wittingly or otherwise, invoked the movement referred to as ‘new football writing’ – a swathe of literary football fiction that would reshape, reimagine, subvert, parody and add to those established conventions and character stereotypes in an evolving football landscape. Reflecting on Fever Pitch’s impact, Hugh McIlvaney was characteristically disinclined to hide his feelings when he described the text, and the work of those writers who sought to emulate its success, as self-conscious literary narcissism that came at the expense of writing about the game and those who play (in Braunias 2001, 28). The acclaimed sports writer’s views are reverberated in those of theorist Steve Redhead who frequently, less than gently, characterises Hornby’s football writing and those football writers who followed in his stride as the ‘soccerati’ (2004, 294). The label, assigned originally by Tony Parsons (1994, 126), collects those who chose to examine the sociological, political, cultural and economic aspects of football outside of match reports, formulaic biographies and interviews; writers who found their readership in middle-class suburbia and the ‘prawn sandwich-eating’ season ticket sections in English football stadiums;3 the writers who helped put football on society’s high-brow agenda (Cox et al. 2002, 202). My Favourite Year (1993) duplicated the approach of Glanville (1961) and Terence Delaney (1961), whose anthologies also claim a dearth in football fiction and restrict their selection to comparatively few examples. The focus on intellectual football writing, and the soccerati, journalists and creative non-fiction writers such as Pearson, Harry Ritchie, Ian Hamilton and Giles Smith, was employed across the short tenure of Simon Kuper’s literary football journal Perfect Pitch (1997–1998). Gathering an impressive roll call of authors, including Marcela Araujo, Jimmy Burns, Jim White, Emma Lindsey and Jorge Valdano, each issue featured memoir, journalism and fiction – Volume 4 contained the first ever publication of a Borges short in the UK. A coup, certainly, but a coffin nail, too. After four issues, the venture collapsed. The stretch for unnecessary intellectual heft undid its aspirations regarding good football writing (Braunias 2001, para. 33). Rather than underscore a rejection of cerebral football writing, the project’s lack of popularity and subsequent lack of popularity could have been a response to the implicit snobbery in its overt reach for erudition.

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Two well-established novelists who contributed to the journal, Hunter Davies and Roddy Doyle, have also made their mark on football’s fiction. Striker (1992), Davies’ parody of the celebrity footballer, a scathing swipe at the often twodimensional sport-star autobiography and broader late 1980s football culture, is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five. Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel The Van (1991) offered exuberant localised insight on the Republic of Ireland’s unlikely success in qualifying for a Quarter Finals place at that 1990 World Cup in Italy. Doyle, an established and successful author before either Davies or Hornby, would unfairly be considered among the soccerati, who were for the most part non-fiction writers. The Van may not meet the criteria of being a football novel but is included here because it captures the sense of community, joy and optimism in an entire nation’s support of its representative team through the eyes of its protagonist Jimmy Rabitte. The appearance of football in the novel, like the joy and optimism, is short-lived. However, it is significant as it proves to be a catalyst for the rise and fall in the prosperity of the mobile chip van of the title – and Jimmy and his partner Bimbo’s fortunes along with it. The novel’s focus on Rabitte, his family and primarily the impact of unemployment on him and so many like him rings with pathos and biting socio-political commentary. Like Dunky Logan (From Scenes Like These 1968) or Len Rawlings (Dying of the Light 1976) Doyle’s protagonist wants to be defiant, but is ultimately powerless to affect change. For Jimmy, even a short-lived emancipatory engagement with football has immense, if fleeting, impact. The Booker Prize was presented to Doyle for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), which features a one-off play-off, stones for goalposts, match of football in the street. But the play-off is a single incident in the novel and does not amount to an element of narrative significance. Thackeray and Whitbread Biography award winner D.J. Taylor exhibits all the qualities of soccerati membership. He contributed to both Hornby and Kuper’s collections and then later in the decade published his own literary football novel, English Settlement (1996). The text watches over the troubles of outsider American Scott Marshall, an affluent management consultant who moves to London in the wake of the 1990s US recession and finds himself embroiled in the murkier side of Walham F.C., a fictitious version of Fulham. The club’s home ground, Craven Cottage, becomes a site for a study of cultural displacement in a postThatcher English football landscape. Another football novel well placed within the hierarchy of literary football fiction would be Mick Bowers’ Football Seasons (1998), which examines the decisions of an insider, former professional footballer Paul Andrews, who risks his marriage, his family and a burgeoning post-football career when he finds himself attracted to a younger man. Not the first exploration of homosexuality in football fiction (see Putting the Boot In (2014, c1985), it is significant where Bower’s work draws on football fiction conventions if only to subvert them, such as the narrative split between the memories of his transition from fan to footballer and the contemporaneous unfolding of his entangled relationships in the present. While there continued to be a high standard of literary

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football fiction emerging from the UK, the 1990s is also notable for football fiction emerging from elsewhere and in other kinds of popular fiction. Football fiction began to change in the 1990s, but for those paying close attention, the changes were not as drastic as has been previously imagined. As demonstrated above, the quantity of literary fiction appeared to increase. Schoolboy stories were more clearly marked by their diversity and demarcated as young adult fiction, but a large proportion held fastidiously to the ‘last-minute-winner’ characteristics of traditional football narratives. Crime-related football novels maintained their steady, though murderous, run of form, and hooligan fiction exploded. In a handful of cases, they ‘improved’ on their 1970s predecessors. Women re-entered the field as protagonists. Indian football fiction experienced a second peak, and, as if signalling a changing of guard, the decade witnessed the retirement of Roy of the Rovers.

Popular football fiction in the 1990s Tales of Roy Race, star player of fictional team Melchester Rovers, began in the comic Tiger in 1954. This series became so popular by 1976 that Roy of the Rovers went from strip to comic title. The comic endured until 1995, carrying on after Roy’s playing career ended two years earlier.4 Revived by the first Match of the Day magazine in 1997, Race enjoyed a brief managerial career before his boots were cleaned for the last time – as noted later, the character has since been given a 21st-century makeover. The Roy Race comic and its numerous peers and imitators carried the long-held traditions of football, and other sports-related, narratives: winning against the odds (once against evil eastern European football robots); never giving up; the reliability of friends; the power of collective action; and many other lessons shared through playing with grace and good sportsmanship (the gender specificity in the use of the term ‘sportsmanship’ is deliberate). Drawing on the game as a hook, authors and publishers recognised the value in developing texts aimed at young male readers who were learning or reluctant readers. Examples include the majority of the 70 or so novels published by Rob Childs, such as the 8-novel science-fiction/fantasy soccer series Time Rangers (1997–2000), The Big . . . series (1988–2000) comprised of close to 20 short novels, and the 7-novel Soccer Mad series initiated in 1970 only to re-find its feet in 1996. Other prominent young adult fiction writers producing short football novels during the 1990s including Paul Stewart, who wrote the four-novel Football Mad! series between 1997 and 2000 and Alan Gibbons, whose work includes the ten-novel Total Football series (1997–1999) with Some You Win (1997) and Injury Time (1998). Michael Hardcastle is another example, but he is exceptional in that he more consistently published short football novels for younger male readers over a period of more than 30 years. An anecdotal comparison between Shoot on Sight from 1966 and The Away Team (1992) and the five-novel Goal Kings series (1998–2005) reveal consistent and similar patterns in the treatment of football to its schoolboy story counterparts in, and before, the early 1920s.

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Two key exceptions – works that should be considered genuine groundbreakers – were Hannah Cole’s short novel Kick Off (1989) and the Soccer Stars series (1998–1999) by Emily Costello. Aimed at younger female readers, Cole’s novel, the story of two young girls who want to play for the otherwise all-male school football team in the face of expected resistance, is a work ahead of its time. The eight books in the Soccer Stars series’ obvious differentiation is that it appears to be the first girls’ team to have appeared in football fiction since almost 80 years. These texts are significant as indicators of changing attitudes around girls’ and women’s football. As they do in the stories of Ray Lester, Bessie Black and Meg Foster, the stories illustrate the game as a sport for females, where the pitch is a site of everyday activity and through it a site for their empowerment. The depiction of the girls’ and women’s participation counters stereotypes around a lack of ability or even interest in sport (Heinecken 2015, 23) that may have discouraged publishers from entering the field sooner. As it was, another five years would pass before football played by female players appeared in fiction on a more regular basis. Even where there are exceptions in terms of character, gender and diversity, the stories for young adults and their exhaustive variation on abiding convention bind the origins of the genre all the way through its history to its contemporary popularity. They undermine contentions in the lack of interest in the made-up football story, but where these traditions and tropes are employed in popular football fiction primarily aimed at adults, they also reinforce criticisms regarding the maturity of football supporters. In the rush to capitalise on the surging interest in football writing, a range of football novels leaning on established practices in the genre featured stories of players, fans and managers. Sports writer Jim White wrote The Diary of Darren Tackle (1998), a humorous take on a hapless less-than-average player. ‘Mack’ MacNeil in the Australian novel Keep It Simple, Stupid (Goldsworthy 1996) is an example of the same kind of player on a different continent. The Glaswegian parochialism of James Barclay’s The Bigot (1995, 1997, 2005), a trilogy about a grumpy, biased supporter, would limit its readership, but it is representative of a light-hearted examination of one kind of Scottish football fan. A slightly more widely celebrated comedy, if only geographically, is that of inept coach Les Bence, star of Life at the Tip: Les Bence on the Game (Grist 1993), the novel version of the serialised narrative that appeared regularly in the football journal When Saturday Comes (Ticher 1986). Scots novelist Sandy Jamieson’s second novel, The Great Escape (2013, c1997), is a conventional former player turned coach rescues downtrodden club story, but his first is a less conventional crime-related football fiction. Own Goal (1997) narrates the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher during her attendance at a Scottish Cup Final. Much more standard football crimes were drawn out in the Mark Rosetti series (1996–1998) by former player agent Mel Stein. The trilogy is set in the world of top-flight professional football. Two very different thrillers, originally published in Spanish, Bernard Atxaga’s literary psycho-thriller The Lone

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Man (1998) is set during the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain, and Antonio Dal Masetto’s Hay unos tipos abajo (‘There are some guys below’, 1998) is set during the previous World Cup in Argentina in 1978. The central figure of Atxaga’s novel is Carlos, a hotelier and former member of ETA,5 the Basque separatist group. Carlos hides two ex-colleagues and current ETA members in the hotel. The Polish national team, their security detail and Spanish police are also in residence. The novel’s juxtaposition of the Poles’ best ever run in the tournament (they made it to the semi-finals) and the increased media attention and security complicating the operation to smuggle the Basque gunmen out of the country offers a fascinating counterpoint between football, politics and national identity. As equally and deeply steeped in a sense of paranoia, Dal Masetto’s Hay unos tipos abajo follows a young journalist, fresh to the capital, who fears that he has become a subject of observation by the junta, during a period of severe censorship. The novel is marked by its capture of a fear-filled atmosphere in Argentina alongside its coverage of and the political and militaristic shaping in the staging of that particular World Cup (Wood 2017, 134–139). Collectively, these texts hold to, stretch and build on the norms of football’s fiction. They also represent its growth as a form during the decade. A new development is the introduction of female characters, which arose as a result of Karren Brady’s own incredible achievements. The first female managing director of an English Premier League football club, Brady wrote two novels. United (1997) adopts elements of her own story with the protagonist inheriting a controlling share in a football club and marrying one of the club’s footballers. The second novel, Trophy Wives (1998), is a more melodramatic take on footballers’ wives and partners, whose role in the game was emerging as a popular culture phenomenon portrayed in TV shows such as Footballers’ Wives (Chadwick and McManus 2002–2007), which has undergone academic scrutiny (see Clayton and Harris 2004). While Brady’s novels tend to focus on the salacious aspects of the professional game during a period of growing affluence and the gathering cult of celebrity, they align with Brady’s views and her embodiment of her championing of women in leadership roles in football. In contrast, Elizabeth Coldwell’s novel represents the frequent occurrence of erotic writing being published through self-publishing digital platforms. It is noted as an exemplar and for its subversion of the tropes of those misogynistic soft-porn novels of the late 1970s and 1980s by placing women in leading and decisionmaking roles. Football novels with a female footballer in the lead role are rare, which makes the two novels Hem and Football (1992) and its sequel Hem and Maxine (1993) by Indian author Nalinaksha Bhattacharya important to the genre. The texts focus on the life of Hemprova Mintra, a schoolgirl from Calcutta who, at 13 years old, wants to remove herself from suffocating familial responsibilities exacerbated by social expectations on young women in the community. She joins the local football team where the coach, who draws on the communist manifesto in team talks, inspires Hem to greater things. At a time when, outside of fiction, women’s participation in football was regarded as transgressive, Hem goes on to play for

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the first professional Bengali club for women. In Hem and Maxine, Hem finds herself amid Calcutta’s societal hoi polloi, embroiled in a relationship with Maxine Basak, the white wife of a corrupt, lascivious Indian politician. Bhattacharya’s novels explore serious themes of gender politics, empowerment and the tensions between sport and familial obligation made more difficult and contentious when situated within the Indian caste system and from the female point of view. Most likely due to their focus on a young female Indian footballer, the texts were initially credited as the inspiration behind the movie and subsequent novelisation of Bend It Like Beckham (Dhami 2004), but the film’s script writer and director has since noted otherwise.6 Fortunately for this study, the Hem novels were published in English. However, as noted in the previous chapter, Indian football fiction was not a new phenomenon. Through the work of Kausik Bandyopadhyay, we know that Moti Nandy’s novels and short football fiction, published in periodicals and sports magazines, continued to be popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s (2011, 249–253). Nandy did find further success with two football novels in the 1990s: Ferrari (‘The Lost’) (1990) and Dolbolder Aage (‘Before the Change of Club’) (1992). His work was then collected in a range of anthologies of sports fiction, also published in Bengali, including: Khela aar Khela (1994), edited by Siddhartha Ghosh; Kishar Golpo Khela (1998), edited by Asoke Sen; and Santipriya Bandyopadhyay’s Srra Khelar Golpo (2001). These works established Nandy as India’s foremost football author and inspired a number of peers. Two novels by Bandolpadhyay, Goal (1990) and Offside (1990), and another by Niman Bhattacharjee, Footballar (1993), drew on the popular 1990s conventions of realist football fiction to look at the Bengali football scene during the 1960s and 1970s (Bandyopadhyay 2011, 253). Before moving to discuss football fiction of the 21st century, a phenomenon that re-emerged and subsided in 1990s football fiction must be observed. Transgressive behaviour and questions raised by politics, loyalty and national identity as they are connected to, or embroiled in, football is at the core of football hooliganism.

‘ Among the Thugs’ : the literature of hooligans When we first meet the younger version of Paul Andrews in Mick Bowers’ Football Seasons, he is charging from a stand filled with Sheffield United supporters onto the pitch toward the players of the Millwall team as part of an angry mob (1998, 3). Kevin Sampson followed the critical and commercial success of Away Days (1998a), a patient examination of hooliganism, with a book of creative non-fiction football writing, Extra Time (1998b) – a treatise on being a Liverpool supporter. Sampson’s primary interest in the game is as observant fan.7 Outside of these notable exceptions, hooligan fiction, hoolie lit, or hoolie porn began operating, for the most part, at some distance from new football writing. The genre exploded in popularity not as a result of new football writing but rather in response to it (Redhead 2007, 2004).

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Most football fiction surveys trace hooligan literature’s origins to Skinhead (Allen 1970). This text positions Alfred Draper’s Death Penalty (1972), where football is more integral to the narrative, as a more suitable candidate. Irrespective of debate on when it started, all discussion agrees upon the fictive form attaining peak production in the late 1990s as hooliganism as an activity was being diminished by the implementation of tighter security at matches and more sophisticated police measures. Alignment with a wave of highly successful British films making gangster chic marketable invoked an avalanche of arguably mostly made-up, though pitched as confessional ‘sports’ fan memoirs (Redhead 2004, 27). Further reading on the phenomenon of football hooliganism, a popular field, spans from recent research (Spaaij and Testa 2016, 365–375) to reports drafted in 1968 (Howell and Harrington 1968), from perspectives on ‘Casuals’ and their fashion (Thornton 2003) and historical research that dates the activity to the 1863 (Taylor 2011, 1752). The vibrant, gratuitous violence of these novels aimed at readers who sought to better understand, celebrate or vicariously indulge in football hooliganism were most aptly labelled ‘hit and tells’ by Redhead (2004, 28). Examples of the overtly fictional, in terms of narrative delivery, writing style and quality, and those most commonly referenced are Gavin Anderson’s Casual (1996), Sampson’s Away Days (1998a) and the stories from the prolific pen of Dougie Brimson in his novels The Crew (1999) and its sequel, Top Dog (2001), which have since been adapted into films. The nature of violence and the intrinsic cultural role of the fan are central to three novels by John King (Redhead 2004, 394), whose debut The Football Factory (1996) and its sequels Headhunters (1998) and England Away (1999), were the first to specifically position football hooliganism as a driving force in a literary novel. In the novels of Irvine Welsh, as noted by Anthony May, football is a central element of each of the main characters’ experience of violence as a part of life in Scottish society, but the violence always supersedes football’s influence (2018, 930). While at times pervasive, football is not foregrounded in Welsh’s work in the ways it is in King’s novels. The characters in both authors’ works visit football. But where it seems to be a source of empowerment for Tommy Johnson and his peers and a vehicle for their actions (J. King 1996, 1998, 1999), for Begbie, Rents, Sick Boy and Spud (Welsh 1994–2018), it is one of a handful of distracting character flaws that keep the four men tenuously connected. The reader is only ever afforded rare glimpses of football in the texts of King and Welsh, and those glimpses are from the sidelines. As highlighted by Redhead, the work of these two novelists could be seen as a working-class football fiction response to new football writing – one that is designed to align with football fans, who are able to see themselves in the work, while simultaneously disturbing those not traditionally seen as football supporters – those who’d taken up a fashionable ‘post-Hornby’ interest when the first works of both authors were published (Redhead 2000, 8). King’s novels follow and examine a group of working-class, white, racist, disenfranchised, effectively powerless young men (Tadié 2012, 1780) who spend their

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not insubstantial earnings and time waging war on supporters of other clubs (see The Football Factory, 1996, and Headhunters, 1998). Under a banner uniting them in their aggression, they also wage war on supporters of other countries’ teams, who are united under their own banners and flags (see England Away, 1999). Football culture as catalyst for exploration of national and individual identity underpins Tommy Johnson’s unapologetic perspective on life in a working-class housing estate, its pub, the football supporters’ bus, and rampaging through an assortment of English, and then German, cities. The narratives’ parallels with militaristic honour and loyalty instilled through team sports with the violence enacted in the name of a local football club are confronting – not surprising but brutal, honest and challenging. As Alexis Tadié notes, the fictional representation of these acts distils and personalises the experience for the reader in ways that arms-length sociological studies cannot (2012, 1781). Football provides a similar mechanism in the works of Welsh, which draw on the writer’s support of Edinburgh-based football club Hibernian F.C. His characters’ interactions with football are most often peripheral. Where football is positioned as an institutionalised cornerstone of working-class Scottish culture, it can be seen as integral to the fabric of their characters. If seen, matches are watched on TV, usually in a pub or by accident on a video tape, comparisons are made between scoring goals and orgasms, and all references are made in the maintenance of his protagonists’ small community within the context of its place within a slightly broader Edinburgh community. As Anthony May notes, football appears in almost every Welsh novel (2018, 931). From Trainspotting (1993) and The Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) to A Decent Ride (2015) and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018), it is often pulled into view for setting, character development and narratorial commentary on those behaviours of supporters of two other teams: the Glasgow team, The Rangers F.C.,8 and Hibernian’s hometown rivals Hearts of Midlothian F.C. In Welsh’s fiction, these clubs and their fans are aligned with the values of Sectarianism and Unionism and the worst traits of colonialism, most often characterised as violent bigotry. In sharp contrast, Welsh depicts Scots of, or those favouring, Irish descent as socialist, egalitarian, republican and in moral opposition to Unionism (May 2018, 931). The ongoing clash between these cultural groups culminates in Dead Men’s Trousers (2018). In a rare, and relatively lengthy, view of a match, Welsh’s men attend Hibernian’s real-life, long-awaited and now infamous Scottish Cup Final victory over The Rangers F.C. and participate in the riotous pitch invasion that occurred afterwards. In what must be Welsh’s most overt authorial intrusion to date, we see the protagonists’ celebration turn ugly as they defend their honour and that of their club in a battle instigated by the supporters of their opposition on the national stadium pitch following the game’s final whistle. This allows the characters, and vicariously Welsh, to claim a moral, political, cultural and footballing victory. The Hibernian fans of Welsh’s novels and King’s Chelsea fans are diametrically, politically and philosophically opposed in their viewpoints. Yet it is possible to see them as being shaped by the same social and economic forces, the same anger at the

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inequalities delivered across a broken social system that continues to marginalise the working classes, regardless of their cultural ideologies and value systems. Consideration of Welsh’s novels brings the history of football fiction to one of its most recent works and, as underlined by Stead, to a time when the genre is at its richest (2013, 250). Acceptance of the form is reflected in its relative abundance. While the next section considers the latter stages of the genre’s historical development, it will do so with a view to presenting its contemporary state of play.

Three emergent themes in football fiction The distance and variation from erudite and pensive to adversarial and violent football fiction during the 1990s reflects the significant changes that occurred in football fiction in the late 20th century. In comparison to the blowout of publishing activity that swept through the field of football novels in the 21st century, it seems relatively calm. Mirroring general publishing trends, the rate and volume of football fiction publication has substantially increased. The quality and content are proportionately varied. Roy Race has been resurrected, and the schoolboy, and now schoolgirl, football story is at its most popular. Literary football fiction has continued to expand. The number of female protagonists has grown, especially in fiction aimed at young adult female readers, where established players have entered the genre as authors for the first time. Discussion on contemporaneous developments on existing forms will follow consideration of new and emergent forms of the football novel that have proliferated in a relatively short period of time in the 21st century: fictional stories based on real people, the impact of self-publishing and what can be learned from the rise in the re-publication of old novels. Due in no small part to the requirements of the game’s play, two teams of (up to) 11 players; a support crew of managers, coaches, trainers, and physiotherapists; and a cast of thousands of fans, the genre has always enjoyed an extensive and colourful cast of characters. Yet the incorporation of real teams and players for mimetic authenticity has featured in the genre since Arnold Bennett and the earliest football novels. The technique has more recently given greater depth and dimension in detailed fictional explorations of real people and on real football events. David Peace’s biographical novel, The Damned Utd (2006), describes Brian Clough’s short, damaged tenure as manager of Leeds United. For 44 days in 1974, a young, abrasive, unstable Clough attempted to remove and replace the memory of Don Revie, his much-loved predecessor, and institute his own brand of football at the club. As an exercise in football, it was calamitous. As an exercise in fiction, Peace’s presentation of a heightened, hyperreal, subjective perspective enables examination of the nature of the game and its social and political context through the eyes of one of its greatest and most divisive managers. Employing free indirect discourse, or limited third person, for the present day 1974 and a searing second-person perspective for Clough’s own short-lived and doomed playing career in the years before, the reader is afforded communion with the man, the team and the sport. The book realises a high-wire balancing

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act between the most refined techniques of literary fiction as they are brought to bear on a brutish and ugly piece of football culture. Insight and understanding are carved out in an exacting penetration of the consciousness of the football manager within the safety of the artifice and parameters that fiction allows. Such was the magnetism in the realist capture of Clough’s football genius, noisy verbosity and righteous anger conveyed through an incessant, relentless voice; the novel achieved what few football novels have the power to do. It attracted an audience within and outside the football community and inspired a film, albeit with an altered narrative and title – The Damned United (Hooper and Morgan 2009) took a softer approach to the character’s portrayal and the story’s conclusion. Former international player Derek Dougan’s account of the fractious relationship between a player and a coach in The Footballer (1974) may be the earliest attempt at the biographical novel. The story, which bears a striking resemblance to the relationship Dougan, then striker, had with then Wolverhampton Wanderers coach Bill McGarry, does not and cannot offer the same emotionally charged failings of The Damned Utd. Sports reporter Guillermo Thorndike’s biographical novel El revés de morir (‘The Opposite of Dying’) (1978), also published before the Damned Utd, is equally unlikely to have been the template. A later work by Peace, the hypnotic and arguably superior Red or Dead (2013), is a first-person account of the managerial career of Bill Shankly, the man who arguably established Liverpool F.C.’s ongoing success. An account of the tense, volatile and incredibly successful relationship between the two men at the heart of Manchester City’s accomplishments in the late 1960s and early 1970s can be found in Colin Shindler’s The Worst of Friends: Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City (2010). The Road to Lisbon (Greig and McGarry 2012) follows Jock Stein’s Glasgow Celtic on its way to become the first UK team to win the prestigious European Cup in the Portuguese capital in 1967. While the novel draws on the same kailyard traditions of Robin Jenkins’ work, a fictionalised perspective of Stein is used to carry one of the novel’s interwoven narrative threads. Robert Endeacott has written a number of fictional representations of real Leeds United stories. Dirty Leeds (Endeacott 2009) focuses on the team’s league win prior to Clough’s arrival. The sequel, Disrepute: Revie’s England (Endeacott 2010), watches over Don Revie’s troubled tenure as England manager. Endeacott’s most recent novel, The Gigante (2019), is a factional perspective of John Charles – a player Leeds sold to Italian club Juventus in 1957. Charles is one of the few English players to have made a successful transition from his native UK football to continental European football. The historical, biographical exploration of Sheffield United player Rabbi Howell is the basis for the self-published novel The Evergreen in Red and White (Kay 2014), which brings us to a second theme identified in 21st-century football fiction. The disruption of traditional approaches to the genre is key to the impact independent and self-publishing has had on the field of football fiction. Author Steven Kay’s presentation of Howell’s story draws together a wealth of local research around the club and the player to celebrate an early pioneer of

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inventive football. Unable to attract a traditional publisher to the work – a narrow topic within an already narrow field – the author elected to self-publish. Positioning the work within his own independent publishing company, 1889 Books, Kay garnered multiple local press reviews. A positive review in the football journal When Saturday Comes attained the text a degree of industry recognition – and an online profile, which includes reviews of some 50 football novels, offers readers some indicative assurances as to the novel’s quality. Closer inspection of the reviews reveals arguably limited engagement with the texts, Kay’s focus on plot and a reluctance to engage with more literary novels may also highlight possible issues with the presentation of Evergreen. Kay’s practice is highlighted here as a result of connection to and exemplification of a larger DIY online community of football writers who share, review and promote one another’s work, and represents an increasingly common publication process. In the contemporary literary environment, which is currently remaking itself to incorporate the advantages of digital publishing, the concept of the book as container is being challenged and changing publishing (Dietz 2015, 196). Yet significant numbers of self-publishing football fiction authors continue to operate across what would be considered as traditional approaches. The range of football titles is wide and varied. Many texts aim to capitalise on perceptions around the genre’s alleged scarcity or attend to disguised authorial agendas about broader football issues. Unfortunately, while these books can be expertly delivered, they are often poorly executed. Soccer: The Novel (Mininni 2006) is an example of an author filling a perceived gap in the field of football writing – its declarative approach hopes to encourage participation in the US environment. In contrast, playing on the phrase usually reserved for the partners of football obsessives, Football Widows (Hickling 2008) has little interest in the game beyond using it as a site for murder – one grisly episode takes place on a pitch. There are many fascinating subjects in the self-published range, but their exponential increase in publication has made it difficult to keep track of or to track down. A selection of examples is used here for illustrative purposes. The plot, setting and character development in Stephen O’Donnell’s second novel, Scotball (2014), are considerably stronger than his first, Paradise Road (2012). Both novels were arguably published too soon. They make expert use of dialogue but would benefit from greater narrative cohesion, robust structural editing and an edit across the use of voice. In the second, such editing would affect more controlled use of a narrative device shaped as a football highlights television program, which delivers a highly informed, though highly authorial, diatribe on the state of Scottish football. Small independent presses, such as O’Donnell’s publisher Ringwood, delegate promotion of their titles entirely to the authors. Heartlab, publisher of Blitzball (Ludwig 2019), appear to deliver its entire promotion online. The range of self-publishing outlets, from Authorhouse and CreateSpace to vanity publishers such as US-based Tate Publishing and Enterprises,9 is as varied as the texts they publish. Meanwhile, electronic or digital publishing and social media have incited extraordinary growth across the publishing industry. In 2013, an estimated

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80% of new releases originated from self-publishing or small presses (Carolan and Evain 2013, 286). The researchers predicted the figure would increase annually. Alongside these texts, another emblematic practice is fan fiction. Over a decade ago, John Hughson and Marcus Free asserted that sport by its nature resists fan fiction (2006, 92). Today, an abundance of fan fiction now exists. Its creation is the result of a convergence in the expansion of fan fiction practices and the increasingly sophisticated ways football clubs, football organisations and television companies use the sport and its related forms of media to engage audiences (see Waysdorf 2015). The fiction produced on the active LiveJournal community, Footballslash, which has been operating since 2002, tends to focus on the UEFA Champions League, its players and clubs (Waysdorf 2015, para 1.2). Fan fiction will not be included in this study. It is noted here as a popular avenue of football fiction and an extension of those previously noted fictionalised accounts and representations of real players and clubs. While also not discussed in depth or with additional detail in this text, further insight and discussion on the distinctions between relatively formal and more informal publishing practices, the issues and concerns and their exponential growth can be found in online resources and journals such as The Writing Platform and Publishing Research Quarterly. Recent academic texts, including The Literary Careers in the Modern Era (Davidson and Evans 2015) and Digital Authorship (Skains 2019) should also be considered. A third emergent theme in contemporary football fiction is re-publication. This does not include novels that have been in continuous print since their initial release or that have experienced a resurgence of interest in the wake of a 2009 film adaptation, e.g. The Damned Utd (2006). Rather, it highlights ‘discoveries’, older works often regarded as ‘classics’ and texts published in languages other than English that have been translated. J.L. Carr’s How Steeple Sinderby Won the F.A. Cup (2005, c1975) and Robin Jenkins’ The Thistle and the Grail (2006, c1954) found new stature amid the soccerati in their search for football literature in the early 1990s and have continued to find a football audience. B.S. Johnson’s experimental work The Unfortunates (2008, c1969) also found new non-football audiences through its pioneering of a fragmented narrative structure. The re-release of John King’s Football Factory trilogy in 2016 to celebrate its 20th anniversary poignantly marks the novels’ continued – and if anything sharpened – relevance in social and political environments that reflect the exacerbation of broken-down communities. The re-publication of Gerald Verner’s Football Pools Murders (2015, c1939); Julian Barnes’, AKA Dan Kavanagh, Putting the Boot In (2014, c1985); Hunter Davies’ Body Charge (2013, c1972); and George Douglas’ Final Score (2004, c1975) suggest renewed or at least continuing interest in crime-related football fiction. They also reflect the changes wrought by digital publishing practices, such as low maintenance of an expansive back catalogue of digital titles and the affordability of publishing via other mechanisms, such as print on demand. The repackaging and re-publication of Siobhan Curham’s Sweet FA (2002), retitled as The Sweet Revenge of the Football Widows (2014), is indicative of a different

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set of entrepreneurial practices afforded authors and publishers using digital publishing platforms and, in this specific case, her rebranding as a young adult fiction author. English translations of literary and popular football fiction include Vienna (2006) by Eva Manesse (see Bairner 2011, 32–48) and Bengali author Moti Nandy’s ground-breaking 1970s football novellas (2010). In addition to the three themes outlined, and alongside those works noted in Football in South American Literature (Wood 2017), there has been a relative proliferation of English novels and translations.

Characteristics of football fiction in the 21st century Besides those texts already noted, it is important to highlight significant texts that have emerged in football fiction in the previous two decades. Doing so illustrates unmatched vibrancy in the genre. This section begins with literary works from a range of countries and closes with examples of the more challenging works being published for young male readers. In between, it notes the growth in narratives featuring female characters and the continuing staple convergence of football and crime, with a small number of examples of football drawing on other more established genres including romance and fantasy. A number of notable works suggest continuing and growing interest in Europe and elsewhere. Iceland’s Elísabet Jökulsdóttir’s short story collection, Fótboltasögur (tala saman strákar)(‘Football Stories (Communicate Lads)’(2003), is one such example (Turnbull et al. 2008, 225). The comic writing of Argentinian Hernán Casciari’s Más respecto, quy soy tu madre (‘A Little Respect, I’m your Mother’), originally published as a blog in 2003/2004, met with success in Spain in 2006. Laurent Mauvignier’s novel In the Crowd (2008) is a French literary novel that highlights the aftermath of the 1985 Heysel Stadium Disaster in Brussels from the perspectives of a disparate collective who attended the European Cup Final involving Liverpool and Juventus. A wanton act of violence and the consequent barrier crush that ended the lives of 39 people and injured as many as 600 more are unravelled and given room to breathe in this visceral, emotive and, at turns, sensitive study of grief, recovery and the complexities of a football tragedy. The heteroglossic narrative travels from anticipation of attendance at a match representing the pinnacle of European club football, to and through the disaster. The novel then moves beyond the claustrophobia to the court case that takes place three years later. Divergent perspectives from French, English and Italian attendees present views from the crowd on the day. They eclipse the reason they are there and acutely capture the emotional impact such an event had on the lives of those who survived. Three additional literary novels that must be considered are El Fantasista (‘The Fantasist’ 2006), Not Art: A Novel (2010) and Utazás a tizenhatos mélyére (‘Voyage to the End of the Penalty Area’, 2006). All three are by prestigious national

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prize-winners in their native countries, the first by award-winning Chilean novelist Hernán Rivera Letelier and the other two, both set in the liminal space between fiction and non-fiction, by Hungarian novelist Péter Esterházy. Chilean novelist Hernán Rivera Letelier was among a number of his country’s writers to adopt football as a literary device to examine the Pinochet’s horrific rule over the country. His football short story Donde mueren los valientes (‘Where the Brave Die’, 1999) arguably laid some of the groundwork for the novel El Fantasista (‘The Fantasist’ 2006), which positions a talented footballer as a uniting symbol intrinsically bound to an anti-authoritarian establishment discourse. This allows the author to interrogate the dictator’s impact on the people of Chile. Not Art: A Novel is not a novel in the traditional sense, but it is a novelistic examination of a relationship. It centres on the narrator’s mother, a football expert whose life is tethered to a football pitch. It is she who explains the offside rule to her son, the narrator, and who takes off her stockings in the park for the boys whose ball, made of rags, becomes loose. The boys in the park happen to be members of the 1950s Hungarian national side, including the legend Ferenc Puskás. The friendship between the mother and Puskás, as with the text’s narrative on the relationship, relies on a willingness on the reader’s part to wilfully ignore the existence of a world beyond the football pitch (Tadié 2012, 1785). The text makes numerous references to Hungarian clubs and players. Whereas Not Art portrays a ‘magical’ autobiography, the author/narrator’s first football text Utazás a tizenhatos mélyére (‘Voyage to the End of the Penalty Area’, 2006) is positioned as non-fiction but is more comfortably perceived as fiction (Tadié 2012, 1785). Puskás takes a more central role in Voyage, which brings together the author’s recollections of his own experiences as a player, the nature of football in the Hungarian lower divisions, contemporary German football and, as would be expected from a Hungarian writing about the 2006 World Cup, a view of the 1954 World Cup final in which Germany defeated Hungary 3–2. Esterházy re-imagines Hungary’s third goal as being allowed and in doing so unearths his own and his nation’s tangible pain at the loss. As with Hines’ work in the 1960s and short stories in This Artistic Life (2009), the author’s own football-playing experience elicits a sense of authenticity in the novel’s portrayal of the game, its reverent consideration and use of Puskás as an emblematic figure in Hungarian football, and the game’s place in other countries’ cultures. The award-winning Chilean novelist Hernán Rivera Letelier was among a number of writers who adopted football as a literary device. A football short story Donde mueren los valientes (‘Where the Brave Die’, 1999) arguably laid some of the groundwork for his novel El Fantasista (‘The Fantasist’ 2006), which interrogates the impact Pinochet’s dictatorship had on the people of Chile from the perspective of a virtuoso footballer, a symbol of the people intrinsically bound to an anti-authoritarian establishment discourse. A small number of Australian novels have been uncovered in the course of this study, which overlaps with the forensic research of Paul Mavroudis. The novels rely on well-worn traditions in football fiction, leaning into the tone of Goldsworthy’s Keep It Simple Stupid! (1996). They include Tony Wilson’s Making News

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(2010), which follows out-of-luck Australian ex-player Charlie Dekker whose career in England has abated. The novel’s secondary characters, the player’s successful author wife and aspiring journalist son, add dimension to a story that critiques English and Australian football celebrity culture and its relationship with the tabloid press. Mr Cleansheets (2010) takes Adrian Deans’ hapless 40-something Australian keeper Eric Judd to England to try his fortune at a professional career. Deans’ work simultaneously vents over ‘soccer’s’ mistreatment by other Australian football codes while attempting to promote an ideal position for the game in the country’s sporting landscape (Mavroudis 2013, 494). Additional Australian titles include Bailey of the Saints (2011), written by football journalist David Alejandro Fearnhead, and two titles by first-time author Texi Smith: Introducing Jarrod Black (2019) and its sequel Hospital Pass (2019). All heavily rely on the genre’s tropes. Neil Humphreys’ two football novels, Match Fixer (2009) and its sequel Premier Leech (2011), have Australian ties, are written by an Englishman and are primarily based in Singapore, which is likely why their focus is on gambling and match fixing more than the football itself, though the first follows a journeyman footballer. In recent years English-language football fiction has experienced similar levels of renewed interest, diversification and experimentation that has resulted in relatively large number of divergent football fictions. One work typifying modern aspects of the use of football as a vehicle in the real world as well as in fiction is Home Ground (2017), edited by Louise Welsh, which is a collection of stories that celebrate the social entrepreneurialism of the Homeless World Cup event in Glasgow. Danny Rhodes’ Fan (2014) borrows the split narrative from The Damned Utd and includes some Peace-influenced second-person point of view in a fictionalised account of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. The sense of derivation is negated by the power imbued by the author’s experience of having attended the tragedy. Three more literary novels are Ross Raisin’s The Natural (2017) and Anthony Cartwright’s first and fourth novels, Heartland (2009) and Iron Towns (2016). All three are indicative of the consistency and frequency of highest standards of football fiction continuing to be published. The Natural is a rare football story in that it requires no knowledge of football. It is about ambition, friendship, rivalry, talent, competition and who a person can become in the face of adversity, so it does carry the hallmarks of the football fiction. But this story of a bullied footballer trying to build a career while being at odds with his own sexuality and of a footballer’s wife lost in the detritus of her husband’s playing career moves into territories rarely challenged in mainstream football novels. Heartland (2009) is far less subtle but just as tightly wound. Like Isaac Goldemberg’s Tiempo al tiempo (‘Time to Time’) (1984), Cartwright’s book is divided into equal halves, its home-and-away fixtures offer structural parallels and comparisons between an international spectator experience and a local game. Each part of the narrative is rife with the politics of race, class and wealth. Immersed in the vernacular of football, it pushes into new territory, forcing the reader to readdress expectations, and it is rare in that it features an adult protagonist who still plays football. Iron Towns evokes the atavistic working-class experience of football amid the broken communities and skeletal

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remains of post-industrial northern England. Cartwright’s numerous switches of narrative perspective from spectators to players and fans of local team, Iron Towns F.C., captures the emotional resonance of a collective. The frequent employment of real players and clubs adds authenticity and powerfully underlines the economic disparities between top-tier clubs and players and journeyman defenders like Liam Corwen. It is through Corwen, a human inkwell of tattoos, that we see the depth and distance from an England international cap earned as a substitute to the endless, meaningless fixture list and work-a-day mediocrity of mid-table lower-league football. Iron Towns is a stunning work, surreptitiously playing with form while simultaneously recalling the writing and sentiment of those angry young men 50 years before. Cartwright’s use of a large cast of voices and characters offers a much greater sense of a whole community. The women’s team playing in a park in Paul Breen’s Season of Bones (2016) is more demonstrative of the game’s growing place in the landscape rather than the author’s interest in the sport. However, it denotes a heartening aspect of contemporary football fiction: the increasing acknowledgement of female participation in the game, as players and in roles around football. This is particularly true of young adult fiction. In recognition of its burgeoning, though long-deserved, position in the sports fiction landscape, Helena Pielichaty’s excellent Girls F.C. series was reissued in 2018. A great strength in this series is its historical exposition of the early pioneers of women’s football – stories that have until now been hidden. Public interest and academic research are now growing through the work of Gertud Pfister and Stacey Pope (2018), Jean Williams (2017, 2013, 2007, 2003), Jayne Caudwell (2011, 2002), Barbara Cox (2012) and many others. Former Australian national side player, Ellyse Perry co-authored Magic Feet (with Clark 2017), the only one of a four-book sports series that is about football. Current US player Alex Morgan’s The Kicks (2013–2019) is a simple, effective and worthy ten-book series aimed at young adult female readers and players. Morgan’s prominent place on the US football landscape, the employment of an excellent ghost writer, and the stable growth of women’s football has led to a New York Times bestseller listing and a TV show. These stories’ success is indicative of the growing interest in, and media attention on, women’s football. The stories are noted here as unapologetically positioning their protagonists as athletes first, irrespective of gender. The maturity in young adult football fiction aimed at readers who identify as female is much stronger now. A substantial proportion of contemporary football fiction for young adult readers is now aimed at female readers. Cath Crowley’s Gracie Faltrain (2004, 2006, 2008) series follows Gracie through a series of relationship trials and football-related tribulations. Donna King’s Kick Off (2007) sees a young woman settle into life in England through football. Liz Deep-Jones’ Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (2008) follows a footballer in her quest for acceptance in predominantly male team without losing her femininity. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal is explored further later in this book. While both Breathing Soccer (2008) by Debbie Spring and Pretty Tough (2007) by Liz Tigelaar demonstrate that girls can play football, Shut Out (Halpin 2011) is a gentler, less-intense take on a similar narrative. Peter

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Abraham’s Down the Rabbit Hole (2006), the first part of his Echo Falls detective series, has a female footballer as the mystery solver. For older readers, The Season (Dyer and Dyer 2016) makes use of aspects of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to build the story of 20-year-old Meagan McKnight, who plays striker for her local team. When we meet McKnight, she’s just missed a goal-mouth sitter. The Season is an engaging football romance but, with the exception of its allusion to literature, it doesn’t stretch the football or romance genres. Defending Taylor (Keneally 2016) offers similar romantically framed conflicts, while Breakaway (Spears 2016) offers a look at how three male protagonists respond to the death of a close friend. Each of these texts reflect football as a popular vehicle for romance in various ways – Breakaway seeks to subvert perceptions of gender norms and is listed alongside texts aimed at similar target readerships. Through each of these texts we see young adult fiction aimed at the higher end of the 12–25 age range. The ‘soccer mom’ fiction genre, which coincided with the game’s initial and rapid growth in popularity in the US and the emergence of UK footballers’ wives’ stories, has significant similarities. The women featured in these texts tend to exist around football, respectively dropping children at parks for activities and celebrating their partners’ wins, but the game or any significant feature of its play is not given serious treatment. Soccer mom and footballers’ wives’ novels are noted here to dispel their first-glance consideration as football novels. Titles range from practical, humorous and horror fantasy to the contemporary football equivalent of bodice rippers. Examples include Jennifer Apodoca’s Ninja Soccer Moms (2004) and Carpool Diem (2008) by Nancy Star. A small number are included in the list as a representative sample or where there is enough football for them to be considered within the genre. Football-related crime fiction has always been a staple of the genre. The fifth book in Alex Gray’s contemporary Scots crime fiction, or tartan noir, Pitch Black (2008), investigates a spate of murders related to fictitious Glasgow football club Kelvin F.C. Gray follows in the footsteps of crime novelists from the 1960s, incorporates real teams and makes the most of a clearly growing knowledge of the game (however, some terminology is used incorrectly and will likely upset purists). Philip Kerr – another top-tier crime writer and a more obvious football fan – has produced what might be considered the premier football crime fiction. Beginning with January Window (2014), the trilogy, set around fictitious club London City, brings impeccable knowledge of football together with the author’s inimitable skill in crime fiction. Santiago Roncagliolo’s La pena máxima (‘The Maximum Penalty’, 2014) is a political thriller built around Peru’s matches in the 1978 World Cup and articulates and parallels the insidious political relationship between the two countries through the matches (Wood 2017, 183–184; see also Wood 2005). Arild Stavrum’s Exposed at the Back (2014) brings the sensibilities of Scandinavian noir to the football novel. This, his second novel, has the stamp of approval of Jo Nesbo, whose cover quote practically validates the book’s football credibility. Stavrum’s own credibility was established when the former player won the Norwegian sports writer of the year award for his previous, more literary

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football novel No More Free Kicks (2008), which is as yet only published in Norwegian. Other notable crime writers have made mention of football clubs within their work. Scottish club Raith Rovers feature in a number of Ian Rankin’s Rebus series (though not in the TV version where Rebus’ team is Hibernian – for convenience, perhaps, as a majority of the show is filmed in Edinburgh). Christopher Brookmyre, a supporter of Paisley side St Mirren, also makes frequent football references in his work, including a number of short works.10 Fantasy football is generally regarded as a game played across workplaces, but there is a growing branch of fantastical football fiction, too. The most recent, If Only: An Alternative History of the Beautiful Game (Turner 2017), goes to great lengths to demonstrate authenticity. It includes detailed fictitious sports reports and imagines alternative outcomes of significant matches such as Derby County winning their semi-final against Juventus in the 1973 European Cup. With its foreword by Irvine Welsh, Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer (McInnes 2016) also offers an alternative history in that it suggests the missing link in the human evolutionary process is a footballer. The closing section of this chapter turns to the longest-standing and most populated field of the genre. Young adult football fiction features highly successful series, which often incorporate professional footballer endorsements. Comics and novelised schoolboy stories also comfortably sit alongside far more complex, emotionally challenging narratives. Young adult football fiction aimed at those readers identifying as male remain the most overtly traditional, straightforward, didactic ‘football as lessons for life’ texts in the genre. Where texts are aimed at young, early and reluctant readers or adults learning to read (see Bolger 2000), football is an engaging vehicle to hold a reader’s attention. The game exhibits positive behaviours in teamwork, hard work and communication, and its match or tournament-based structure lend a natural performative narrative arc. These texts can also feature endorsement by professional footballers, who are increasingly actively involved in their sport’s fiction. Former Australian international Johnny Warren co-authored the Jasper Zammit trilogy with Deborah Abela. The series was originally published as a trilogy in 2005 and reissued in 2014. Neil Montagnana-Wallace co-wrote, former Australian international, Mark Schwarzer’s five-book Megs Morrison series (2007–2009). David Beckham, Theo Walcott, Frank Lampard and, most recently, Tim Cahill have attached their names to series. These texts feature a young male protagonist who is, with very few exceptions, a player. There are highly successful series alongside those with star power. Tom Palmer’s work on texts such as Boys United (2009) and, more recently, on the rebranded, notably much younger Roy of the Rovers comics and novels (2019) are suitable examples. Set during World War One, Palmer’s standalone novel Over the Line (2016) is an exemplar of the popular device of using football as a vehicle to add social, historical or cultural elements. Football-related crime series are also common, such as Close Range (Hale 2010) and Dan Freedman’s seven-book Jamie Johnson series (2007–2014), which features a football detective.

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More thematically sophisticated young adult football fiction merge genre, challenge reader perception and tackle a range of challenging subjects. The novels noted here seek to explore collectivism versus individualism, belonging and home, and the other. Examples include Hungarian novel, A Fehér Király (‘The White King’, 2005), György Dragomán’s autodiegetic story of a young boy trying to survive in an unnamed authoritarian regime resembling Ceausescu’s Romania (the author’s native country). Theresa Breslin tackles issues of race and sectarianism in Divided City (2006), a book that has been used as teaching material in Scottish schools. Mal Peet’s Paul Faustino novels The Keeper (2003), The Penalty (2006) and Exposure (2008) involve the football journalist protagonist investigating three very different football subjects in Peet’s fictitious South American. Exposure won The Guardian 2009 Prize for Fiction. Morris Gleitzman’s first Australian football novel, Boy Overboard (2002), tells the story of two football-loving refugees, while his second football novel, Extra Time (2014), unpacks the tremendous pressure on young players recruited early by very large, affluent European clubs. Gleitzman adds another layer of complexity by presenting the narrative from the player’s younger sister’s perspective. The French novel by Fatou Diome, Belly of the Atlantic, powerfully combines the point of view of a young footballer’s sister and the perspective of two young Senegalese refugees. Both novels compellingly also explore gender roles. Mitch Johnson’s Kick (2017) begins with a boy making boots for a multinational corporation when all he wants to do is play football. It offers a keen, socially conscientious perspective on the football industry and raises questions around inequity and distribution of wealth without resorting to didactic morality lessons.

Conclusion Closing the chapter on a text that raises more questions than it addresses is fitting considering it began with Hornby. For the first time, the football novel gained recognition, even if it was simply from those asking where all the good ones were. The impact of Fever Pitch can be weighed in terms of its welcome light on the form and in opening the way for the football novel since its publication and its overwhelming of those writers whose work went relatively unrecognised prior. Debates about its merits have faded in the face of the volume of work that followed, but they maintain some of their potency. Good football writing has existed for a long time and more does now, arguably as a result of the book’s success. At a practical level, the recent thread of the overtly fictionalised biographies can be seen as a natural progression of Hornby’s memoir. David Peace, whose work attained the heady heights of attracting non-football fiction readers, has been adopted by football authors capturing historical moments at Manchester City, Leeds United and Sheffield United with varying degrees of success. Realist fiction depicting the spectator’s experience continues to be an integral and vibrant part of the genre. Hooligan fiction has faded, but the visceral capture of the more violent subcultures associated with football still haunt

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the oppositional social and political forces at work in the novels of John King and Irvine Welsh. Reflecting changes in the game, football’s fiction is flourishing in the 21st century. It is more pronounced, multifarious and diffuse, and a much greater proportion of its expanding field is sophisticated, self-aware and literary. Great football novels, like great football matches, have always managed to stand outside of their container. Today, where the practice is a more acceptable pursuit for writers irrespective of class or standard, language or position in the game, the novels are standing out with greater frequency. The soccerati have returned to their box (seats?), and female players have taken to the field in adult and young adult fiction. Literary fiction is widely embraced, signalled by a diverse range of approaches in an equally diverse number of countries of origin. The continuation and initiation of successful literary football journals marks an increased level of interest since the doomed days of Simon Kuper’s noble, if misguided, efforts to bring astute and discerning writing to the football masses. Woman’s football fiction draws in tenets from other genres in romance fiction, more closely examines the relationships women have with men’s football and is beginning to examine the women’s game, too. The publication of young adult fiction enacts a microcosm of the larger field of football fiction. The repetition and re-presentation of tried and tested plot formula, characters and settings remain popular alongside far more inventive and challenging reads. These actions alone signify a reading and writing environment wide open and braced for publication. Digital writing and publishing practices have exploited the opportunity, the gap, and the field is, as a result, experiencing exponential growth. The re-publication of old novels and increased numbers of translated works have made a greater range of works accessible alongside the uneven field of self- and indie-published novels. Academic research continues to grow as the field expands. There are opportunities to bring new research fields to the study of the genre. Gender in sports studies are more frequently being applied to literature, digital publishing research is now working to overlap the humanities and sport and community engagement. There is now a broader, richer and deeper range of content to engage the football reader. These two chapters highlight novels, authors and developments of the football fiction, the peaks and the relagative lows. This detailed overview of football fiction’s terrain, its history, its longevity, its most robust and productive periods and its current form provides the platform to consider the commonalities that occur across the form, the generic markers which connect football novels. The broader ‘distant’ picture will be used to better understand the football novel as a collective and bring new understanding to the individual units within its bylines.

Notes 1 When Saturday Comes describes a mid-1990s boom where it notes its place on the landscape. It is clear that publication of football fiction has continued to be popular and the slow down the journal featured came as a result of increased competition in an increasingly digital market. The magazine began in 1986 and has provided the best of football writing and more than a few of the form’s best writers.

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2 ‘The Relentless Pain and Responsibility of a Football Club’: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch’ (2006), Jeffrey Hill’s inimitably thorough and insightful reading of Hornby’s novel and its social context, including discussion of the Home Office report on The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (1990). Subsequent investigation and court rulings determined, in late 2018, that the South Yorkshire Police were responsible. While 96 fans died on the day, the tragic death of Steven Whittle’s has been included in the total as it is a directly related to the disaster. 3 In an interview in November 2000, Roy Keane, Republic of Ireland and Manchester United captain, criticised the lack of noise generated by fans at a Champions League match (against Dynamo Kiev). In doing so, he implied that working-class football fans had been out-priced and replaced at football stadiums by a brigade of prawn sandwicheaters, a derogatory description for those attending football matches to enjoy expensive, luxurious corporate hospitality facilities rather than support a team or enjoy the match. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bsv9eHckpQ. 4 A short run of the comic featured his football-playing son, while the highlights of his own career were being published in other football magazines (Shoot 1993–1995) 5 The organisation Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (‘Basque Country and Freedom’) was founded in 1959 with the goal of gaining independence for the Basque Country from Spain. 6 Gurinder Chadha was inspired to write and direct the film as a result of her consideration of notions of national identity, particularly with regard to being ‘British’ after seeing an image of Ian Wright, a black player, draped in the Union flag during the 1996 European Championships. 7 Sampson had football writing heritage prior to Away Days in that he had been at the forefront of work on fanzines with Peter Hooton and writing for When Saturday Comes. He would likely be appropriately qualified were he ever to find himself ranked among the soccerati. 8 Glasgow Rangers F.C. participated in professional Scottish football competitions between 1872 and 2012, when they went into liquidation. A new club, ‘The Rangers Football Club’ emerged in 2012, it is commonly, and arguably mistakenly, assumed the new club absorbed the heritage, characteristics and rivalries of the original club. 9 Not to be confused with Tate Publishing Ltd, the publishing arm of the Tate Gallery, Tate Publishing and Enterprises were a Christian publisher, flagged as being exploitative by Industry watchdogs, before being shut down in controversial circumstances in 2018 (Money 2018). 10 Brookmyre wrote a short comic play, Bampot Central, about fans of Falkirk F.C. and has also published short fiction related to football. See https://ontheshelf2.wordpress. com/2009/01/18/brrokmyre-short-stories.

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Redhead, Steve. 2000. Repetitive Beat Generation. Edinburgh: Rebel Inc/Canongate. Redhead, Steve. 2004. ‘Hit and Tell: A Review Essay on the Soccer Hooligan Memoir.’ Soccer and Society 5 (3): 392–403. doi: 10.1080/1466097042000279625. Redhead, Steve. 2007. ‘This Sporting Life: The Realism of the Football Factory.’ Soccer and Society 8 (1): 90–108. doi: 10.1080/14660970600989525. Rhodes, Dan. 2014. Fan. London: Arcadia. Rivera Letelier, Hernán. 1999. Donde mueren los Valientes. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Rivera Letelier, Hernán. 2010, c2006. El Fantasista (The Fantasist). Madrid: Santillana. Roncagliolo, Santiago. 2014. La pena máxima (The Maximum Penalty). Lima: Alfaguara. Roell, Sophie. ‘Interview with Simon Kuper.’ Five Football Books (in English). n.d. https:// fivebooks.com/best-books/football-simon-kuper. Sampson, Kevin. 1998a. Away Days. London: Vintage. Sampson, Kevin. 1998b. Extra Time. London: Yellow Jersey. Sen, Asoke. 1998. Kishar Golpo Khela. Calcutta: Dey. Shindler, Colin. 2010. The Worst of Friends: Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City. London: Mainstream Publishing. Skains, Lyle. 2019. Digital Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/ 9781108649537. Smith, Texi. 2019. Introducing Jarrod Black. Sydney: Fairplay Publishing. Smith, Texi. 2019. Jarrod Black: Hospital Pass. Sydney: Fairplay Publishing. Spaaij, Ramón and Alberto Testa. 2016. ‘Hooliganism.’ In Routledge Handbook of Football Studies, edited by John Hughson, Kevin Moore, Ramón Spaaij and Joseph Maguire, 365–375. London: Routledge. Spears, Kate. 2016. Breakaway. New York: St Martin’s. Spring, Debbie. 2008. Breathing Soccer. Saskatoon, Canada: Thistledown. Star, Nancy. 2008. Carpool Diem. New York: Hachette. Stavrum, Arild. 2008. No More Free Kicks. Oslo: Oktober. Stavrum, Arild. 2014. Exposed at the Back, translated by Guy Puzey. Glasgow: Freight. Stead, Peter. 2013. ‘Brought to Book: Football and Literature.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Football, edited by Rob Steen, Jed Novick and Huw Richards, 240–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Mel. 1996. Marked Man. London: Southbank. Stein, Mel. 1997. Red Card. London: Southbank. Stein, Mel. 1998. White Lines. London: Southbank. Stewart, Paul. 1997. Football Mad. London: Scholastic. Stewart, Paul. 2000. Teamwork. London: Scholastic. Tadié, Alexis. 2012. ‘Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (12): 1774–1790. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2012.714944. Taylor, David John. 1996. English Settlement. London: Vintage. Taylor, David John. 1997. ‘Rally Round You Havens!: Soccer and the Literary Imagination.’ Perfect Pitch 1: Home Ground, edited by S. Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Taylor, David John. 2017. ‘A Football Novel Is Never Simply about Football.’ The Guardian. 27 May. www.theguardian.com/global/2017/may/27/football-novel-boys-schoolstories-modern-fiction. Taylor, Nico A. J. 2011. ‘Football Hooliganism as Collective Violence: Explaining Variance in Britain Through Interpersonal Boundaries, 1863–1989.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 28 (13): 1750–1771. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2011.594682.

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Thorndike, Guillermo. 1978. El revés de morir (The Opposite of Dying). Lima: Mosca Azul. Thornton, Phil. 2003. Casuals: Football, Fighting and Fashion: The Story of a Terrace Cult. Lytham: Milo Books. Ticher, Mike. 1986. When Saturday Comes. n.d. www.wsc.co.uk/about-wsc. Tigelaar, Liz. 2007. Pretty Tough. New York: Razorbill. Turnbull, John, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab. 2008. The Global Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Turner, Simon. 2017. If Only: An Alternative History of the Beautiful Game. Worthing, Sussex: Pitch. Verner, Gerald. 2015, c1939. The Football Pool Murders. London: Wright. Waysdorf, Abby. 2015. ‘The Creation of Football Slash Fan Fiction.’ European Fans and European Fan Objects: Localization and Translation, edited by A. Kustritz. Special Issue, Transformative Works and Cultures 19. doi: 10.3983/twc.2015.0588. Welsh, Irvine. 1993. Trainspotting. London: Secker & Warburg. Welsh, Irvine. 1994. ‘Granton Star Cause.’ In Acid House. London: Secker & Warburg. Welsh, Irvine. 1995. Marabou Stork Nightmares. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Welsh, Irvine. 2015. A Decent Ride. London: Jonathon Cape. Welsh, Irvine. 2018. Dead Man’s Trousers. London: Penguin. Welsh, Louise, ed. 2017. Home Ground. Glasgow: Cargo. White, Jim. 1998. The Diary of Darren Tackle. London: Warner. Williams, Gordon. 1968. From Scenes Like These. London: Black and White. Williams, Jean. 2003. A Game for Rough Girls? The History of Women’s Football in Britain. London: Routledge. Williams, John. 2006. ‘“Protect Me from What I Want”: Football Fandom, Celebrity Cultures and “New” Football in England.’ Soccer & Society 7 (1): 96–114. doi: 10.1080/ 14660970500355637. Williams, Jean. 2007. A Beautiful Game: International Perspectives on Women’s Football. Oxford: Berg. Williams, Jean. 2013. Globalising Women’s Football: Europe, Migration and Professionalization. Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. Williams. Jean. 2017. ‘Standing on Honeyball’s Shoulders: A History of Independent Women’s Football Clubs in England.’ In Football and the Boundaries of History: Critical Studies in Soccer, edited by Brenda Elsey and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 227–246. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. doi: 10.1057/978-1-349-95006-5_12. Wilson, Tony. 2010. Making News. Millers Point NSW: London. Wolfe, Tobias. 1989. This Boy’s Life: A Memoir. New York: Grove. Wood, David. 2005. ‘Reading the Game: The Role of Football in Peruvian Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (2): 266–284. doi: 10.1080/ 09523360500035925. Wood, David. 2017. Football and Literature in South America. London: Routledge. Woolridge, Joyce. 2008. ‘These Sporting Lives: Football Autobiographies 1945–1980.’ Sport in History 28 (4): 620–640. doi: 10.1080/17460260802580669. Writing Platform. http://thewritingplatform.com.

Chapter 3

Line-markings The topography of football fiction

Football evolved in collaborative agreement, through rule changes, innovation in play and resolution of authoritative governance. The crossbar, which replaced a piece of string, was invented in Sheffield in 1857 and made compulsory across the English Football Association competition in 1882. The uniform 24 feet between the goal posts was applied as a rule in 1863, but there were no line-markings. The goal posts and a flag at each corner indicated the outer reaches of a pitch up to 200 yards long and 100 yards wide. Modern line-markings were eventually arrived at in 1902. A similar process of trial, negotiation and resolve, of scholarly intervention and authorial invention, is reflected in efforts to circumscribe the field of play, the origins and the faint outlines of football fiction. The relatively long and proliferate history presented across the two previous chapters will benefit from organisation, clarity and configuration. Today, the dimensions of the crossbar, the posts and line-markings of the pitch are defined with precision by the Laws of the Game (IFAB). They state a preference for the pitch’s size (90–120 x 45–90 metres), colour (green) and make-up (predominantly grass); a preference for match duration (two halves of 45 minutes each); and a preference for line-markings – the now universally-recognised equitable halves including penalty (18-yard box) and goal (six-yard box) areas complete with penalty spots (11 metres or 12 yards from the goal line) and arcs (or ‘D’s). Rules dictate conduct of play, among them: outfield players not touching the ball with their hands during play; the whole ball crossing the touchline (outer boundary) to be out of play; and crossing the goal line between the goal posts for a goal to be scored. In an effort to clarify dimension, definition and refine guiding principles in football fiction, this chapter will adapt a distant reading model of abstraction, the graph, based on a combination of practices from historical research and literary analysis (Moretti 2005, 67) to map the field and account for the length, breadth and depth of football’s presence in fiction. Understanding a body of work with a relatively lengthy and unwieldy timeline requires a clear sense of overall connection, of movement and change across the field, though not necessarily within each individual element or unit within its scope. Distant reading offers a method of approach that enables consideration of very large bodies of work. The application of a distant reading method facilitates

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the codification of football fiction, including the inception, evolution and maturation of significant or emblematic modes or assemblies that occur within it. Leaning into football nomenclature, the term ‘division’ has been selected to describe these modes or assemblies of works within the field of football fiction. However, distant reading, a practice designed for the study of very large bodies of work, could not effectively determine the nature of a relatively small system, such as a genre, without some knowledge of the elements or units. This study makes use of the distant reading approach in combination with close reading textual analysis. A majority of the texts included have been read; the remainder have been cross-referenced with reviews, analysis and surveys. Their content can therefore be categorised with confidence. The first section of this chapter discusses the context and impetus for, and implications of, using this hybrid distant and close approach. This chapter adopts and substantially redresses and redevelops limited existing historiographic and taxonomic work to date (McGowan 2015, 76–97). It builds on, and benefits from, increased interest in football novels from academics (Piskurek 2018; Wood 2017; Bairner 2016, 2011, 2009, 2000; Cox et al. 2002), authors (Taylor 2017, 1997) and historians (Mitchell 2015; Seddon 1999); a greater range of novels (older, newer and undiscovered texts); and a more informed understanding of its narrative grammar. The model, highlighted later in this chapter, provides a framework to document a ‘distant’ view of the corpus and is followed by the summation of eight identified divisions: mainstream football fiction; the oldest and longest running form of young adult male football fiction and the instigator of the most common and simplistic narratives, described here as ‘boys’ own adventure’ or ‘schoolboy’ stories; speculative and fantasy football fiction; crime-related football fiction and its subgenre hooligan fiction; literary football fiction; female football fiction; and its counterpart in young adult fiction. The next section contextualises distant reading, notes-related contentions and presents the argument for its use alongside close reading textual analysis. It is followed by a taxonomic categorisation of modes or divisions of football fiction occurring within the genre. The identification of these aspects of its nature as a system constructs a platform for deeper understanding of the football novel as a phenomenon.

Distant reading Literary theorist Franco Moretti devised distant reading for large-scale statistical quantitative literary analysis over a number of years (2013, 2004, 2003a, b, c, 2000, 1998). As a method of enquiry, distant reading allows tracking of various elements through sometimes vast bodies of literature, conspicuous in their historical and geographical scope (Khadem 2012, 410). These elements are then used to construct models to explain the emergence, closure or transformation of aspects of the body of literature (Khadem 2012, 410). Where it required dispensing with

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close reading approaches to literary analysis, Moretti’s approach was provocative but has since been demonstrated to be an appropriate, if contested, means to broaden literary studies methods in the examination of collections of work in various sizes (see, for example, DeWitt on Victorian periodicals; 2015; Mitrić on civility in the work of Austen, 2007; and Milner on world-building in the science fiction genre, 2004). Rather than practice close reading, the literary studies staple, Moretti contended the study of literature required a figurative step back. Positioning distance as a condition of knowledge, he argued, allows focus on smaller or larger aspects of a body of literature such as devices, themes, tropes or genres (Moretti 2000, 54), which is conceivably more effective than attempting to connect insights gleaned from disparate individual cases (2005, 4). Moretti has been criticised for proposing the approach without prescribing how it might be conducted (Khadem 2012, 409). Through the theorist’s enthusiasm for his practice and an array of collaborative efforts, distant reading has been carried out using statistics, big data, information theory and network analysis among others means to bring computational measurement to the interpretation of literature (Freedman 2016, paras. 1–7). When Moretti began his discursive tender to tip the carts of literary theory, computational analysis was not as readily available. The early methods Moretti proposed were drawn from the sciences. In Graphs, Maps and Trees (2005), a text that brings together a series of earlier papers published in the New Left Review in 2003 and 2004, Moretti proposes three models to augment the distant reading of a given field. The first, Graphs, traditionally used to illustrate quantitative historical trends (2005, 13), is used in this next section as a method to consider football fiction. The second, Maps, traditionally used to demonstrate geographic locations and geometric relationships (2005, 37), is used to explore relationships within and across texts and are explored further in Chapter Five. The third, Trees, used most notably by Charles Darwin to develop evolutionary theory, was used by Moretti to consider the inception and generic (or genetic) development of detective fiction (2005, 91). To demonstrate the use of the historical graph, or historiograph, Moretti collated 44 discrete genre studies to highlight the development of British novelistic genres between 1740 and 1900. A diagrammatic comparison of their duration highlighted something of a generational shift in their popularity, the tendency for genres to exhaust their lifespan in 25- to 30-year cycles, prompting the suggestion the gathered studies could be understood as a sum of their parts, as a collective system (Moretti 2005, 4). Moretti borrowed the method, or rather the premise for the method, from Fernand Braudel, the Annales school historiographer (Moretti 2005, 13) whose notions of the longue durée stress a long-range consideration of history, of identifying the abstract pattern in the historical process (2005, 29). Applied to an account of the development of a genre, in this case football fiction, the approach could not be regarded as long range in Braudelian terms. But it provides the basis for a historically longer, geographically wider and morphologically deeper knowledge of the football novel, particularly where common ideologies

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are exhibited and trends and other tendencies toward particular aspects of football’s fiction are detailed. As a method of distant reading, the graph is, as Moretti acknowledges, problematic, particularly where it uses quantifiable measurements to demonstrate patterns and changes that inform interpretation but are not in themselves a form of interpretation. This is not the only critique of distant reading. Moretti’s portrayal of genre and other literary phenomenon as static formations runs counter to the inherently fluid nature of a genre as posited by genre theorists (see Frow 2015; Gelder 2004; Duff 2000; Chandler 2014, among others). Moretti’s focus on the novel comes at the cost of consideration of other forms of literature such as: poetry (Kristal 2002, 61); drama (Prendergast 2001, 100); the history of the book; and the history of theatre (Greenfield 2006). The use of secondary source material to produce new research may affect distortions in any claims made (Burke 2006). Moretti argues the possibility of distortion is not grounds enough to abandon the research (2006). However, in response Amir Khadem notes Jonathon Arac’s caution around potential inequalities (Khadem 2012, 411). Scholars developing an individual study may not be as equal as those building second-hand models with them (Arac 2002, 45). Khadem takes it further, adding the distant reader, a comparatist dependent on the critical work of others to devise models without personally engaging in the critical process, is not in a position to offer a similar critical return (2012, 411). Anne DeWitt questions Moretti’s lack of attendance to readers and highlights that his calls to expand the canon neglect the large body of daily prints published during the Victorian era (2015, 161–162). The debate around distant reading is polarising and extensive (see Ascari 2014; Erb et al. 2016) – a situation, Jonathon Freedman notes, with which Moretti is very comfortable (2016, para. 1). Further evidence of his enthusiasm to engage is documented in his contributing to an online discussion about Graphs, Maps and Trees on The Valve (Moretti 2006) which led to the publication of Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees: Critical Responses to Franco Moretti (Goodwin et al. 2011), which captures the expansive discussion on the approach and its detractions. Post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is perhaps the most scathing critic of Moretti’s work, for its generalist approach and its basis in the Eurocentric view of the novel (2015, 29). Spivak is also not alone in her criticism of Moretti’s rejection of close reading (2006, 104). Moretti’s proposition, the oppositional positioning of distant reading to close textual analysis, represents a paradigmatic shift in literary studies thinking (Spivak 2006, 104) and has predictably been roundly and heavily disputed (see Prendergast 2001, 2005; Orsini 2002; Apter 2003; Spivak 2003). Knowing it would be controversial, Moretti argued that close reading practices privilege ‘the canon’, a very small percentage of books published, at the cost of a broader understanding of a larger body of works – works that have been ignored or dismissed. The theorist also noted the practical perspective, that there are simply too many books; the reader’s finite time limits their ability to closely read and analyse every text in a given field (2005, 55). However, as Spivak asserts, distant reading can only

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be delivered with expertise in close reading (2006, 104). It is a view echoed by Christopher Prendergast, who sees the combination as cumbrous but offering much potential (2001, 120). In the face of this criticism, constructive or otherwise, Moretti’s hard-line position softened. While he sees such an arrangement as incongruent – the approaches, in his view, are conceptually opposed – he concedes the study of literature will be richer for close reading and interpretive abstraction (2006). In addition, and possibly as a result of, his work on The Novel (Volume 1, History, Geography and Culture, published in 2006 and Volume 2, Forms and Themes, published in 2007), which reviewer Eric Bulson depicts as Moretti’s grand and eloquent attempt to reconceive a system of literature, appears to stitch disparate bits of knowledge about individual cases together and relies heavily on a number of close analyses to broaden its picture (2006, para. 10). Today, the combination has been rendered far less problematic. The adaptation of digital methods of enquiry have enabled scholars to study thousands of novels at a time or unpack the repetition, geographic relationships and nodes within a single text or series (see Hackler and Kirsten 2016, 5–17; DeWitt 2015, 167; Erlin and Tatlock 2014, 2; Kontje 2014, 134). The more commonplace development and use of hybrid approaches help this study address a key criticism. Distant reading cannot effectively determine the nature of a system, such as a genre, without integrating knowledge of the inner workings of individual texts. The combination of distant and close reading can be therefore be regarded as appropriate and suitable for the study of football in fiction. A graph, as a model of abstraction, frames, organises and articulates generic elements in football fiction in order to more effectively examine what occurs within them. This approach has been hindered by an inability to adopt digital methods as significant numbers of works are out of print and or undigitised. However, physical accounting combined with close reading of the texts and a synthesis of analysis, reviews and data drawn from a range of other cross-referenced sources has enabled an informed breakdown of the body of works. The use of secondary sources may distort the findings and situating of individual texts, but every effort has been made to mitigate inaccuracy. As many texts as physically possible have been read. Paratextual indicators and other clues derived in the act of excavation of individual texts have also assisted in countering risk of misrepresentation. The combination of these processes challenges assumptions made around the general lack of material, the lack of quality material and notions of ‘avoidance’ in writing about the sport, particularly where a lack of literary criticism has led to perceptions of football being of low cultural status (Cox et al. 2002, 199; Taylor 1997, 80; Glanville, in Braunias 2001, para. 7). Following contextualisation of the hybrid approach to the genre’s categorisation, we turn to the historiography, which highlights the divisions within the genre. Key characteristics of each division are noted and diagrammatically articulated. The process goes some way to highlighting football fiction’s under-representation in terms of cultural value and social significance.

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Historiography Based on a catalogue of over 500 books (listed in They think it’s all oeuvre . . .) and illustrated in Figure 3.1), the historiography of the football novel represents the codified landscape of football fiction. It plots the form’s inception (approximately 1878), its stable historical progression across a century, its evolutionary leap through the 1990s and its current contemporary status. Mapping eight divisions, it captures the longevity, demonstrates patterns within and, across the corpus, allows the graph to capture a structured overview of the field and facilitates interpretation of the collective as a genre (discussed in detail in Chapter Four).

Figure 3.1 Historiography of football fiction

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As with any research, it is merely a moment in time, a snapshot, albeit an expansive one, that will be refined and developed with the new discoveries, new understanding and the continuing resurgence in the production of new football novels. Assembling the works into divisions and identifying key texts is carried out through identification and frequency of occurrence of common phenomena (Waller 1997, 63). The chronological position of a work (year of publication), its morphological arrangements (setting, voice, character, point of view, plot and structure, etc.) and its main focus or relationship to football (positioning of the game within the narrative, prominent themes, etc.) determine its location within a particular division. Limitations of scope and scale will affect the inclusion of every football novel released over the period in question. Those included have been selected to draw attention to key texts and authors and the beginnings, endings and development of significant moments within a division. Additional criteria used for categorisation include: works appearing in multiple previous surveys; the first (and last) texts in each division; representative works by prolific authors (as significant contributors); the most recent; and works considered as important, innovative and influential. Where a work crosses the boundaries between one division and another, it is placed where it is understood to have the larger role. Novels written by Irvine Welsh and John King, for example, often deal with football violence, so they could be added to hooligan literature. Steve Redhead positioned these texts as a working-class social response to the literature produced by the ‘soccerati’(2004, 393); a separate division may have been appropriate. These writers’ expanding collections of work and their high standard of writing and use of literary techniques, such as experimentation with voice, structure and point of view, has led to their positioning as literary football fiction. The team manager’s dilemma and corruption central to They Used to Play on Grass (Williams and Venables 1971) might place the novel in crime-related football fiction, but with its near-futuristic spin and innovation in terms of the genre, it is placed within the division of speculative and fantasy football fiction. Use of intertextuality and a reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello would situate 2009 Guardian Award winner Exposure (Peet 2008) in the literary football fiction division, but it is primarily aimed at mature young adult readers. The young adult form of football fiction is supported by greater evidence of historical longevity. It is one of the few kinds of football fiction that has been in continuous production since its inception. This establishment of taxonomic divisions highlights key texts and authors, long-range trends and, through identification of text-level tensions and divergences, line-marks the field. It begins with the two largest assemblies of football fiction, mainstream football fiction and young adult male football fiction. It closes with discussion on those fictions aimed at young adult female readers. One category not included on the graph but, noted in the catalogue in the final section of the book, is self-published and independently, or ‘indie’ published titles, for now they will be noted within the division that aligns best with their content. Each division will now be discussed and illustrated.

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Mainstream football fiction The first football fictions highlighted in Figure 3.2.’s mainstream football fiction timeline was aimed at adult male readers and predominantly concerned with romanticised notions of football and the triumph of the spirit of the game over adversity. They drew heavily on formulae established in the junior versions of texts noted in young adult male football fiction and ran to variants of the blueprint: footballer (or coach, a man) joins team, footballer helps team change, is in turn changed by team, and, as an enlightened collective, they achieve their goal, often by scoring a few and lifting a trophy or proving themselves to the doubting or dastardly blighters on the opposition’s team. The turn to English stereotype is deliberate as a great majority of football fiction produced in series such as the Football and Sports Library (Amalgamated 1921–1938) and the Aldine Football Novels (Oldhams 1925–1931) were set in England and produced by English writers. They also set the tone for the conventions that became the staples in this division. In terms of the history of football fiction, there is little coincidence in the early abundance of football novels appearing in the country whose invention of association football is well documented. In mainstream football fiction, the stories of players, managers or clubs exhibit the most common tropes of football fiction and tend toward the conventional and predictable. With few exceptions, they fall into two categories noted by literary theorist Alexis Tadié. The majority are reliant on the literary traditions of the emerging (or fallen) sporting (read: football) hero (2012, 1777). The narratives tend to run to similar scripts, as outlined above. The first example is Goal!

Figure 3.2 Mainstream football fiction

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A Romance of the English Cup-Ties (1920) by the genre’s most prolific author Sidney Horler. Another is former player Derek Dougan’s grievance-airing in The Footballer (1974). Adrian Deans’ heady adventures of a has-been in Mr Cleansheets (2010) and Steven Kay’s historical revision in the indie-published text The Evergreen in Red and White (2014) are also examples. While these novels focus on players, the cones have been lain out for managers, too. Horler’s McPhee (1923) is a quiet champion; Scottish pundit Bob Crampsey’s football novel The Manager (1982) sees a more lascivious Scottish coach save a struggling club. Atkinson for England (James and Brown 2002) offers a little more invention, and certainly more humour, with a small club manager who is elevated to the national job. Stories that concern whole teams or clubs and, generally, their being saved from relegation, bankruptcy, a self-serving chairman or developer, or simply from themselves, include: Shuffley Wanderers (1949) by John Pudney and The Return of the Busby Babes (Dillon 2000) and The Ripple Effect (Holland 2004). In these cases, more than one ‘hero’ features, but the team, or a group within the club, fulfils the role of unified ‘hero’ in the tale, reflecting a ‘team effort’. Where the texts in this division offer the perspective of the football audience, the observer, fan or spectator – Tadié’s second categorisation (2012, 1779) – it is to watch football from the stand or sideline, to offer a realistic sense of engagement by characters not so closely involved in kicking the ball in the novel’s story world. These titles often rely on football as the setting but not always as a vehicle for plot development. They are far more common in other divisions within the genre and only occur relatively late in mainstream football fiction as fans begin to capture their experiences of football within the context of their own lives. Scully and Mooey (Bleasdale 1984) and relatively recent examples The Charlton Men (Breen 2014) and Fan (Rhodes 2014) each offer perspectives of disenfranchised English football enthusiasts. Outlier ‘hero’ stories included in mainstream football fiction for their relative innovation are: Beatrice Fry’s semi-fictitious novel A Mother’s Son (1907), which exemplifies early inclusion of football in a novel for adult readers, and Paul Nash’s football comic Striker (1986–2018), which began daily in an English tabloid newspaper in 1986 and found renewed interest through self-publication in 2018. The comic’s content, strictly for an adult readership and contentious due to sexist and racist depictions of characters, achieved initial success through a crowdfunding campaign – a possible first in the genre. In much the same way a horror genre novel meets key expectations of horror readers, mainstream football fiction novels address the needs of their target audience and rarely move outside the expectations of football fandom. Primary and secondary characters are men, most often footballers, and are, with few exceptions, presented in variably focalised-free, indirect discourse or limited third person from a range of distances. Mainstream football fiction will likely include humour (Grist 1993; Barclay 1995; White 1998) and make minor use of elements more closely aligned with other divisions within the genres such as crime-related fiction. The illegal gambling in Match Fixer (Humphreys 2009) and blackmail in Making News (Wilson 2010) are relatively recent examples. Mainstream football

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fiction is most heavily criticised for its ‘low-brow’ approach and a tendency to reinforce limited perspectives on the genre. They are likely responsible for its dismissal by theorists and critics.

Young adult male football fiction Young adult male football novels are arguably the most popular, if limited, form of football fiction. As Figure 3.3 demonstrates they became incredibly popular in the 1920s. Early texts by writers such as R.A.H. Goodyear and Herbert Hayens were fraught with concerns of class and lessons in morality (Taylor 1997, 97). As the contemporary form experiences formidable growth and interest and reflect the much greater diversity in modern football, they are far less concerned with class, though aspects of community and good citizenship are demonstrated at every opportunity. Gender specificity is noted here because there is little doubt of the imagined readership of the texts in this division. Their casts of characters are often entirely male. Small degrees of variation on stereotyped plots and stock roles in easily relatable football story worlds dominate their construction. The setting might change dramatically – the Wild West (Lampard 2015), for example. However, the fundamental ways these texts present didactic moralised stories seldom change, yet it would be unfair to criticise them for their lack of evolution. The stable employment of the characteristics, tropes and uses of football across a range of narrative structures and devices have held the interest of young male readers across the genre’s history. This fixed set of characteristics informs a number of areas of football fiction. Most effective in making extensive use of the

Figure 3.3 Young adult male football fiction

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schoolboy story formulation noted in previous chapters, they come in two main forms: the comic book and the novel. Though clearly not a novel the comic book, particularly the British comic book, has long-standing football story traditions. The form is included in the survey as a result of its significant impact on the genre’s tropes. Publication is thought to have begun with The Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967). Roy Race, easily the most popular, rose to prominence in the 1950s and peaked in the 1970s when the writers and illustrators incorporated contemporary styles, events and storylines derived from popular television into the strip (Tomlinson 2017). Race’s retirement certainly signalled the end of an era in 1993. Not to the same extent as previous decades, demand, circulation and reprinting of Roy and other football characters’ adventures has continued. The 2009 Hotshot Hamish Annual, which gathered weekly comic strips of the star from a Scottish tabloid newspaper, is one such example. Overall, the fortunes of the football comic have, like Roy, peaked, fallen and risen again, but they can claim to have been in continual existence since their inception. With the increasing popularity of comics such as the Belgian production Louca (Dequier 2017–2019) and the reimagining of Roy of the Rovers (Palmer 2019) in comic and novel, the form looks set to continue. Series dominate the lower age range of the young adult male football novel spectrum (12–25 years of age). Taking the periodic, short, narrative update format used in comics, the interest of younger, learning and reluctant readers is maintained through regular engagement with teams and familiar characters. UK authors Rob Childs, Paul Cockburn and Michael Hardcastle are most prominent. In Canada, author David Starr (2018) has also produced a series for reluctant readers. The stories in these works and those like them tend to be formulaic and focused on Tadié’s ‘football hero’. They most often use a player’s first-person point of view, placing the reader amid the action. The earliest example is the earliest novel discovered in this study: the overtly moralistic The Boys of Highfield: Or, the Hero of Chancery House (Charles 1878). The story of a group of boys who play football together every week and get themselves in trouble over a broken window includes a number of brief descriptions of matches and a plate illustrating a match. The focus on the hero, the villain and other members of the team throughout as well as its existence being threatened by repercussions of the damaged window qualify the text as a football novel. The most recent novels aimed at readers in the same age range are a little more sophisticated in their storytelling and generous with their inclusion of football action. Examples include: Newberry Medal and Honor winner Eugene Yelchin’s Arcady’s Goal (2014), a novel about objective truth and a talented orphan in Stalin’s Russia during World War Two; 2019 Carnegie Medal nominee Mitch Johnson’s fast-paced, confronting and optimistic take on child labourers in Jakarta, Kick (2017); and Tom Palmer’s World War One novel Over the Line (2016), the novel of a footballer sent to the battlefields, which is a lesson in empathy. Palmer, a recent Children’s Book Award winner, is also responsible for five of the new Roy of the Rovers short novels published in 2019 and 2020.

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Professional footballer authorship, or rather tacit endorsement of football novels, is most common in this division. The earliest example, The Golden Boots (1967), credited to Denis Law and co-author Kenneth Wheeler, sees Johnny Goldero literally fill his late father’s boots. Intent (hope) for a sequel, The Prize and the Game, was signalled on the inside cover, but there is no evidence of the sequel ever being published (McGarry and Allsop 2011). Far more recently, Frank Lampard ‘wrote’ a 20-book series (2015–2018), Tim Cahill’s Australian series (2016–2019) runs to 9 books so far, and Theo Walcott ‘wrote’ 4 (2010). David Beckham (Football Academy, 2009–2011) and Mark Schwarzer (with Montagnana-Wallace 2007–2010) have at least acknowledged the attachment of their names and not their penmanship to projects. The Schwarzer collaboration with Neil Montagnana-Wallace series Megs Morrison (2007–2010) makes robust use of the game to lightly explore race, religious tolerance and historical political division in Australia. The series’ strongest aspects are the inclusion of active independent female characters in lead roles and the involvement of a diverse cast reflective of the immigrant influence on Australian soccer culture. These attributes are more common in young adult female football fiction but are still remarkably rare in young adult male football fiction. Works intended for readers who are a little older, incorporate additional layers of dimension. Most merge a sophisticated application of conventions, including those from other genres, with an educated depth of knowledge of the game and make use of more involved themes, issues and character dilemmas. Brian Glanville’s short story collection Goalkeepers Are Crazy (1964) and the novel Goalkeepers Are Different (1971) exemplify great, if conventional, football writing. Bill Naughton’s collection The Goalkeeper’s Revenge (1968) differs widely and is much more in keeping with traits exhibited in the more mature young adult fiction that emerged in the late 1960s (see Chapter Five). Dan Freedman’s five-part Jamie Johnson series (2007–2011) and Palmer’s five-part Foul Play series (2008–2011) splice football with well-plotted, quick-paced detective fiction, while Nick Hale’s three-part Striker series (2010–2011) echoes Horler’s 1930s hero Tiger Standish as they mix football with international espionage. Mal Peet’s three football novels feature complex storylines, intricate character studies and explore meaning in football and other aspects of culture. The Penalty (2006) examines the slave trade when a star player becomes the subject of a missing persons investigation. In Exposure, his third novel featuring journalist Paul Fasutino, Peet reweaves stage drama into an emotive literary tale of South American football celebrity. The Boy in the Dress (2009), David Walliams’ comic tale of a young cross-dressing footballer, underlines the author’s lack of football knowledge but also uses the game to effectively challenge a range of traditionally ascribed gender conventions and body-image issues. Powerful examples explore broader social and political issues. Sophie McKenzie’s novel The Fix (2009) examines a meaty ethical dilemma when the star striker is offered a bribe and has to choose between throwing the big match or paying his rent. James Riordan’s novel Match of Death (2003) is a fictionalised account of an actual ‘life or honour in death’ game played during

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the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in 1941, and György Dragomán’s A Fehér Király (‘The White King’, 2005) offers searing insight into growing up in a dictatorship. When writers stretch and push at boundaries with innovation and insight, and where football is key but not the only concern, their novels highlight how much the genre can offer in terms of narrative possibility and representation.

Speculative and fantasy football fiction Like crime-related and romantic football fiction, speculative and fantasy are two expansive genres in general fiction. While only accounting for a handful of texts in this genre, they have been separated from mainstream football fiction as a result of, and to highlight, their overlap with a significant popular genre. This blurring of genre boundaries is discussed in more detail in Chapter Four. Originally published in 1925, Sorrell and Son (Deeping) closes in the early 1940s. By virtue of casting the late stage of its narrative 15 years into its future, as indicated in Figure 3.4, Warwick Deeping’s work would be regarded as the first recorded football fiction that draws on the tenets of speculative fiction. Gordon Williams and Terry Venables’ They Used to Play on Grass (1971) and Pelé’s World Cup Murder (with Resnicow 1986) also speculate on the near future. Pelé’s only novel features a World Cup Final in New York. Eight years after its publication, a FIFA World Cup semi-final was played in New Jersey. Robert Rankin’s Knees Up Mother Earth (2004) features a carnival-esque cast of time travellers, monsters and aliens, and Terry Pratchett’s 37th high-fantasy Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, makes statements on the historic development and contemporaneous state of football alongside a scathing parody of the English university system. Originally published in 2009, it was reissued on the eve of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The most recent works here include There’s Only Two David Beckhams (2015), set during the 2022 World Cup, which allows author John O’Farrell space to sharply dismantle the sport’s governing body. Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer (McInnes 2016) ponders the missing link in human evolution and suggests the key to the mystery is football. Another alternative history is Simon Turner’s work If Only: An Alternative History of the Beautiful Game (2017), which is fiction but not technically a novel. Employing a common enough activity among football supporters, speculating on ‘what if’ match outcomes, Turner includes fictitious and detailed imitations of newspaper match reports.

Figure 3.4 Speculative and fantasy football fiction

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Crime-related football fiction Football serves as an integral part of the narrative in crime-related football fiction. Criminal subplots, such as players being kidnapped (The Ball of Fortune, Horler 1925) or pushed to throw a game (The Football Suspects, Grant 1928), often feature in early mainstream football fiction. Those works in the crimerelated football division, as illustrated in Figure 3.5, represent a darker edge and have a more serious air to their criminality. Horler’s work with the character Tiger Standish through the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., Tiger Standish Takes the Field 1939) and the Arsenal stories of Leonard Gribble (1939, 1950) could be seen to carry the transition from innocuous football story to the more violent crime-related football fiction emerging in the 1950s. The novels by John Creasey (Inspector West Kicks Off 1949), Bernard Newman (Cup Final Murder 1950) and Cecil Freeman Gregg (Professional Jealousy 1960), tales of organised crime and bloody crime scenes, mark a more gruesome tone. The 1970s brought the emergence of even grittier cases, such as those explored by Hazell (Yuill 1974–1979), the former footballer, ex-police, private-eye solving crime in the football (under)world. By the fourth instalment, the series sidesteps football action for other crime-orientated realms. George Douglas’ football crime epic Final Score (1975) plays out as well as any thriller found in airport bookshop shelves and requires a significantly greater, if proportionate, suspension of disbelief. Hunter Davies’ football-related crime novel Body Charge (1972), which arrived during the same period, is sensitive by comparison. Like Duffy (1980) and Putting the Boot In (1985) by Dan Kavanagh (Julian Barnes), Body Charge deals with a seedier side of football and serves to challenge issues around sexuality and equality still prominent in football today. Alongside lawyer and former players’ agent Mel Stein’s trilogy beginning with

Figure 3.5 Crime-related football fiction

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Marked Man (1996), Sandy Jamieson’s second novel, Own Goal (1997), with its assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher, is an earnest retribution fantasy. Standards took a penalty-box dive when former player and perennial manager Steve Bruce wrote his trilogy. Bruce describes (welcome) commensurate embarrassment when recalling his aspirations for authorship. The first novel, Striker (1999), an overwrought simplistic and clichéd football crime story, and its sequel, Sweeper (2000), are retrievable, but the third, Defender (2000), remains a mystery – though one that may not need resolution. In contrast, Offside (Montalbán 2001), a murder mystery immersed in F.C. Barcelona football club, and Pitch Black (Gray 2008), set in a fictitious Scottish club, are finely polished novels that incorporate the hallmarks of football and crime fiction. Ex-footballer Arild Stavrum offers elegant insight on the game in his second novel, Exposed at the Back (2014). The most recent entry in the field is the self-published title Keep Possession: A World Cup Fictional Thriller (Leiden 2018), a story of the robbery of the World Cup trophy. If title is an indication of quality, then some of strongest entries are Philip Kerr’s trilogy January Window (2014), Hand of God (2015) and False Nine (2015), which speak to a much more nuanced understanding of the game and its parlance. Kerr’s blend of sturdy contemporary crime fiction and a keen understanding of football culture is accomplished.

Hooligan fiction Hooliganism, an aspect of football culture that peaked in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, is reflected in a distinct form of football novel. Though one that might sit more comfortably in crime-related football fiction, the range of texts are illustrated in Figure 3.6. Dougie Brimson has written hooligan-related non-fiction books, film scripts and two comedic mainstream fiction novels, but he is still perhaps best known for his novel The Crew (1999) and its sequel Top Dog (2001). Dynamic, fast-paced plotting drives these novels, which carry all the expected attributes of popular genre fiction. They stand out in hooligan fiction where they successfully weave the form’s tropes, pub-table planning and street battles around football grounds, with traits of organised crime fiction, including a cleverly structured East End London-style heist. By the publication of Phil Tadman’s Domestic Football (2003), the tsunami of confessional bloodied-knuckle memoirs had overwhelmed fictional accounts (Redhead 2004, 392). Where Tadman’s novel might

Figure 3.6 Hooligan fiction

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be regarded as the last hooligan fiction, proof of Brimson’s novels’ crime-related football fiction appeal is arguably evidenced in their continuing popularity. The books’ re-publication in digital formats in 2011 and 2012 saw them gain top spots in a number of digital text fiction charts. Richard Allen’s Skinhead (1970), Draper’s Death Penalty (1972) and Dick Morland’s Albion, Albion (1974) established the parameters and conventions in their use of football as a backdrop and vehicle for the associated violent behaviours of hooligans in their stories. Richard Allen is one of an estimated 45 pseudonyms used by author James Moffat, a prolific UK-based Canadian author whose works re-found cult status with each re-emergence of the subculture. Skinhead has been noted as a considerable influence on the work of novelist John King and others (Redhead 2007, 93), particularly where King’s objective is the depiction of a culture, rather than its perceived focus on football-related violence. King’s later work Skinheads (2008) borrows from Allen’s work most closely, but it is The Football Factory (1996) and books two (Headhunters 1998) and three (England Away 1999) of the trilogy that led academics and critics to note their literary qualities (Redhead 2004, 294).

Literary football fiction The indistinct but knowable markers of great works of literature – the highest standards and quality of writing, their experimentation with form, and their subversion of and challenge to common themes – separate these works from their more popular generic, often mainstream, counterparts. Their paratextual positioning in the landscape of writing – including who publishes these texts and who reviews them and where – also offers another set of distinguishing markers. Eduardo Sacheri’s novel Papers in the Wind was initially published in Spanish in 2011 then translated and published in New York in 2014 by Other, a publisher renowned for its focus on highly acclaimed works of literature. With regard to the quality of his football writing, Sacheri is positioned on Figure 3.7 alongside Doyle and Hornby. Papers in the Wind, the story of three friends looking after the orphaned daughter of a late professional footballer, was reviewed in The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement and Kirkus. It was also reviewed by the winner of the prestigious 2010 PEN/Hemingway Award Brigid Pasulka, author of The Sun and Other Stars (2014) (another literary football novel). Given the challenges put upon the literary football novel by Glanville, Plimpton, Hamilton, Taylor and others, the texts discussed in this section and nominated as literary football fiction in other chapters of this study have each undergone the same level of scrutiny and justification as Sacheri’s novel. The first football novels to have achieved a degree of literary status are likely to be Bennett’s The Card (1910) and Wodehouse’s PSmith and Mike (1910). Brazillian football literature in Mano, livro da saudade (‘Mano, A Book of Emotional Longing’ 1924) by Henrique Maximiamo Coehlo Neto (see Wood 2017, 46) and the Russian novel Envy (Olesha 1927) may provide some disputation, but

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Figure 3.7 Literary football fiction

arguments for football fiction’s lack of quality before the 1990s would be undone in the 1950s by Robin Jenkins’ The Thistle and the Grail (1954), Australian novel The Earth Cries Out (1950) by Harold C. Wells and David Wood’s noting of José María Arguedas’ novel Los ríos profundos (1998, c1958). Most surveys also list ‘The Match’, the short story from The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (Sillitoe 1959), which captures the bearing of a game’s result on one working-class family in hard-bitten times. The Thistle, The Match, and The Hollow Ball (1961), Sam Hanna Bell’s deeply philosophical critique of football’s place in culture and society (Bairner 2000, 32), arguably created space for writers such as Brian Glanville, Barry Hines and Australian author David Martin to explore many facets of the game in their fiction. There is a vast geographical distance between Martin’s The Young Wife (1966) and Gordon Williams’ From Scenes Like These (1968), but they echo similar tensions and the impact of football’s hold on working-class people in the 1960s. Between and around two works by Vargas Llosa – Los cachorros (1967) and Aunt Julia and the Script Writer (‘La tía Julia y el escribidor’ 1977) – as discussed by Wood (2005, 269 and 271 respectively), the football novel emerged in a widening range of countries. Not included in the study but worth noting is Esse est Percipi (Borges and Bioy Casares 1998, c1969), an Argentinian short story in which the authorities have replaced broadcasts of real football with fictional live radio reports. Other examples include: Austrian novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (‘The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick’, Handke 1970); Isreali novel The Fox in Chicken Soup (Kishon 1971); English novels Body Charge (Davies 1972) and How Steeple Sinderby Won The F.A. Cup (Carr 2005, c1975); Chilean novel Soñé que la nieve ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning’,

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Skármeta 1975); Scots novel A Would-Be Saint (Jenkins 1978); English novels The Dying of the Light (Glanville 1976) and Elgar on His Journey to Hanley (Aldritt 1979); and Danish novel Fodboldenglen (‘The Football Angel’, Nielsen 1979). Things appeared to slow down a little in the 1980s, but there is a football novel from Stan Barstow (1980) and Jorge Salazar’s Peruvian novel, La Opera de los Fantasmas (‘The Opera of Ghosts’ 1980). James Kelman’s A Chancer (1985) and A Disaffection (1989) are not football novels. They make mention of football, although it would be difficult to depict the culture of the west coast of Scotland without doing so. Kelman also notes football in several short stories, including Away at Airdrie (1978), which is about a young fan losing his dad at a game at the stadium. The explosion of football writing and novels in the 1990s, explored in more detail in Chapter Two, notes the game’s role in the lives of ordinary working-class families, those complex and sophisticated studies of the urban male that draw on a range of voices and narrative techniques in the works of Welsh and King and the rise of the soccerati in the likes of Kuper, Taylor, and Davies. In the last two decades, literary fiction has triumphed with new works and multiple novels by authors revisiting the field. Barry Hines included three realist short stories in his collection of fiction and essays in This Artistic Life (2009). The multi-voiced narrative of French novel In the Crowd (2008), the structural design of English novel Heartland (Cartwright 2009), the heart-warming bombast of The Kilburn Social Club (Hudson 2009) and the existential Hungarian fiction/non-fiction of Péter Esterházy (2010) offer something of the multeity and splendour of literary football fiction. Chilean novelist Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novels El Fantasista (‘The Fantasist’ 2006) highlights the convergence of football and politics in literary fiction (Woods 2017, 117). Sebastian Faulks recruits a footballer to deliver a key narrative thread in his London novel A Week in December (2009). This is much more a mark of the entrenchment of football culture and its commercialisation on the landscape of the city than a mercenary Wodehouse-style attempt to increase book sales. To further evidence this point, John Lancaster adopts a similar narratorial device in his own London novel Capital (2012). Alan Bissett’s Pack Men (2011), a dextrous perspective on the contemporary disenfranchised Scottish Unionist, should be mentioned alongside the works of King and Welsh. But with the Scots fans travel travelling to the northern English city Manchester, it also proposes a forceful North/South counterpoint to the works of Faulkes and Lancaster. Papers in the Wind (Sacheri 2014, c2011); The Sun and Other Stars (2014), a romantic tale of family, love, loss and recovery set on the Italian Riveria; and Iron Towns (Cartwright 2016) exemplify the multifarious nature of more recent literary football fiction. David Peace novels Red or Dead (2013) and The Damned Utd (2006) are highlights of 21st-century literary football fiction. Peace demonstrates an unsurpassed ability to capture the distinctive voices of his protagonists Bill Shankly and Brian Clough and weave a compelling fictive and emotive story between the facts of their lives. The violence of Clough’s verbose, frenetic rage starkly contrasts the stillness of moments in Shankly’s kitchen with a cup of tea, his wife and the radio.

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The texts collected in literary football fiction are characterised by the level of distinction in their presentation, the writing and treatment of their subject, the author’s standing and/or their demarcation by an expert such as awards won and other forms of acclaim. These works examine the fragility of love of football and the solitude of those involved, and they pull our attention to the complexities in our celebration of football heroism (Tadié 2012, 1778). The literary football novel is a most effective tool for exploration, for excavation, of understanding of the people and the socio-political contexts and communities in which the game is situated, on and off the pitch.

Women’s football fiction The first football fiction with female protagonists were those involving the working-class heroine of early 1920s (Melling 1998, 97). Sadly, as indicated on Figure 3.8, a fully formed female protagonist did not re-emerge in her own right until the early 1990s when Hem stepped onto the pitch in Hem and Football (Bhattacharya 1992) and carried on playing in its sequel, Hem and Maxine (Bhattacharya 1993). Regarded as literary football fiction (see Taylor 1997, 2017), these books’ focus on a professional player’s life, relationships and football career make them two of the most significant female football novels to date. More recently, an increased number of female authors, writing across a range of football fiction, has coincided with a growing interest in the women’s game in the US, Europe and Australia. Three key themes have emerged: an overlap with the genre of romance; the phenomena of the ‘soccer mom’ in the US and the wives and girlfriends of players, known as WAGs, in the UK; and the rise of the female football hero, which is even more distinct in young adult female football fiction. As often indicated by a fit, naked male torso on the cover, romantic football fiction story structures are dictated by their alignment to the romance genre (see Ramsdell 2018, 2012; Tapper 2014). The exploration of a new romantic relationship runs parallel to participants’ involvement in football, which is also used as a device to raise dramatic stakes. Mostly written by and for women, these texts highlight a significant shift in the presence of female characters in football’s fiction. As opposed to the positioning of romance as an accessory (see Horler et al.

Figure 3.8 Women’s football fiction

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through the 1920s and 1930s) or disguised as sex as pursuit and expectation in the exploitative novels of the late 1970s (see Osbourne 1976; Giller and Greaves 1979–1981), whether it is explicit erotica or polite courtship, these texts treat romance positively and as the central goal. The Season (Dyer and Dyer 2016) is the story of a soccer star who is also a debutante and plays across the meaning of ‘season’ in these divergent aspects of her life. Self-published romantic football fiction novels exist in abundance. Liz Crowe’s novels, published between 2011 and 2015, include Caught Offside (2011) and Man On (2013) and are traditional heteronormative romance stories involving the leading female and a male footballer. Kate Christie’s four-book series Girls of Summer (2016–2019) is romance about, and aimed at, lesbian and gender-neutral readers. Elizabeth Coldwell’s Playing the Field (2010, c1998) is explicit heterosexual erotica involving two journalists whose goal is to sleep with the entire national football team. These examples represent the variation in women’s romantic football fiction. Soccer mom novels aimed at and about female parents are named after those predominantly female parents responsible for driving their children to and from sporting activities. Examples include: Carpool Diem (Star 2008), which features a mother who watches, and coaches, football from the sidelines; the erotic romance The Secret Desires of a Soccer Mom (Harding 2006), where dropping the kids at football is a distraction from dangerous daytime liaisons; and the five-novel series Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom (Kenner 2005–2009) about a mother whose life is much more supernaturally complicated. Novels featuring players’ wives and or girlfriends tend to be situated around football but not necessarily within it. Kerry Ketona, self-proclaimed WAG turned UK celebrity, wrote two novels portraying the lives of women involved with footballers (2008, 2007). Soccer mom and what have been described as WAG novels have been included here to reflect their popularity and connection with the sport. Karren Brady’s second novel, Trophy Wives (1998), is a little more distinct in that it positions a small group of strong, ambitious women – all footballers’ wives – at the centre of the fortunes of a fictitious London football club. While little football is described, the book offers an unswerving insight on a Premier League football clubs in the late 1990s. The women could as easily be framed as football heroes. Three examples of female football heroes occur in: a novel by New York Times bestseller-listed self-publisher Mariana Zapata; United (1997), Karren Brady’s first novel; and an early book by the relatively prolific Siobhan Curham. Kulti (Zapata 2015) is a first-person-perspective on the unfolding relationship between a 27-year-old professional player and her new coach. As noted in the previous chapter, United (Brady 1997) focuses on the trials and tribulations of being a female chair of a big club. Sweet FA (Curham 2001) focuses on four ‘football widows’ – women widowed and affected by other forms of anti-social behaviour besides neglect by a partner’s obsessive love of football. In each, football is the catalyst, the driving force, and remains key to narrative development throughout. In Sweet FA, for example, the tournament playing out in the background is a recurring plot device to highlight the women’s individual and

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collective frustrations brought about by the game and aspects of the culture it touches on. The only other works discovered to date on female football writers outside of US and the UK can be found in David Wood’s text Football Literature in South America (2017, 191–215). Wood sets aside a chapter to discuss the limitations on female writers in Latin America and notes football literature by female poets and short story writers in Brazil, Peru and River Plate, the unique cross-culture on the estuary between Argentina and Uruguay. These texts are not included in this study, which focuses on football novels, but Wood’s work should be regarded as essential reading.

Young female football fictions Football fiction aimed at young adult female readers, see Figure 3.9, did not really find traction until the turn of the 21st century. A lack of support and coverage of the women’s game has restricted awareness and participation and socialisation (see Cauldwell 2011). The arrival of the cross-cultural comedy – drama – romance film Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha et al. 2002), which was followed by a novel (Dhami 2004) and a successful West End musical (2015), has been the subject of much academic discussion exploring gender, identity and cultural representation (see Abdel-Shehid and Kalman-Lamb 2015; Ratna 2011; Walseth 2006). Borrowing the cultural cache of David Beckham, whose fame has moved beyond playing football, to challenge traditional masculinities and femininities and demonstrating the more openly inclusive world of women’s football, the film undoubtedly sparked a new level of interest and awareness in the sport. Hannah Cole’s innovative short novel Kick Off (1989) was a first, even though its treatment of female footballers still positions the story as an incursion across gender boundaries (see Williams 2003). Rob Childs’ Girl in Goal (1991) was written as part of a short-lived program to challenge gender stereotypes. The eight books in the Soccer Stars series (1998–1999) by Emily Costello follow a US-based football team through the stereotypical trials and tribulations of football team stories for young readers. These latter texts are significant as potential

Figure 3.9 Young adult female football fiction

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indicators of changing attitudes around girls and women’s football. Like the stories of Ray Lester, Bessie Black and Meg Foster (see Chapter One), they illustrate the game as an activity for females, where the pitch and the club become sites of empowerment. Football fiction aimed at female young adults tends to draw on the staples of heroic players and team stories established in young adult male football fiction with the characteristics of women’s football fiction. They place the female at the centre of the narrative, as the basis for models for readers at the younger end of the young adult range. Helen Pielichaty’s ten-part Girls F.C. series (2009–2011), republished in 2018, and Narinder Dhami’s Beautiful Girls series (2008–2011), which followed her highly successful novelisation of Bend It Like Beckham (2004), follow the model presented by Costello. However, the authors of young adult female football fictions have generally sought to extend, stretch and subvert the football narrative. Besides the work of Donna King, Liz Tigelaar, Peter Abrahams noted in Chapter Two and that of Liz Deep-Jones and Cath Crowley discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five, the football novel aimed at the young adult female reader continues to develop. With the game’s world-wide uptake, it is a trend that is likely to continue. Shamini Flint’s first-person player and US immigrant narrative Ten (2017) is an excellent example, but the range of quality and diversity in character and subject matter might best be depicted in the distance between Leanne Sage’s self-published novel Zilla (2016), where football becomes a source of freedom and a leveller against bullies, and Kat Spears’ complex and emotive romance Breakaway (2016), published by St Martin’s, the prestigious imprint of HarperCollins in New York. Current US international player Alex Morgan uses her ghostwritten series The Kicks to promote the game to young players. The series has been highly successful since Saving the Team was published in 2013. The latest addition, Switching Goals, is due to be published in late 2019.

Conclusion In top-tier competition, the need for uniformity and weight of hierarchy bound to commercial imperatives mean the laws of the game are rarely subject to radical change. Weather, wear and tear, technological advancement and physical improvements in speed and consistency of play have forced playing surfaces to evolve. While they still comply with required standards of size, colour and makeup (around 97% grass for most English Premier League clubs), pitch turf, for example, is now woven through with a graticule of synthetic fibres. Improvement is incremental. However, outside of formal competition, informal football matches are played in gardens, in concrete car parks and on beaches. This vibrancy arguably gives the genre its most practical football analogy. Those most inflexible of rules are also the most stable and most readily translated across its fiction. The forbiddance of the use of hands (unless of course ‘backie-goalies’ – a player who is keeper and outfield defender at the same time – are agreed beforehand), the use of posts or target and scoring more goals remain constant. Everything else can

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change. A limitless list of spatial and temporal conditions can affect governance of play. Where the shape of the pitch, the number of players and the game’s duration are compromised, negotiation, maintenance and more flexible parameters are embraced. The ‘rules’ must be open to variation. Five-a-side games in small halls with overhead lights are played without headers, a ‘kick-about’ on a bitumen street uses uneven kerb stones as touchlines to keep the ball from Mrs Smith’s roses, and jerseys as posts is mandatory for a pick-up match in parks that will always feature a frequently contested crossbar. Football’s fiction is no different. There are clearly commonalities, constants, constraints and variation. The line graphs and taxonomy have expedited a layered and deepening understanding of the genre through its organisation. The nominated divisions are malleable. A text can shift from one to another or belong in more than one at any given time. They have facilitated assemblies of like texts. Their use of conventions and their use of football has enabled recognition of shared characteristics. A view of football fiction spinning, sidestepping and crossing its way into a number of significant genres has also emerged. With some clarity, some types of football novel have risen to and fallen from prominence; others have been underestimated and, worse, unnecessarily dismissed. Distant reading, as a process of abstraction, has allowed new knowledge and other aspects of note to come to the fore. One constant across a large part of the genre’s history is the inherent binding of football and crime. The timing of the crime genre’s emergence as influence arguably coincides with the advent of the game’s professionalism. There is the evidence sought by those who argued for it to remain an amateur sport. The Card (Bennett 1910) features the earliest example of professional players and an unethical politician. There is no relationship in Bennett’s text to suggest the untoward. This is simply to note of the prescience of their existing in the same place at the same time for the first time. Romantic notions of a golden age are distinct from the genre’s overlap with the tenets of romance fiction. A breadth of homosexual, heterosexual, gentle or overtly erotic amatory relationships have blossomed across the genre in literary, mainstream and women’s football fictions. Other popular and highly recognisable genres being drawn into football novels or have drawn football into their own genres, including speculative fiction and fantasy fiction. The latter may account for a small number of football fiction texts and have been combined in one division – only those where the whole ball has crossed the line are counted – but they are highlighted for the significance of their combination of football and other traditions of popular or genre fiction. Literary football fiction or football’s place in literary fiction reflects a more sustained and widespread account than previous studies have allowed. The texts listed in women’s football fiction are examples of where football novels could be placed in more than one division; they are, however, collated in a single division to foreground the presence of female authors and protagonists in the genre. They also mark an area of nascent growth influenced by the women’s game finding a more prominent place on the sporting landscape.

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Mapping the corpus in this way gives substance to arguments for its legitimacy and supports and counters various arguments about its form. Mirroring the football’s ability to move across a range of environments, the purpose or value of these parameters is not weakened when they are renegotiated or changed. Rather, as it does in the recognition of common fictional tropes, their adaptability and fluid nature strengthen organisation of form. The application of structure, the determination of which forms the game has and can adopt, and who and what can be included has only opened the doors to further research.

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Chapter 4

‘Rules for the simplest game’ Conventions of the football fiction genre

Richard Lindon probably killed his wife. With a shopfront opposite a famous school in the English town of Rugby, the bootmaker turned a steady supply of boot leather and a direct-to-customer sales base (through ceaseless requests from schoolboys) into a commercial football enterprise. Lindon’s football’s construction relied on an inflated pig’s bladder encased in leather (Price et al. 2006, 259). The stitched leather panels offered durability and increased stability but could not completely negate the bladder’s irregular form or the ball’s uneven, often unpredictable movement. Lindon could not have anticipated that inflating the bladders would be the end of Rebecca, his wife, mother to their 17 children and a business manager in her own right. Yet, using a clay pipe stem, she blew into enough diseased bags to contract a fatal lung disease (Hawkesley n.d., para. 4). Too late to save her, Lindon adapted Charles Goodyear’s vulcanised rubber to create a stronger, more uniform bladder in 1862. Ten years later, the English Football Association accepted its size and shape as standard and incorporated these dimensions into the Laws of the Game. Around the same time, Lindon turned to focus on the Rugby ball, the chosen sport of his neighbours. The modern football, a near perfect sphere, is aerodynamically designed, eradicated of imperfection (see McGowan 2010) and, like the genre of football fiction, a long way from its lumpy origins. The previous chapters provide an overview of football fiction’s terrain, history and current form. We turn now to look at the various ways in which the football novel works. Building on commonalities settled from a distance, consideration of the football novel in generic terms provides a framework to develop a deeper understanding of phenomena that occur across the texts as well as in them. Genre theory offers the potential to recognise similarities amid the wealth of diversity within the body of works (Shepherd and Watters 1998, 97). At a practical level, genre is the analytical term for the classification of shared textual practices that enable identification of texts (books, film or any other media) through their use of features common to a particular form of narrative representation, including horror, romance, crime or football (Chandler 2014, 1; Hartley 2011, 124). Genre is also a process that unifies the rhetorical situation (Bitzer 1968, 3); the culture of or within a given group; and the existence, knowledge and influence of other

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genres. A single genre cannot therefore be limited to simplistic levels of classification or form or isolated to the people who use genre as a means of measurement or arbitration (Devitt 2008, 573). To make an argument for football fiction as a genre is also to make an argument against it. If this chapter accounts for the existence of football fiction as a genre, it must also describe the instability that comes with ongoing change in a genre, even if that change is anchored in identifiable characteristics and existing commonalities. The ‘vulcanised’ uniformity of and consistency in schoolboy football stories can exist alongside the seemingly disparate hand-stitched unpredictability in literary football fiction, but they operate in a category that changes with each new addition. While the primary concern here is with form, content and the principles of genre classification, there are many areas of genre theory that would warrant further consideration. Any reading of genre theory must begin with the second edition of John Frow’s Genre (2015). David Duff collects work by key contributors to the field, including Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, Northrop Frye and Gerard Genette in his collection Modern Genre Theory (2000). The work of Anis Bawarshi (2016, 2003) and Amy Devitt (2008, 1993) would also be worth consideration, as would Leila Kinney on genre as a social contract (1987), Carolyn Miller on genre as social action (1984) and Kathleen Jamieson on rhetorical constraint (1975). As this work is not an examination of genre theory but rather an application of its use as symbolic action (Frow 2015, 12), the next section will present the context for the application of genre theory as a framework to understand football fiction in ways that enable an informed identification of what would be regarded as generic conventions commonly employed in the football novel. The remainder of the chapter will draw on illustrative textual examples to interrogate, develop and refine previously identified patterns, literary techniques and narrative elements specific to football fiction (McGowan 2017).

Genre Understanding genre can be akin to driving a car: people do so with little knowledge of the engine’s operation. In fiction, a sense of how the engine drives the work is sufficient for recognition of form. Knowledge of known markers that serve the expectations of the reader and the writer without either requiring a deeper understanding of their theoretical function, purpose or quality provide an effective but simplistic basis for generic categorisation. Most often written as popular fiction, the football novel reflects the preoccupations, interests and needs of the period in which it was written and by those, primarily football fans, who created them (Cawelti 2006, 188). They routinely appropriate football novel traditions in their use of literary technique and devices, including setting, character and narrative structure. Where sense can only be made of an individual text by its contextualisation in terms of other texts and the repertory of textual possibilities (Scholes in Genette 1992, vii), recognition of traditions, preoccupations

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and characteristics noted as having an impact across a number of football novels would be grounds enough to describe football fiction in generic terms. Before the theoretical underpinnings are expounded where the literary football novel and the young adult male football novel exhibit similarities, this chapter considers the notion of football fiction as a Bourduian field of restricted production. Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu asserts the cultural high-brow, particularly when it comes to art, is concerned with use of language or the lexicon of relevant artistic forms and originality and creativity in its production (1993, 62). High-brow fiction is far less concerned with the consumer, reader or viewer – the highbrow often elicits contempt for ‘art’ consumed by mass audiences (Bourdieu 1993, 62). Ken Gelder describes the field of restricted production as occurring where creators deliberately direct their work at small audiences, fellow artists and/or social or cultural groups attuned to similar interests (2004, 13), whereas lowbrow or popular fiction undertakes no such measures to earn exclusivity. Lowbrow fiction openly operates with the consumer, reader or viewer in mind. It is concerned with mass appeal and, importantly in a discussion on football fiction, can place greater value on convention over originality (Gelder 2004, 13). While this segregation was encouraged and reinforced by those writers and critics of and with regard for the soccerati, polarisation of the popular from the literary is contestable, especially where it is rare for any work in either of these generalised categorisations to be aimed at those without knowledge of the game. Indeed, its limited readership, even if only perceived, marks football fiction, where a majority of writers direct their work at a football audience, an attuned socio-cultural group with similar interests, as a field of restricted production. Our shaping and building of knowledge and understanding with regard to football fiction is carried in its collective generic distinction and classification. The practice of generic distinction is borne of Aristotlean analysis, of divisions set out by Plato, of the determination of mimetic strategies that make up genre and form in terms of voice, representation and the types of action represented, whether it be tragic, comic or romantic. In Modern Genre Theory, David Duff outlines a brief history of genre’s theoretical development, the argument for its loss of face in the eyes of the literary avant-garde and a prescient discussion on the reinvigoration and democratisation of the term’s use in popular culture (2000, 1–3). Literary theorist Genette disentangled genre theory from its conflation of mode (as linguistic categorisation and means of enunciation) and genre (as literary categorisation and means of formalised criteria and historical type) (Duff 2000, 211) and sought to chart the ways a text could be systematically interpreted and understood (Allen 2000, 101). Through the concept of ‘transtextuality’, or textual transcendence, Genette effectively set any text in relationship with other texts (1992, 2). He notes that in a developed system of genres (see Todorov 1990; Frow 2015, 135–139), it is not the separation of each form from others, according to characteristics specific only to that form, but the characteristics themselves (Genette 1992, 8). Their interplay within and between each individual work in the context, or genre, sets the mark, so the comic can exist outside of the comedy,

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just as there are comedies that lack the comic or are at least less comic than other comedies (Genette 1992, 19). We are therefore able to view football fiction in light of what Graham Allen describes as the exhibition of determinable relationships between specific elements of individual texts (2000, 101) within the system of its divisions. In highlighting repeatable patterns of representation, football fiction conforms with Genre theorist Amy Devitt’s view of genre as a dynamic, semiotic construct used to bring form and content together, where a text can be located within context and the roles of the individual and its broader social categorisation can be acknowledged (2008, 573). Genres’ styles, choice of material and conventions are subject to an ongoing process of renewal and remodelling. As new works emerge – even the most formulaic, didactic and clichéd schoolboy story (Lampard 2019) – they add to and shift, however marginally, the generic properties and body they belong to. They change our understanding of the genre, so it cannot ever be finite or stable. Football fiction has arguably undergone a period of substantial change in recent decades. The level of change it has undergone since its inception has been even more dramatic. This notion of continual adjustment in a genre over time undermines the possibility of static formation or formula (French 2005, 50). The ephemeral nature of such framework appears to speak against the identification of steady tropes or fixed conventions, yet ‘organisation’ is necessary for recognition. While acknowledging the existence of a ‘loose consensus’ in literature, Daniel Chandler asserts that any map of a genre or a system of genres (in any medium) will be disputable (2014, 2). Characteristics can be identified but are not, as we have seen, isolated. Traditional definitions of genre are most often based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions shared by the texts and regarded as belonging to them (Chandler 2014, 2). This includes determinations enacted on texts by creators and cataloguers, by publishers and booksellers and by reviewers and critics who categorise, list, recommend or position a work within parameters of a particular field. With so much variety in its midst, football fiction does not and could not present a riveted pattern. However, the presence and classification of elements understood by the creator and audience (Cawelti 2006, 186) – including common features of its narrative representation such as setting, voice, character, accepted ideas and other linguistic devices – enable generic distinction. A work might not adhere to all of the accepted conventions (see below), but it is possible that it could still operate within the context of the genre and reflect and perpetuate its fluid nature. We use genre to connect our knowledge of texts to, and within, a (living) discourse (see Bakhtin 1981) to better understand and to bind meaning to the social and structural dimensions of the communities that devise and use them (Frow 2015, 12–14). Using a number of illustrative textual examples, this chapter will now consider the common patterns and literary elements that form the basic narrative grammar of the football novel. These patterns and elements include setting and narrative structure, the role of football and its impact on the protagonist, the

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role of the protagonist, the development of the football voice and other aspects particular to football fiction such language use and player stereotypes. The identification of prevalent narrative features to reinforce classification is an established method for analysing genre. In Westerns (2005), Philip French models ‘types’ of story and identifies characteristics found within the cinematic presentation of the genre. Umberto Eco’s examination of Ian Fleming’s novels in The Role of the Reader (1979, 144–174) considers narrative situation as a means to analyse and draw patterns of significant events common to fiction featuring the character James Bond. W.H. Auden’s elaboration of specificities in The Guilty Vicarage enabled the poet to determine commonplace events in English detective novels (1948, 406–412). The mechanics of these studies are not as important here as their modelling of a methodology, which highlights the relationship in and between form and content within a group of texts. As exercises in categorisation, the studies of French, Eco and Auden suggest situating a text requires identification of convention(s) common to works already seen as belonging to a particular genre or genres. Specific characteristics of a genre are difficult to isolate and remove from context. However, broad-level conventions can be noted: the smoking gun or the dead body in crime fiction or the footballer and the football match in football fiction, for example. This chapter identifies a number of broadlevel, at times overlapping, conventions.

Conventions Conventions identified in football fiction in previous research have not changed substantially (McGowan 2017), though some of the thinking around them has. Those identified will be refined here and updated with a view to informing the close textual analysis that takes place in Chapter Five. The conventions discussed are: setting – the presence of a pitch and the protagonist’s relationship to the pitch; the level of engagement with football (and the role of football in the narrative); football’s influence on narrative structure; the cast of characters; the employment of mimesis; and the use of language and voice. We begin with the pitch, the line-marked area upon which the game is played. With or without goalposts, a pitch appears to be a minimum requirement. The narrative may be located in a famous stadium, a leafy park, a dusty playground or on a television screen in a bar, but there is always a pitch. In terms of mode of representation and repetition, it is a primary requirement for a football fiction reader to recognise and situate the text (Devitt 2008; Bawarshi 2003). For the reader, the pitch tends to represent more than a win, a loss or a draw. It can be a stage or a canvas resonating with representative power (Murphy 2017, 339). For the player, it is, most often, the locus of action, where characters express and or prove themselves, where conflicts are played out and resolved. A small number of novels in literary and women’s football fiction view the game from the pitch. Anthony Cartwright’s novel Heartland (2009) features the once promise-filled career of Rob Catesby, a former pro-trainee turned PE

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teacher, and Iron Towns (2016), also by Cartwright, focuses on Liam Corwen, a current pro whose career is in decline are two excellent examples of literary fiction with a player at their centre. The dejection of football’s disenfranchised men is acutely rendered in both and paralleled with the breakdown of northern English social and political structures. The pitches these men play on, the kick and rush of local league in the former and the rough and tumble of professional mediocrity in Iron Towns mark decline in the men on them and the community around them. Along with Cartwright’s work there is ex-keeper Len Rawlings, once a star, now forgotten, sorrowfully contemplates a successful career from solitude of his retirement in the Dying of the Light (Glanville 1976). Sal Casillas experiences a much more cheerful love-hate-love relationship with the new coach in Kulti (2015), under the night lights on the training ground, and Expedito González, the supremely-talented protagonist in Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novel El Fantasista (2006), is the key to victory for locals Coya Sur over corporate rivals María Elena (Wood 2017, 112). These examples represent the relatively limited range of the roles characterised by the adult player in football fiction. The football novel’s pitch tends to be the domain of the young adult footballer. Central tensions and relationships are undone and repaired as the football games progress. In Cath Crowley’s debut, The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain (2004), the protagonist, Gracie, takes control on the pitch and realises her power and a romantic interest there. The relationship’s unfolding, the initiation, break-down and resolution, result from action and decisions made on the pitch. In Macbeth, You Idiot! (Henderson 2009), a football-based adaptation of the Shakespearean theatrical work, is acted out on the field of play, the ‘stage’. MacBeth’s prowess (in battle) is demonstrated when he saves his team from a loss in the novel’s opening match/scene. His subsequent ‘displacement’ as school hero is also demonstrated through his footballing choices. Two examples are noted here, but instances of players in young adult fiction far outnumber those in their adult counterpart. The presence of the pitch is integral to the setting in a football novel; it has a key role and, as highlighted in the work of Anthony Cartwright, can be characterised to add dimension to the setting around it as well as what occurs on it. The player’s perspective in these novels is impacted by their proximity to the field of play, the growing distance felt by Rawlings, the safety barrier for testing boundaries during match practices in Kulti and the site of village honour and a statement of independence in El Fantasista. Young adult fiction novels widely make use of the immediacy afforded the author through use the of first-person point of view to place the reader as close to the pitch as possible. Letting the reader see from the narrator’s perspective naturally lends itself to placing the reader in the thick of the action. For the young adult reader, where its employment is more frequent, this results in the tendency for the protagonist to be, become or return to being a player. The close third-person point of view, which enables the reader to see the action from the shoulder of the protagonist, move between characters, and learn more about the reactions of those affected by the protagonist’s actions, is more frequently adopted in adult football fiction where the reader is less likely to be

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a player and is more interested in characters, themes and events other than the outcome of the match. What takes place on its surface affects those watching from the sidelines, the manager, the fan, the player’s partner or mother. A majority of novels aimed at adult readers and a very small number of young adult fictions are removed by the small distance between the pitch and the dugout or a seat in the stand. The works by Red or Dead (2013) and The Damned Utd (2006) by David Peace, which offer detailed first-person present tense insight of an individual football manager, are notable exceptions. These works stand out for their intimate look at football from the minds of two of its most famous and successful managers. They also stand out for the use of the literary technique particularly voice, the melodic poetry in the repetition of players names in team selection in Shankly’s story, for example. Voice, or narrative situation, is a crucial element in the football novel; the view from the sidelines and the position of the pitch in football novels are more concerned with observing the game such as the manager or a fan is discussed. Part of club president Andrew Rutherford’s frustration in his role at Drumsagart Thistle F.C., the Thistle in the title of The Thistle and the Grail (Jenkins 2006, c1954), is being caught between competing demands and pulled away from his own desire to affect proceedings. As club spokesperson, he must negotiate with supporters the club depends on. The daily running and organisation requires club, not team, decision-making, yet he must answer for it. In between, he wants to watch the football, football uncluttered by the mess around it. Jenkins’ handling of this and many other concerns afflicting his football man is devastating and quite brilliant in its understatement. Few texts, football or otherwise, compare, despite the majority focusing on those involved at club management level. Responsible for what occurs on the field of play and most likely first to face the consequences of failure, the manager’s story tends to be the focus of narration as opposed to the narrator. This distance gives space to the narrator, reliable or otherwise, to lend their perspective. Atkinson for England (James and Brown 2002), which follows the exploits of a poorly equipped manager promoted to run his national side, uses the character to parody the clichés of English football and its most notorious moments of managerial incompetence. Johnny Cook: The Impossible Job (McIntosh 2014), the most recent example of the unlikely hero in a manager’s job, paints the manager as a likeable everyman doing it tough. A large majority of football novels, by some measure, are written by men. It is therefore of little surprise that a comparative number of protagonists are male. A small number of female protagonists featured in texts in the 1920s. They begin to feature again in the 1990s, but they are relatively few in adult football fiction. This situation is not reflected in young adult football fiction where female protagonists, and authors, have greater representation and the number of young adult female football fictions is expanding. The imbalance is being addressed, to a degree. As a professional player, Sal Casillas, in Kulti, is a rare exception, rarer still are female coaches, which is what makes Carpool Diem (Star 2008) such a notable exception. Besides being a rare soccer mom novel in its inclusion of football, the soccer

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mom, Annie Fleming, takes a heavy hand to her daughter’s engagement with the game, the team’s coach and the team’s training regime. The fans’ view of the match is another step removed from the sideline. They may not always watch the game from the sidelines, but their attendance at matches and love of a club are central to novels such as The Charlton Men (Breen 2014) and Fan (Rhodes 2014). Paul Breen’s novel follows the lives of supporters of one of London’s less glamorous clubs in the wake of the city’s 2011 riots. Danny Rhodes’ work considers the aftermath of the Hillsborough Disaster from someone who survived. In Alan Bleasdale’s novel Scully and Mooey (1984), despite the pervasive spectre of Liverpool F.C., Scully’s favourite club, he never sees an actual match. Bleasdale’s focus is on the young man’s experience of Thatcher’s northern England, where football has become too expensive for ordinary fans to attend. This brings us to the figurative presence of the football pitch. When the events in a football novel take place away from the pitch, it does not necessarily reduce the significance of the game to the narrative. In the novels where this does occur, the pitch maintains a figurative presence. The footballrelated violence of hooligan literature, such as the works of Dougie Brimson (The Crew 1999) and Dick Morland (Albion! Albion! 1974), are more concerned with following or supporting a team and fighting opponents of other teams than attending a match. The Football Factory (King 1996) focuses on Chelsea F.C. fan Tommy Johnson, who fights his way through the season alongside his friends. Each round of the F.A. Cup marks the team’s progress in the competition and simultaneously nominates who the gang of supporters will confront in their own battles. Figurative use of the pitch allows the author space to dissect masculinity in 1990s British society. Another violent element of football fiction, which revolves around the game but not often near it, are crime-related football novels. The representation of football and crime’s long interwoven traditions emerged in the 1920s when a little kidnap and some mild extortion offered dramatic tension to the football outcome. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, officers like Inspector West (Creasey 1949) were chasing down and arresting villains in the front of the main stand during a match on a Saturday afternoon (the villain’s capture is the focus, not the football). Contemporary equivalents still use the setting; crime continues to happen in and around football clubs without taking notice of the players’ on-field efforts. Examples include Pitch Black (2008) by Alex Gray and the first of the Jeremy Kerr trilogy, which begins with January Window (2014). Both novels take place in and around baggage-free fictitious clubs, Kelvin F.C. and London City, respectively, and reference to real teams for context. Jason Burke Murphy’s discussion of the position of the pitch and the weight a narrative, a back story, can bring to real fixtures, players and events on the pitch (2017, 340–343) inadvertently highlights the one of the great strengths in the football novel, the literal and figurative relationship with the place where the sporting moment is related, held up to scrutiny, woven into the plot, the motifs, and the meanings of the football novel (D’Arcy 2007). The field of play, the presence of the pitch, is integral to the fabric of football fiction and fertile ground

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for a novel’s action, the weight of a plot, complex characters and their discords. The amount of time spent on the pitch or around it in the course of the novel can also be seen to be a direct consequence of the protagonist’s relationship with the game. Distance from football impacts on the story’s presentation and narrative structure. In the way stories about players are dependent on their playing, novels about a team are often dependent on the structure of a club’s achievement. How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup (Carr 2005, c1975) and The Thistle and the Grail (1954) follow a tournament with a highly prized trophy to be won. This lends the football novel a narrative arc with a set of obstacles to overcome on the way to the climactic showdown. In The Football Factory, the Cup tournament is key to gaining the vaunted face-off with Millwall’s firm and not related to the potential for Chelsea F.C. to progress in the competition. In Steeple Sinderby, the picturesque town and lost romance of the F.A. Cup are restored by the giantslaying village green team. Amateurs triumph over professionals, civility over thuggery and good over various evils in a throwback to 1930s football coverage. The Thistle and the Grail is the exception, Drumsagart’s Cup Final win is juxtaposed with Andrew Rutherford’s rumination on the less than ethical actions he’s taken to get the team to the final. The novel’s focus on the bitterness in protagonist’s personal defeat overshadows the club’s success and foregrounds the destructive power of football and obsession. Such a character study can only lead to questions regarding the football novel’s cast. As there is in all genre fiction, football fiction has its cast of characters. They are not necessarily or overtly distinguishable from those archetypes used in other genres. The football novel has its own versions of these characters but cannot claim ownership over any given type. However, it is possible to highlight variation and illustrate how the game itself has influenced their evolution. Among the team there is usually a (nascent) natural leader; a cheeky striker; a gifted though diminutive midfield playmaker; and a strong, stoic defender. The mythologised eccentricities of goalkeepers have been exploited many times in football’s fiction (see Deans 2010; Glanville 1964, 1971, 1976; Naughton 1968 for example). The strong and stoic defender is almost magically, physically and emotionally reduced by the spritely skills of his often far shorter, faster, more skilful opponent (Taylor 1997, 97). The cheeky attacker has to learn the benefits of teamwork. These tropes are well worn; we’ve been watching them play out in real-life football since before Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone dazzled Lisbon at the 1967 European Cup Final (Greig and McGarry 2012). There is usually a hard-bitten yet inspirational coach such as McPhee (Horler 1923) and some nefarious developers with plans to exploit the club’s land, such as the lawyer in The Ripple Effect (Holland 2004). There are variations, of course, and updates. The nefarious developers or greedy chairmen are now oligarchs or the obscenely wealthy; the cheeky striker is now a young player whose lost his dream football contract and, stuck in a small town, finds himself coming out, like Tom Pearman in The Natural (2017). Before The Kilburn Social Club (2009) by Robert Hudson, the range of roles a player could

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have in a novel expanded from football pitch cliché alpha male and spoilt child to media pundit news site columnist. KSC F.C.’s league-topping champs feature a black Muslim goalkeeper who took the name Cohen, an Argentinian Achilles, an opera singer, a South African freedom fighter and a captain with a doctorate and a part-time teaching gig at Kings University. Modern football’s increasing array of harassed club officials, lawyers, agents and wives and girlfriends have also increased its potential cast, if only to add to the list of likely villains. Football novels often take advantage of such changes in game and its natural propensity for drama to explore and develop deeper, more emotionally complex issues. Football fiction readers, particularly adult readers, are generally football fans who understand the game’s nuances at a sophisticated level. Mimetic or realist fiction approaches are often employed to ensure verisimilitude. The depiction of the match performance or the conjured stadium provide a known, intimately understood context, a shorthand for an author to build stronger emotional or psychological issues for the football narrative to interrogate. Characters, settings and narrative structures are frequently drawn from real life to vivify the football action and atmosphere. Out with the biographical novels such as those by Peace, examples are numerous, most commonly in the adoption of real football team. They possibly begin early in football fiction with Arnold Bennett, who cites Tottenham Hotspur alongside his recurring fictional Stoke-based teams in the short story The Matador of Five Towns (1912). Mike and PSmith pretend they are Manchester United supporters (Wodehouse 1910). D.H. Lawrence notes a match between Aston Villa and Notts County (1934), and Leonard Gribble, most commercially, used Arsenal (twice) and Stanley Mathews (as himself) in crime-related football fiction (1939, 1950a, b). The actual 1949 F.A. Cup Final was the backdrop for Bernard Newman’s Cup Final Murder (1950), Gordon Williams and Terry Venables placed their fictional team in a league of real teams in They Used to Play on Grass (1971) and Keith Aldritt leaned on Elgar’s love of Wolverhampton Wanderers (Elgar on the Journey to Hanley 1979). Use of real teams as device was not limited to English football novels. Isaac Goldemberg’s Tiempo al tiempo (‘Time to Time’ 1984) uses a match between Peru and Brazil to explore the former’s relationship with Judaism (Wood 2005, 274), Péter Esterházy turns Ferenc Puskás into his mother’s friend (2010) and Hernán River Letelier intertextualises legends associated with Green Cross Temuco to examine Pinochet’s Chile in El Fantasista (2006). There are numerous instances of World Cup tournaments. The two most literary examples are arguably the 1982 World Cup in Bernardo Atxaga’s The Lone Man (1998), which explores national identity alongside individual fealty to a cause, and Antonia Dal Masetto’s novel Hay unos tipos abajo (‘There are some guys below’), which uses the 1978 World Cup as a focal point to examine the actions and murderous rule of the Argentinian Junta. A fans’ inherent knowledge of teams, matches and events forces honesty and precision in the football novelist. Realistic fiction requires the writer to create an exacting account of football. However, in their faithfulness to the truth, the scenarios being fictionalised will only ever be re-creation re-presentation,

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very credible fakes. Openly acknowledging this relationship, J.L. Carr’s opening page of his novel asks why those who seek authenticity in their football experience would read a story about an amateur team winning English football’s most prestigious prize (2005, c1975, 1). Narratorial voice in a football novel and the voices of its characters and/or narrators are informed by the combination of effects contributing to what we know as narrative situation (Genette 1980, 212). Who the storyteller is, his/ her point of view, the distance he/she is from the events and how he/she knows what he/she shares are generally inflected with football’s vernacular, the register most commonly associated to describe the game. The use of football language often becomes a characteristic in and of itself. Even those texts, which feature very little football, can reflect an immersion in the vernacular of the sport. This same immersion can present issues for a non-football reader. Potentially prohibitive jargon can be exacerbated, in the cases of Jim White (1998) and Hunter Davies (1992), for example, by the use of potentially difficult to relate to, often irrelevant, insider jokes. Too much football jargon or punditry can make a novel sound more like a sports report, which is parodied for its clichéd lexicon and repetitive nature in the works of Martin Amis (London Fields 1989) and J.L. Carr (Taylor 1997, 98). However, too little of football’s cultural markings can remove the sense of football altogether. Terry Pratchett, the famous fantasy author, manages an admirable balance where he simultaneously pokes fun at the match report form, while using it as a means to translate the game to a readership not traditionally associated with football. The reports in Unseen Academicals (2009) also change perspective from the novel’s dominant limited third to an omniscient third-person perspective to deliver the football action in its entirety. Similar shifts in perspective and narratorial voice occur in From Scenes Like These (1968) by Gordon Williams. During matches, the point of view shifts from the player, Dunky Logan’s internal, view of his participation in the match, to a third-person external view. The initial discomfort and sense of incongruence in the shift from the arms-length observation to more viscerally feeling the football as its played emulate the wider conflict and Dunky’s discomfit around his living with his mother in the town while working as a farmhand in the country. The representation of the narrative situation offers a powerful alignment of form and content. This synthesis of the author’s use of vocal strategies, the novel’s primary mode of communication, is crucial to the reader’s interpretation, the authenticity of the world and the existent discourse. If, for example, the protagonist is a young woman who likes football, such as Gracie Faltrain (Crowley 2004) or Charlie Brown in Pretty Tough (2007), the text is very likely to spend time on the pitch with her as a player and include a series of moral dilemmas as it builds toward her accomplishing the necessary rite of passage. The voice will be appropriately affected by and of these events and changes. If the protagonist is an older male football hooligan, such as Billy Evans, the leader of, and brains behind the heist in, The Crew (Brimson 1999), then he will most likely not play, the novel is unlikely to portray football and moral dilemmas will be indistinct or

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completely absent. The voice, which will largely remain unaffected as such, will invariably be in the vernacular. These two novels highlight the same universal themes, football’s strength as a leveller and as a natural force in bringing diverse and disparate communities together, even if it is a gang of hooligans, but their use of voice and manipulation of techniques of narration is patently different. The books have little other similarity beyond their reliance on and copious references to football or football culture.

Conclusion Recognition of similarities amid the diversity of football fiction has enabled deeper understanding of the football novel and facilitated some classification. In the face of genre theory’s arguments against static formation, the conventions and constraints seem contrived, but they are handy for our categorisation of knowledge. Application of genre theory changes the way we look at the football novel and the phenomena that occur across football fiction texts. This chapter has detailed a narrative grammar and common morphological arrangements, or the ‘rules’ governing play that shape, shift and extend the football novel and reinforce, soothe and subvert readers’ expectations. It has articulated notable characteristics and established new and enduring qualities and organisational factors that might be placed on the production of a new novel if it were to be situated within the football fiction genre. To make an argument for football fiction as a genre is also to make an argument against it. An application of genre theory enables recognition of similarities amid football fiction’s diversity. Genre also provides the means for a useful classification of shared textual practices now that the types of football narrative representation are understood they can be employed in the analysis and examination of individual texts. This chapter accounts for the existence of football fiction as a genre; it describes instability as its ongoing change, change that is anchored in identifiable characteristics and existing commonalities. The ‘vulcanised’ uniformity of and consistency in schoolboy football stories can exist alongside the seemingly disparate hand-stitched unpredictability in literary football fiction, but they operate in a category that changes with each new addition. William Gilbert, a local town rival in the supply of boots and balls to footballplaying Warwickshire schoolboys, is regarded as having made the first leather football. Gilbert’s name is on a national Rugby trophy. The death of Rebecca Lindon is the more profound and interesting part of the history. A footnote amid two men’s claims of success and achievement, her misfortune is enough of a diversion in the narrative structure to change the way we look at the story. It echoes a primary purpose of football fiction: the creation of space for imagination. The ball has a central role in football (Rezaei et al. 2011, 1201) and has, as a result, endured a serious and continued mitigation against the odd and unexpected. Its journey toward flawlessness is arguably making the game more predictable. The same cannot be said of its fiction.

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Gelder, Ken. 2004. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. New York: Routledge. Genette, Gerard. 1992, c1979. The Architext: An Introduction (Introduction à l’architexte), translated by Janet Lewin. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Genette, Gerard. 1980. Narrative Discourse, translated by J. Lewin. Oxford: Blackwell, from Figures III (1972), Paris: Ed du Seuil. Glanville, Brian. 1964. Goalkeepers Are Crazy: A Collection of Football Stories. London: Secker and Warburg. Glanville, Brian. 1998, c1971. Goalkeepers Are Different. London: Virgin. Glanville, Brian. 1976. The Dying of the Light. London: Secker & Warburg. Goldemberg, Isaac. 1984. Tiempo al tiempo (Time to Time). Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Gray, Alex. 2008. Pitch Black. Edinburgh: Sphere. Greig, Martin and Charles McGarry. 2012. The Road to Lisbon. Glasgow: Birlinn. Gribble, Leonard. 1939. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. London: Harrap. Gribble, Leonard. 1950a. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery: The Replay. London: Herbert Jenkins. Gribble, Leonard. 1950b. They Kidnapped Stanley Mathews. London: Herbert Jenkins. Hartley, John. 2011. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies. London: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9780203814284. Hawkesley, Simon. ‘Original Rugby Ball.’ Richard Lindon & Co. Rugby England. http:// richardlindon.co.uk. Henderson, Don. 2009. Macbeth, You Idiot! Sydney: Penguin. Holland, Dominic. 2004. The Ripple Effect. Durham: Flame Press. Horler, Sydney. 1923. McPhee: A Football Story. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Hudson, Robert. 2009. The Kilburn Social Club. London: Jonathon Cape. James, Gary and Mark Brown. 2002. Atkinson for England. London: Empire. Jamieson, Katherine M. 1975. ‘Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint.’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 61: 406–415. doi: 10.1080/00335637509383303. Jenkins, Robin. 2006, c1954. The Thistle and the Grail. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kerr, Philip. 2014. January Window. London: Head of Zeus. King, John. 1996. The Football Factory. London: Vintage. Kinney, Leila W. 1987. ‘Genre as Social Contract.’ Art Journal 46 (4): 267–277. New York: College Art Association. doi: 10.1080/00043249.1987.10792373. Lampard, Frank. 2019. Frankie’s Magic Football: Game Over! London: Little Brown. Lawrence, David Herbert. 1934. Strike Pay. June Issue. https://classic.esquire.com/ article/1934/6/1/strike-pay. Masetto, Antonio Dal. 2005, c1998. Hay unos tipos abajo (There Are Some Guys Below). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. McGowan, Lee. 2010. ‘Piggery and Predictability: An Exploration of the Hog in Football’s Limelight.’ M/C Journal 13 (5). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/ mcjournal/article/view/291. McGowan, Lee. 2017. ‘Football and Its Fiction.’ In Routledge Handbook of Football Studies, edited by John Hughson, Kevin Moore, Ramón Spaaij and Joseph Maguire, 222–235. New York: Routledge. McIntosh, Iain. 2014. Johnny Cook: The Impossible Job. London: Blizzard. Miller, Carolyn. 1984. ‘Genre as Social Action.’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–167. Morland, Dick. 1974. Albion, Albion! London: Faber and Faber.

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Murphy, Jason Burke. 2017. ‘On Virtue, Irony, and Glory: The Pitch and the People.’ In Football and the Boundaries of History: Critical Studies in Soccer, edited by Brenda Elsey and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 339–359. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 227–246. doi: 10.1057/978-1-349-95006-5_17. Naughton, Bill. 1968. The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and Other Stories. London: Puffin. Newman, Brendan. 1950. Cup Final Murder. London: Gollanz. Peace, David. 2006. The Damned Utd. London: Faber & Faber. Peace, David. 2013. Red or Dead. London: Faber & Faber. Pratchett, Terry. 2010, c2009. Unseen Academicals. London: Corgi. Price, Derek De Solla, Robert M. Jones and Andy Harland. 2006. ‘Computational Modelling of Manually Stitched Footballs.’ Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part L. Journal of Materials: Design & Applications (220): 259–268. doi: 10.1243/14644207JMDA83. Raisin, Ross. 2017. TheNatural. London: Jonathon Cape. Rezaei, Ali, Rudy Verhelst, Wim Van Paepegem and Joris Degrieck. 2011. ‘Finite Element Modelling and Experimental Study of Oblique Soccer Ball Bounce.’ Journal of Sports Sciences 29 (11): 1201–1213. doi: 10.1080/02640414.2011.587443. Rhodes, Dan. 2014. Fan. London: Arcadia. Rivera Letelier, Hernán. 2010, c2006. El Fantasista (The Fantasist). Madrid: Santillana. Shepherd, Michael and Carolyn Watters. 1998. ‘The Evolution of Cybergenres.’ Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii (2): 97–109. Star, Nancy. 2008. Carpool Diem. New York: Hachette. Taylor, David John. 1997. ‘Rally Round You Havens! Soccer and the Literary Imagination.’ In Perfect Pitch 1): Home Ground, edited by Simon Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Tigelaar, Liz. 2007. Pretty Tough. New York: Razorbill. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1990. Genres in Discourse, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Jim. 1998. The Diary of Darren Tackle. London: Warner. Williams, Gordon. 1968. From Scenes Like These. London: Black and White. Williams, Gordon and Terry Venables. 1994, c1971. They Used to Play on Grass. London: Penguin. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. 1910. Mike and Psmith. London: Adam and Charles Black. Wood, David. 2005. ‘Reading the Game: The Role of Football in Peruvian Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (2): 266–284. doi: 10.1080/ 09523360500035925. Wood, David. 2017. Football and Literature in South America. London: Routledge. Zapata, Mariana. 2015. Kulti. Amazon [online].

Chapter 5

Two halves Differentiation between adult and young adult football fiction

On accepting the manuscript for Cath Crowley’s first novel, her editor asked the Australian author to include some football (online interview 2008). The request is only unusual until the reader learns the redoubtable Gracie, the figure at the centre of the highly successful young adult fiction series, is a soccer player. It was an oversight. To the author’s credit, Crowley made football integral to the Gracie Faltrain (2004–2008) trilogy. In the published version of The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain (2004), the sport is positioned at the core of the narrative. The protagonist, a teenager, is comfortable playing football. The football field is where her hubris is dismantled and where she proves her abilities as a peer to untrusting male teammates. Relationships – including romantic ones – are lost and won on the pitch. The import of football diminishes as the series progresses, but Gracie’s stories are no less important to the genre. Echoing the publication of novels that reflected the development of women’s football in the 1920s, Crowley’s works and those since reflect an escalation in opportunities for young women to ‘see’ other women playing football. As public awareness, acceptance and interest in the women’s game grows, so does publication of novels with a female footballer as protagonist. If the increase is indicative of a change in the genre – an emerging trend in women’s sports fiction that also highlights growth and development in football itself – are these novels also demonstrative of the football novel’s capacity to do more than simply tell a story? Reflection and illustration of broad conventions and themes is central to this final chapter. The book’s structure has narrowed to a point where we can look inside two football novels within the context of our understanding of the genre. By way of outlining football fiction’s historical terrain, refining its taxonomic organisation, discussing conventions that operate across individual texts, such as devices, themes, and tropes, we move from consideration of distance as a condition of knowledge (Moretti 2000, 54), understanding drawn from the collective whole, toward this point: a closer examination of the internal structures of the football novel. In this chapter, the distant reading approach is bound to close reading methods. Geographic maps, another of Franco Moretti’s proposed models of abstraction (2005, 33), are adapted to reflect changing conventions

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and distinctions in novels aimed at readerships differentiated by age. A close textual analysis of two exemplars will then illustrate line-level similarities and divergences, such as the immutable requirements of a pitch, as well as traditional characteristics and recurring themes operating within the genre. Football novels aimed at female readers, particularly in young adult fiction, tend to revise traditional models and conventions and are often emotionally complex. While there are exceptions, this is generally not reflected in the majority of novels aimed at young male readers. As the longest-standing form of football fiction, novels aimed at young male readers still tend toward the didactic and are orientated toward match results, even when the moral lesson is at odds with the outcome (‘winning isn’t everything, but it’s still great we won the tournament!’), and are less emotionally complex. Irrespective of nominated gender, young adult football novels all feature the inclusion of on-the-pitch football action – most often through the protagonist’s participation as a footballer. Adult football novels do not require the same proximity to the field of play. Football is often used as a narrative vehicle for unification. In young adult football fiction, that unification tends to be toward a negotiated goal and is often key to team success (Morgan 2013–2019; Abela and Warren 2005–2007), while in adult football fiction it is more likely to have violent associations and consequences – particularly in writing concerned with fan culture (Brimson 1998; J. King 1996; Welsh 1993, 2018). These readership-based differentiations are indicative of the potential of other divergences in the ways adult and young adult football fiction narratives engage with the game. The mapping process adopts a small representative sample of football novels taken from the larger body presented in previous chapters. The novels in the close textual analysis are typical of their specific target readerships, are representative of the period in which they were published and share an underlying script. The young adult football fiction to be analysed is Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (Deep-Jones 2008). Aimed at young adult female readers, it was released in Australia around the launch of the W-League (2008), Australia’s first national professional female football competition. Striker (Davies 1992) was written for adult male readers and published during the emergence of the soccerati, the same year as Fever Pitch (Hornby 1992). Despite the difference in time of publication, the novels have been selected as they exhibit a number of similarities. Before discussing their content, this chapter will illustrate the identifiable differences in the presentation of young adult and adult football fiction.

Young adult fiction Young adult or YA fiction is defined in the context of this book as literature that offers a young adult perspective and reflects the concerns, interests of and challenges put to those readers between the ages of 12 and 24.1 This aligns with publishing industry standards and excludes texts more clearly aimed at younger audiences. However, if the work is by a significant author (of long-standing

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reputation, for example) or a remarkable one (a former high-profile player, for example), the author’s work may be noted. Literature and theory on young adult fiction are extensive. The related discourse cannot be represented here in its entirety. In an effort to foreground discussion on related football fiction, this chapter contains a brief history and summary of the contemporary context followed by discussion of key debates around the determination, definition and age range of young adult fiction. The series Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature overseen by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford; scholarly journals such as the International Research in Children’s Literature (Reynolds 2019) and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts and Cultures (Snell 2019); trade publications such as Publisher Weekly (Berchenko 2019); and key theorists, including Bradford, Mallan, Stephens and McCallum (2008), Elizabeth Gruner (2019), Perry Nodelman (2017) and Megan Musgrave (2016) among others, should be consulted for further reading. In terms of publishing, young adult fiction is a relatively recent phenomenon. Some theorists nominate S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders (1967) as the point of separation between adult and children’s fiction (Bucher and Hinton 2010; Nimon and Foster 1997). J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), with its visceral shock of adolescence, is also commonly held up as a starting point (Nilsen and Donelson 2009; Scutter 1999). An earlier, though contested, point of origin is Maureen Daly’s novel Seventeenth Summer, published in 1942 as recognition of the teenage years as distinct from childhood or adulthood (Cart 2001, 96). The case for Hinton’s novel is arguably strongest, particularly where it led a burgeoning late 1960s trend toward grittier, realist and transgressive fiction.2 Within a few years, the nefarious acts of a manipulative high-school secret society in Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Judy Blume’s controversial sexual content in Forever (1975) helped young adult literature establish an, albeit uncertain, territory of its own. In the USA and the UK, stories of quiet responsibility, respectability and other ‘middle-class constructs’ were being replaced with novels dealing with the class experience, racism, poverty, alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse. Questions about notions of power and the relationship between the adult author writing and their young adult reading audience were being raised. Consequently, institutional gatekeepers and adult custodians – from editors to teachers and parents to librarians – overlooking the literature produced for young adults sought change, and the 1980s saw a return to staple genre fiction, particularly romance and horror. By the 1990s, media surrounding adolescence had changed dramatically and with pace. Despite competition from alternative choices in popular entertainment, the young adult novel found an expanding audience. Authors began to tackle more complex characters and moral ambiguities, and publishers began to target more age-specific audiences. While J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter (Rowling 1997) boosted interest in fantasy and science fiction, a greater diversity in cultural perspectives became available, encouraging an even broader range of texts and topics. Multiple genres could be found in a single narrative. Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998) – part western, part pursuit, part prison novel with converging

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historic and contemporary narrative strands – is one such example. Young adult fiction also more readily took on a range of forms incorporating verse and graphic novels. Contemporary young adult fiction is noted for its agility and responsiveness to social and cultural developments, for its potential to be shaped by society and to shape the ways its target readership receives and questions language and ideas (Stephens 2010, 209). In the decade since theorist John Stephens made these observations, texts aimed at readers approaching adulthood, like all aspects of young adult culture (and any human endeavour), have undergone substantive and accelerating levels of change. Today’s young adult fiction is marked only by its breadth, depth and variation. Alongside traditional models, genres and experimentation, young adult texts reflect possibilities and opportunities in interactivity, multi-modality and the pervasiveness of digital augmentation. The appreciable improvement in the status of the field has and can be attributed to the success of Harry Potter. There is now long-awaited recognition that young adult fiction novels are worthy of the attention of a wider audience (Kitchener 2017, para. 5). The frequency of the ‘crossover novel’ – the phenomenon of texts aimed at young adult audiences and adopted by adult ones – is closely associated with the revival of fantasy fiction (Beckett 2009, 135) and has increased exponentially. The books, perhaps as a result, are experiencing extraordinary sales – young adult fiction authors Rowling, Veronica Roth, Markus Zusak, and John Green have all led global bestseller lists. The lines of separation between adult and younger readerships, a definitive border since the middle of the 18th century, have more recently blurred significantly (see Knickerbocker et al. 2017; Beckett 2009; Kummerling-Meibauer 1999). Comic books have moved into mainstream popular culture. Children’s picture books are now commonly, subversively, devised specifically for adult readers (e.g. Where the Wild Moms Are (Blackburn 2015) and Go the Fuck to Sleep (Mansbach 2011)). The young adult fiction market has experienced marked growth: 11.3% in the USA between 2013 and 2018 (Andersen 2018, para. 13). Within this context, what qualifies as young adult fiction is usually determined by the intended age range and the target readership. But, as previously noted, Harry Potter changed the landscape. For the purposes of this study, it is important to include as many football novels as possible but also necessary to maintain reasonable parameters for the field. While the age range for young adult fiction has been theoretically stretched from 10 to 30 years and older (see Cart 2001), an aggregation of debates around contested specifics led to this study focusing on texts aimed at readers between the age of 12 and 24 years. This consolidates age ranges prescribed by industry and literary publishing competitions, and it includes the emergent ‘new adult’ (or NA) category aimed at readers 18 to 24 years.3 Unsurprisingly, there is enormous divergence in context and subject matter in terms of social, psychological and sexual development and emotional levels across the range. At the younger end of the scale, novels are geared toward more specific age ranges. Texts aimed at 12 to 14-year-old readers, an accepted industry category, are not children’s literature (Hintz and Tribunella 2013; Wall 1991) but are often considered ‘too

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juvenile’ for most young adult readers. At the older end of the scale, the new adult category was devised as a result of industry recognition of a lack of stories for those readers who see themselves as no longer being teenagers but not yet adults. Amid the shifting and re-drawing of its established ambits, there are characteristics most young adult novels exhibit. Scholars, critics and theorists agree the young adult novel should have a young adult protagonist – young adult readers want to see themselves in the story (Nodelman 2017, 2). Whether in first-person point of view or close third-person perspective, the story will be narrated from the perspective of a young person. The subject matter and story lines should typically be consistent with the age and experiences of the main character. They tend to reflect intensive dialogue and internalised monologues over action and common concerns of the changing young adult experience, a ‘coming of age’ or a ‘rite of passage’ (Aronson 2001, 124), including: learning to take responsibility; becoming a sexual being; coping with social pressures, including via social media and school; and dealing with relationships. Theoretical disagreement tends to turn on intended audience and appropriate levels of sophistication, where level of concern is determined by perceived readership, or at least ‘the implied reader’ (Booth 2005, 1961),4 which can be defined as the person expected to derive pleasure from the reading (Nodelman 2017). Other characteristics are more sharply contested: the preference to push the parents out of the picture to allow the young protagonist to take the credit and gain the experience occurs in most Roald Dahl fiction aimed at young readers, for example, but it is not regarded as essential. Getting to the point in terms of storytelling and pace; adherence to contemporary trends and mass marketing techniques; and ensuring setting, themes and premise are characteristically diverse are common, too (Nilsen and Donelson 2009, 28–32). However, counter arguments regarding the applicability of these characteristics to almost any genre weakens debate about their being markers of differentiation. Where blurred edges and debate and contestation around key characteristics create uncertainty within the territory, the football pitch might offer solace in certainty. Having defined football and young adult fiction, offered context and devised a set of generic conventions, it is possible to identify distinct patterns that emerge from a limited, though layered, topographical review of the field.

Cartographical insight Young adult football novels adhere to those most commonly agreed-upon characteristics. The protagonist is a young person; they are most often presented in firstperson point of view, and the story lines are representative of the target readers’ age and experience. Football fiction is also a field that highlights a high degree of certainty in differentiation between young adult and adult novels. Two separate maps have been devised to illustrate distinctions, including the figurative distance the text is situated from the field of play and representation of gender. To develop his map, Franco Moretti employed principles drawn from German geographer Walter Christaller’s study of Central Places in Southern Germany (1966).

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Moretti built on ‘patterns’ and ‘street maps’, devised in earlier work (1998), to map Mary Mitford’s five-volume Our Village collection (1824–1832). Positioning the world of, or created within, the first of Mitford’s novels as a system, Moretti placed the village and events occurring within it at the centre of the map and situated story components, events occurring outside the village and characters, depending on their physical relationship to the village and each other, at relative and representative distances (2005, 35). In doing so, the literary theorist reduced the text to a limited number of events and occurrences. Through their abstraction from the narrative flow, Moretti constructed a new, artificial object – in this case, a map. Developed across concentric circles, the diagram highlighted related and unrelated elements in Mitford’s work. This representation of aspects of the novel comes ‘from’ the text but is not ‘of’ its narrative structure and is thus able to assist in preparing the text for analysis and in illustrating potential or emerging qualities traditional forms of analysis may not (Moretti 2005, 53). The map of The Village enabled Moretti to note and reflect on the circular nature of the country walks the novel’s characters regularly took. Without the map, this would not have been apparent. The literary analysis is better informed as a result. However, the map itself is not an explanation. Rather, it offers a model of the novel’s narrative universe and the particular way its components have been arranged. The map’s ability to shed light on hidden patterns buried beneath or within the text is the reason for its application in this chapter. The sample to be used in the mapping process follows the larger study in adopting an availability sampling strategy. Each work in the sample has been tested through application of criteria set out in the definition of football fiction. That is, the texts demonstrate a significant reliance on football as a central, pivotal or substantive element and include elements of narrative structure and situation such as point of view, use of language, setting and character development. Through their exhibition of tropes and conventions identified in previous chapters, the 52 titles in the sample (approximately 10% of those listed in the final section of this book) offer diagrammatic illustration of the larger body of works they represent. Any findings can be extrapolated to the wider body of literature with confidence. The sample list highlights 25 texts selected from young adult football fiction and 25 texts from adult football fiction. The young adult fiction represent the most recent texts published in young female and young male football divisions. The adult football fiction texts are drawn from mainstream, crime, literary and women’s football fiction. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal and Striker have been added to the sample for contextualising purpose, making the sample total 52 texts. The texts in the sample are: In Figure 5.1 – titled Representative sample – young adult football fictions are nominated in black bold text, adult in dark grey. They will now be separated according to three factors: (1) the protagonist’s distance from the pitch – whether he/she plays, watches or connects with football in other ways; (2) the protagonist’s designated gender; and (3) the protagonist’s role in the narrative – whether he/ she is a player, a manager, spectator or connected to football in some other way.

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Figure 5.1 Representative sample

Distance from the pitch As noted in the previous chapter, a key element of football fiction is the inclusion of a pitch. Whether it is used for participation in a match, observed from the perspective of a manager or fan or remains figurative throughout, there is a pitch. The first point of differentiation in football novels aimed at distinct readerships discussed here is the protagonist’s relationship to football, which is reflected in how much of the novel is dedicated to the field of play. Figure 5.2 – titled Distance from the pitch – illustrates where the adult or young adult lead character would be in relation to the pitch as a result of his/her role in the narrative. Arcady in

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Figure 5.2 Distance from the pitch

Arcady’s Goal (2014) plays in the novel’s climactic match; it is therefore situated as being close to the pitch. Laurent Mauvingnier’s novel In the Crowd (2010), which uses the Heysel Stadium Disaster in Brussels in 1985 as its catalyst, watches football from a number of spectators’ points of view and is placed on the diagram to reflect its commensurate distance from the pitch. Following Moretti’s lead, the sample novels were plotted in terms of their protagonists’ relationship to the pitch. Three levels of distance can be illustrated. The novels in the innermost circle, the centre spot, feature a player, and football is played. These works include Kick (Johnson 2017), a novel about a young player; The Kicks (Morgan 2019), about a young team; and Iron Towns (Cartwright 2016). The latter reflects a number of points of view, and its lead character is a male professional player. The second level reflects novels that ‘see’ the game

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from the observer’s or spectator’s point of view, such as third-person narratives about teams or first-person narratives of managers, club coaches and fans. These include the fictionalised biography of Bill Shankly in Red or Dead (Peace 2013), the supporters’ stories in The Charlton Men (Breen 2014) and Fan (Rhodes 2014) and the tale of a club in trouble in The Ripple Effect (Holland 2004). The third, or outermost, circle is populated with those works that do not view the pitch but rely on substantive elements of football fiction such as its setting, characters and vernacular. Not Art (Esterházy 2010) notes a match in a park but does not watch. The central character interrupts to help the players with their homemade ball. The event and the novel feature Ferenc Puskás, the famous Hungarian player, as a character (2010, 100–107) who becomes friends with the protagonist’s mother, the novel’s central focus – she teaches her son the importance of football and explains the offside rule. The Crew (Brimson 1998) visits Upton Park Stadium for a match, but the narrative does not include a description of the game being played; its focus is on the organised gang of fans who watch. This is one incident in a novel that is otherwise filled with football vernacular. The crime-related football novel has a long-standing tradition of rarely watching or participating in football but using the stadium as setting and players and club staff as villains and victims. Exposed at the Back (Stavrum 2014) and January Window (Kerr 2014) frequently visit football stadiums and related environs. Figure 5.2 reflects a proportionately greater amount of on-the-pitch action in young adult football novels. With few exceptions, the protagonists are players. This is reflective of the protagonist’s role as an active participant in the narrative of young adult novels in general. In these novels, the football outcomes are integral to plot development. The diagram illustrates their reliance on football action and the game’s use in adding layers of tension. Matches and tournaments are used to assist with story structure and resolution. The narrator’s lack of distance from the story allows a more emotive communication of football in fiction, offering a more intimate insight into the game from a player’s perspective. The reader is allowed to experience the physical, emotional and intellectual challenges of the activity. Where the character is a player, and a young adult player, it is likely that the narrative point of view is first-person perspective, which draws the reader into match action. There may also be a correlation between readership age range and levels of actual participation, as it is more likely the young adult reader would be involved in playing football. These points of note clearly require further study. One point that is notable in the diagram, which can be considered using the same sample, is the number of female protagonists in the fiction, particularly those aimed at young adult readers.

Gender of protagonist The young adult football fiction protagonist is almost always a player. Historically and traditionally, the protagonist is a male player. The establishment of conventions, the inclusion of a pitch, the use of vernacular and the use of the

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game for setting and conflict all emerged in football fiction’s earliest texts. Texts were designed to teach boys lessons about good choices (see The Boys of Highfield Charles 1878). Texts that include stories of male supporters such as Packmen (Bissett 2011), male players in Bailey of the Saints (Fearnhead 2011) and managers such as Atkinson for England (2002) are much more prevalent in adult and young adult football fiction. With the exception of The Kicks, the works noted in the above feature male protagonists and adhere to the conventions and common roles portrayed in football fiction male protagonists. Historically and traditionally, female characters and protagonists in adult football fiction texts tend to embellish the male character’s prowess and fulfil his (under-developed) archetypes as wives, mothers, temptress or commodity (Bandy 2004, 99). Today, female football is gaining traction in terms of participation and public awareness (McGowan and Downes 2018, 63). The abstraction is informed by this knowledge and based on a passing observation made in the previous diagram: there seem to be more female protagonists in young adult fiction. Figure 5.3 – titled Gender of protagonist – plots the texts from the sample in relation to the nominated gender of their lead character. By an overwhelming majority, there are more adult male protagonists than female (15 of 52) and more young adult female protagonists than adult female protagonists (11 of 15). The narrator’s mother in Not Art is arguably the novel’s central character. Sal Casillas in the adult football romance Kulti (Zapata 2015) is a rare example of a female professional player. Corey Palmer is the sports journalist who enjoys

Figure 5.3 Gender of protagonist

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sleeping with footballers in Playing the Field (Coldwell 2010) and Annie Fleming, a well-meaning Mum who wants to see her daughter in the first eleven, in Carpool Diem (Star 2008). While not listed as such, Leah Easter from The Natural (Raisin 2017) is as strong as female characters get in adult football fiction. The wife of local team’s captain, it’s Leah who provides an effective and fully rounded foil to gay footballer Tom Pearman, The Natural’s protagonist. The five females in 26 adult football novels equate to a temptress, two mothers, a wife and one player. This figure echoes the sentiments of sports fiction staples as noted by Bandy (2004, 99–100). Where one in five female characters from a sample of 26 novels is a player, the single occurrence does not offer strong argument for significant change in the landscape. Although, one is an improvement on none. A clearer signal of forthcoming change is the exponential growth in the publication of young adult female football characters, arguably more indicative of the now real possibility of footballers who are female becoming a norm on the sporting landscape. Where the protagonist is a young female footballer, such as Gracie Faltrain or Krista and Charlie Brown, who must resolve their differences as teammates in Pretty Tough (Tigelaar 2007), she is generally smart, strong and able to negotiate personal, emotional and physical challenges. Each entry in the 11-book Girls F.C. (Pielichaty 2018) series tackles a serious social issue such as immigration, poverty, domestic abuse and racism. These young adult female texts have a strong structural connection to the women’s football fiction published in the 1920s but focus on characters in more gender equitable worlds of school and community sports, rather than fully grown adults who have entered the male-dominated sport at commercial professional levels. A historical analysis would further highlight the imbalance. Hem (Hem and Football 1992) was the first professional female player featured in a novel since those of the 1920s; her professional Bengali team were the first portrayed across the same period. It is only when we see Emily Costello’s Soccer Stars series in the late 1990s that players spend significant periods of time on the pitch and as a team. The football fiction conventions are thoroughly employed across those young adult novels reflected in the diagram. The young adult football novel reflects a greater proportion of female protagonists. It is likely that they also reflect the game’s changing landscape. This is an unusual approach to discussing the football novel, but these models of abstraction follow the intent of Moretti’s proposal. They are used to interpret rather than analyse, to provoke questions rather than find answers. Within the body of football fiction, it is possible to see how meaning can be drawn from them in order to further discussion and build new knowledge. They articulate and emphasise elements we may not otherwise recognise from either a close reading or a distant reading alone. It is the combination of the two that allows deeper understanding to occur. Adult and young adult football fiction narratives are inherently related through their concern for the game, but they exhibit a range of stark differences that would benefit from further investigation. This can include

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distance from the pitch and gender of the protagonist. They might also include the amount of match time or football practice seen on the page, the impact on narrative structure as a result of role of the protagonist and the employment of narrative instance (Genette 1980, 212) and point of view. Two incidences of second-person perspective have been noted in the course of this book’s development in The Damned Utd (Peace 2006) and in Fan (Rhodes 2014). Along with the examples cited above, they demonstrate the notion of a clear approach in narrative situation in football fiction may be dependent on the role of the protagonist. The possibility of greater certainty is explored in the next section, which illustrates conventions and distinct points of differentiation between young adult and adult football fiction; it notes distance from the pitch time on and gender among a range of other characteristics.

Close reading: comparative textual analysis Novels in this genre share characteristics about the culture around football; the game itself; its fans, players and clubs; and the consequences of a win, loss or draw. As illustrated, there are text-level differentiations in the narrative structure and situation depending on a text’s intended audience. Language choices in a story’s presentation are selected on the understanding that its ‘style’ refers to particular uses of a language system (Shen 2005, 146). A novel’s organisational strategies, which trace signifiers, statements and discourse within a narrative (Genette 1980, 27), are concerned with the story’s structure and recognition of what is distinctive and effective. This text will now examine the strategies, techniques and use of language informing and influencing the stylistic presentation of two football novels – a young adult and an adult football novel. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (2008) is the debut novel by Liz Deep-Jones, a former commentator for women’s football on Australian television. Her young adult football fiction is primarily aimed at female readers through its protagonist, although its diverse cast reflecting the typical Sydney football community, including a young indigenous male lead, arguably broadens its appeal. Hunter Davies, a renowned sports journalist and award-winning writer, is better known to football fans for his highly acclaimed non-fiction novel, The Glory Game (1972). Striker (1992), his third football book and second football novel (after Body Charge also 1972), is a clever if limited parody written from the perspective of a professional player and singularly aimed at mainstream adult male readers. Despite the years between their publication, the Deep-Jones and Davies novels have been selected for comparison as a result of their underlying, relatively conventional narrative structure. They are remarkably similar in length – Lucy Zeezou’s Goal is 266 pages, and Striker is 265 pages. They follow the exploits of a footballer who gains a degree of celebrity and has challenges in being accepted by his teammates. The works contain numerous incidences of on-pitch football action, frequently namedrop real footballers as minor characters and have strong underlying themes regarding the price or impact of fame – demonstrated

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in both novels by the kidnap and ransom of the respective protagonist (DeepJones 2008, 154; Davies 1992, 238). Lucia Zoffi, the protagonist in Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (2008), is a 14-year-old model with her own line of fashionwear who dreams of playing serious football. The novel follows her life-changing trip from the catwalks of Milan to the backstreets and playing fields of Sydney. Lucy’s parents don’t approve of her participation in the world game, so she pretends to attend dance lessons and conceals her gender with a masculine disguise in order to join the local boys’ football team. Having inherited her world-famous family’s footballing legacy (her dad captained the Italian national team), she soon establishes a role as the team’s star player. She also secretly provides refuge for Max, a teammate whose life as a homeless teenage indigenous Australian is a world away from Lucy’s affluent privilege. The layers of deception are eventually uncovered when the novel’s central tension – Lucy’s forbidden love for the game – is brought to a head through the inevitable clash with an important family commitment. Themes include female empowerment, the normalisation of gendered participation in sport, the benefits of positive team spirit and the importance of family and friendship. Through helping Max build a support system, there are rich discussion points in its exploration of poverty, western affluence and indigenous Australian culture. Striker (1992) follows the rise and rise of the highly talented, often feckless, stereotypical professional footballer. From humble beginnings on a housing estate wasteland, it follows Joe Swift, a pastiche of premier league characters but most closely resembling England player Paul Gascoigne. The novel describes the formative years of Joe’s career, the heady days of participation in Premiership (preEnglish Premier League) football, his appearances for his national side and the inevitable money-laden transfers and language barriers of European super stardom. Its practical, if ineffective (Taylor 1997, 83), conceit is writing the memoir in captivity, while he’s being held hostage for ransom. Parodying the narcissistic footballer autobiography, Davies makes space to comment on commercial, sociopolitical and cultural changes sweeping through the top-tier competitions in late 1980s/early 1990s as well as the mercenary nature of the modern professional footballer. Its pages are filled with the hollow ‘camaraderie’ of teammates, scorn for celebrity groupies and lesser players, the rapacity of managers and the disruptive force of agents. The narrative and industry critique are somewhat weakened by the novel’s inclusion of frequent ‘insider’ jokes that preach to, and entertain, its choral football audience. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal has almost 45 pages of played football over 14 separate instances in its 266 pages, including training and informal games played with friends and teammates. In comparison, Striker features approximately 10 significant instances, including training, which amount to less than 11 pages over a 265-page novel. This reflects the stark differentiation in the amount of football on the page in young adult novels when compared with their adult counterparts. In both novels, on-pitch football has an important role as a vehicle for character

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development. The protagonists demonstrate their talent, prove their worth and use the game to express their ‘true’ selves. They make connections and develop relationships with other characters, friends, teammates and adversaries through playing football. Time spent on the pitch is central to the narrative arc in Lucy Zeezou’s Goal. The playing field is where Lucy, even in disguise, is happiest – something she declares very early in the work (Deep-Jones 2008, 6). The climax of the novel is a football match where she can play unburdened, conscience clear, and free to experience the joy in participation (2008, 240). The volume of played football is arguably the result of fiction being one of very few platforms for young women to see other women play football at the time of the novel’s release. Published 1 September 2008, it arrived on bookshelves two months prior to the programming of one weekly (if at all) televised match from the inaugural season of the W-League. On the basis of their content similarity, scene conclusion and where they occur within each protagonist’s narrative arc, the selected excerpts examine a very common trope in football fiction: the scoring of an important or significant goal as a device to underline each protagonists level of skill. The excerpts also highlight a period of played football from the respective narrator’s point of view and illustrate their ideological assumptions. The sentences are straightforward, grammatically complete and presented in first-person present tense, which is, as noted above, rare in adult but not in young adult football fiction. Frequent use of related terminology and vernacular, such as ‘cross’, ‘ball’, ‘corner flag’ and ’18yard box’ locate each narrator on a pitch during an important match. In the moments covered in the excerpt from Lucy Zeezou’s Goal, Lucy is playing a trial match for the local team, the Dunbar Lions. She scores her second goal with a scissor, or overhead, kick. A highly skilful way to score denotes high levels of confidence in her own abilities and her accomplishment and expertise as a footballer. The frequent use of clichés in the writing (much higher than in the extract from the Davies novel) would be considered normal in young adult football fiction. Harry made a break down the right-hand side and sent a spectacular cross in. I made my run among a swarm of defenders, with Max breathing down my neck, desperate to reach the ball first. The 18-yard box was a battleground; there was nudging, elbowing and fierce fighting for position as we all hustled for the ball. The only way I could win the contest was to come up with the unexpected, Nonno Dino always taught me to act instinctively, moving like a panther ready to pounce on its prey. Somehow I managed to break free from the pack, and with my back to the goal I leapt into the air and scissor-kicked the ball towards the goal. It catapulted past my rivals. Some of the boys started clapping as I landed on my backside with a thud. I wasn’t sure if they were celebrating a goal or my fall. I looked up to see the

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ball nestled in the back corner of the net . . . instead of congratulations, an eerie silence filtered through the air. (Deep-Jones 2008, 53)5 The ‘silence’ is due to Lucy losing her wig and hat in the fall. Lucy’s quick recovery following her ‘break from the pack’ demonstrates physical awareness, agility and strength. The goal and the moments immediately afterwards are to key to the novel’s narrative arc and her character’s development. The revelations regarding gender are confronted directly by her close male friend and teammate Harry, who is angry and upset at her deception – and arguably at being forced to reflect on his own prejudices about female footballers. His reaction is the most vehement, and his new-found distrust, while the most deeply felt, is echoed by some of their teammates. Other players, however, are excited by Lucy’s skills irrespective of her gender – Lucy’s skills and goal-scoring abilities are qualification enough for her to join the team (Deep-Jones 2008, 57). In presenting a spectrum of responses and attitude, Deep-Jones provokes questions of participation, empowerment, equality and equal opportunities. Through Lucy’s willingness to act, perform and participate, even in disguise, the pitch has become a site for the negotiation of gender identity (Cauldwell 2011; Kane 1998; Hargreaves 1994). An environment usually shaped by broader cultural forces becomes a place to freely demonstrate skills, to exploit an opportunity to exercise abilities otherwise denied her (Francombe-Webb and Palmer 2018, 181; Toffoletti et al. 2018, 5). This open embodiment of a more physically aggressive, competitive femininity challenges socio-historical and socio-cultural perspectives on gender norms and women’s involvement in sport (Mansfield et al. 2018).6 The more extensive focus on on-field play in young adult football novels aimed at female readers evinces a sense of empowerment, self-knowledge and the gender-specific pleasure of achieving within a sport or discipline culturally coded as masculine. The scoring of her second spectacular goal marks Lucy’s success in the test implicit in the trial match and her progression from fashion model – a role in which the female body is displayed for the gaze of others and a vehicle for the sale of commodities – and football hobbyist to the realisation of and self-expression as a player. The recourse to clichéd metaphors and the lack of specific detail in Lucy Zeezou’s Goal – ‘somehow I managed to break free’ – suggest that despite the theme of Lucy achieving her ‘goal’ of a more individually embodied identity, the author may not have been able to convey the experience effectively. The common ‘sport as war’ metaphor, with phrases and words such as ‘contest’, ‘battleground’ and ‘fierce fighting’, is used to reinforce tension and conflict in the competitive environment of a football match. The animalistic simile, ‘like a panther ready to pounce on its prey’, highlights Lucy’s predatory nature as a striker. The preceding phrase, ‘breathing down my neck’, suggests close pursuit, and the irritation and discomfort of being surrounded is depicted as a ‘swarm of defenders’. The descriptions are not innovative or original and highlight limited football register, but they do align closely with Lucy’s rhetorical narration. The author’s experience

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as a television commentator suggests this is not an issue of expertise but rather a choice. Non-specific, positional statements such as ‘we all hustled for the ball’ suggest the characters are playing football, but it is football that may not require knowledge of the game’s inner workings. In terms of the prominent role of the male character Max, the author’s aim appears to be inclusion, to broaden the novel’s potential readership across the gender spectrum and beyond the football community to ensure uninitiated, non-football fans can follow proceedings. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal offers a gendered reimagining of football for a young reader. The detail of the fashion modelling is presented as unwanted by Lucy but not incompatible with her playing football. In the sequel, Lucy’s Glamour Game (Deep-Jones 2010), the fashion and modelling feature more, but Lucy’s place on the football pitch and the catwalk co-exist. While this convergence of seemingly disparate talents and ‘worlds’ presents Lucy with challenges, their combination and her successes could also be seen as a feminist construction of the protagonist exercising choice and flexibility without the requirement of progressing from one to the other. Lucy can ‘have it all’, but the challenges of sport in her story operate as metaphors for the challenges of becoming a young adult. The football can be seen to represent a space for Lucy to be discovered and to discover her own ‘true’ identity and, by extension, enables addition of the qualification ‘if she wants it’. Striker (1992) is rare in adult football fiction where few novels focus on a player and their career. It is expected that, despite Joe being a professional player, there is less played football in the text and what there is has less impact on the narrative in terms of its contribution to the drama or tensions. Notably, the novel highlights Joe’s fourth – not first – appearance for England, where he incurs a nasty injury (Davies 1992, 157–159), to signal his progress for the national side – professional football’s pinnacle. His club debut (1992, 115) and his securing a first-team place (1992, 126) are also unpacked in a degree of detail. The author selected these three significant moments in a successful professional player’s career not to demonstrate skill or ability, which are to be assumed, but to show who Joe is as a character. Prestige, the nobility in being a role model and trophies are not of concern. Joe’s carefree attitude informs the delivery and meets with congruent levels of expectation concerning the content of any player’s (fictionalised) autobiography. As a form of football writing, it was designed to titillate readers with behind-the-dressingroom-door perspectives on iconic players and clubs. Joe is unwittingly graceless with regard to what should be momentous achievements, such as inspirational success in top-flight football and achieving fame and riches and success in Italy, where British players have previously failed to make an impression (1992, 221). The selected excerpt occurs with ten minutes remaining in a nil-nil draw in a match that Joe enters as a substitute. Making his debut for the club’s first team, Joe is surprised at having been put in an attacking position and at finding himself with the ball at his feet. It was seven minutes before I got the ball in any space, and it came from a bad clearance, not a pass. I made towards the corner flag, stopped and put

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a foot on the ball, while the full back stood off, waiting for me to commit myself. I knew I should put in a quick cross, as instructed, but that was what their defence expected. Out of the corner of my eye I could see them all lined up, waiting. I pretended to cross, but instead I curled my foot round the ball and dashed past the full back, with the ball rolling towards the byline, about to go harmlessly for a goal kick. I got it just on the line, and with my left foot I sent it high into the goalmouth. I ended on my arse, sliding against the advertising boards. It was a hopeful ball not meant for anyone in particular, but it landed just under the bar. (Davies 1992, 116)7 This tightly written scene includes frequent ‘coded’ football references, suggesting only substantial knowledge of the game will ensure a full understanding and engagement. The author is unapologetic for this narrowing of readership. The book is an exercise in humour for football fans. The prevalence of football-specific registers in this excerpt and across Davies’ novel, including ‘defence expected’, ‘pretended to cross’ and ‘harmlessly for a goal kick’, firmly place the text in the football world. The phrases would require further explanation for the uninitiated. ‘Landed under the bar’ indicates the narrow margin by which a goal was scored. There is approximately eight feet below the (cross)bar in which to ‘land’, but a matter of inches higher, the width of the bar, and Joe would have missed the goal. ‘The full back stood off, waiting for me to commit myself’ might be understood by a reader with no knowledge of football, but it is unlikely. ‘The full back’, a defensive player of the opposition’s team, ‘stood off, waiting’, to give the protagonist space ‘for me to commit myself’, to choose which direction would be better if he is to tackle Joe. While these expressions suggest the protagonist’s deep knowledge of the game, a necessity for authenticity where he is a professional, it also assumes the reader’s knowledge matches it. ‘Pretending to cross’ – pass the ball at head height into an attacking area near the goal with the expectation that one of his teammates will use his head to strike the ball into the net – ‘standing on the ball’ during a moment of pressure, seizing the opportunity to ‘dash past’ his opponent after the misdirection, making the effort to carry on where the cause looks lost with ‘the ball rolling towards the byline’ are all actions designed to signify great confidence. A willingness to risk, and embrace, failure affirms Joe’s level of selfbelief. The objective of the description is also to highlight luck, while showing the reader Joe’s ability to control the ball, the game and even the universal forces governing his destiny. Significantly, Joe makes no use of metaphor. It would not be credible in terms of the character’s voice for him to do so. Davies’ narrator is a character with few and very basic needs; he’s only really interested in football, sex and money. The language used to voice his story reflects this simplistic triumvirate. Football is also Joe’s formal employment. His descriptions and observations reflect his lived experience immersed in the game as an everyday activity over a number of years, so a realistic level of cynicism sets in. Joe speaks through actions. The goal, the

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first of many in subsequent matches, secures Joe’s place in the club’s first team, which provides a platform for his elevation in standing and his eventual selection for the national team. As a moment of significance, the goal shows Joe to be a man with purpose and a winning attitude, a man in possession of the prodigious talent and the bravado of an elite footballer – a technicoloured, swaggering icon of sporting masculinity. Through this characterisation of Joe, Davies speaks of and to the appeal of this type of player to the common male fan. Attendance demographics and participation were changing dramatically in 1992, but most football fans were men, most players were men, the game was defined and governed by men. For the author, there was little need to outwardly assert the player’s position and levels of privilege on the landscape of the game within the text. Its target audience may have been affected by the transformations in football’s consumption and its new-found position on the cultural landscape, but beer-swigging, song-chanting, replica-shirt-wearing, season-ticket-holding stereotypes persist (A. King 1997, 329; see also Van Sterkenburg and Spaaij 2015; Spaaij 2008; Lilleaas 2007; Free and Hughson 2003). The author parodies the football world from the player’s perspective, but the commentary is on the game as a whole. The novel’s narrative is built around Joe’s strengths, borne of confidence earned through footballing prowess. The character’s frailties, the stereotypical lack of maturity, low levels of respect for women and high tolerance for the consumption of alcohol are not dwelt on. Rather they are as depicted as behaviours that parallel the successful football career, even arguably portrayed as fringe benefits. The adoption of a highly informed and precise football register authentically reflects that of a professional footballer and ensures readership is narrowed to the only other group of men who understand it: football fans. This is the implicit acknowledgement in the writing, and what we see in the text is essential to delivering the credibly memetic, classic tabloid, hagiographic, professional player’s autobiography. If the reader is to recognise accuracy in the parody, the novel must reflect its form. The line-level sentence structure, length and rhythm highlight both authors’ divergent stylistic approaches to the vocal strategies. The detail of the scissor kick in Lucy Zeezou’s Goal highlights a degree of grace, artistry and individuality. Lucy is symbolised in the action. As a female footballer, she is capable of embracing femininity and executing and enduring the physical aspects of the game. As a football action, the scissor kick also represents a style of football far removed from the brutish, destructive tackles more typically associated with the uncompromising masculinity on display in Striker. Its comparison with the unencumbered description of Joe’s goal illustrates contrasting approaches to, and the points of differentiation between, young adult and adult football novels. Lucy is a contemporary female footballer written by a female TV football commentator. The laddish 1990s Joe was penned by a middle-aged male football writer. The actions outlined in the excerpts and their significance in the context of their ‘implied’ readership bring their characters’ maturational development into focus. The ways in which the characters and the novels they feature in speak to

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themes of coordination and control over one’s own body, negotiation of multiple social on- and off-pitch relationships and gender politics are all worthy of further consideration.

Conclusion Adult and young adult football narratives are inherently related through their concern for the game, and yet even as they are closely connected, they exhibit fundamental points of departure in their presentation. This sense of alterity in the presentation of novel-length narratives depending on readership is, of course, to be expected. Similarities and divergences will occur between young adult fiction and adult fiction in any genre. However, as the border between the two becomes increasingly blurred, football fiction proffers an exemplar of a genre where the approach of novels aimed at the readerships in question will require tangible and markedly varied approaches, even in older young adult fiction age range where we would ordinarily see the blur removed. This observation requires a great deal more research and was not the aim of the chapter, but it is noted where it exemplifies what is possible when two seemingly disparate approaches to literary analysis are brought together. The hybridised approach of working from a distant to a close reading, one that has been informed by the identification of generic conventions, has enabled the mapping of abstract observations that have been explored at more depth in individual closely read texts. The maps are interpretive, but they are able to reflect matters of significance that would benefit from further exploration. Their use here informs and is informed by the close reading textual analysis of two individual football novels. This approach, drawing the distant and the close into combination, has been effective in far larger studies. This example highlights a relatively ‘machine-free’, ‘book-friendly’ approach to their combination. Their concerted use has addressed a number of the contended issues around the practicalities of distant reading and its remove from the book, while simultaneously providing evidence that the models of abstraction can be employed to inform close reading literary analysis and research. When we layer the observations made from the diagrams with knowledge of identified generic conventions, discussed in the previous chapter, we see these divergences in lucid detail at a textual level. The protagonist in a young adult fiction is likely to be a player and is not as yet as likely to be female, but it would appear the production of football fiction is moving to close this gap. Even in instances where the adult male protagonist is a player, the young adult player will spend more page time on the pitch than their adult counterpart. The adult football novel is far more likely to be delivered from a removed perspective. Whether it is from the sideline, the dugout, a seat in the stand, or an armchair in front of a television, the game will be described by a watcher as opposed to a participant on the turf. That spectator is also far more likely to be male. We can say that the age of the intended readership of a football novel has a demonstrable impact

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on the content, structure and presentation of the text. It will also very likely affect the character’s role, narrative point of view and the level of and quantity of football to be included in a given text. The positioning of the pitch in the narrative and the gender of the protagonist will also have a substantive impact on the employment of football fiction’s identifiable conventions. These requirements and characteristics appear to be specific and directly related to the genre of football fiction. A constant of the genre is that the football novel has and will continue to reflect changes in the game. The increase in young adult female fiction reflects the growth in number of young women playing the game. The novels portray something far less common in the actual game, the freedom and security afforded the young female footballer (Francombe-Webb and Palmer 2018). The levelplaying field remains an ideal. New football fictions continue to be produced and discovered. The field still grows. The game continues to change. We can see that changes in the football novel’s form may be also demonstrative of changes in the game, particularly where the novels highlight growth and development in young adult female football novels. If that is the case, it also demonstrates the football novel’s capacity to do more than simply tell a story.

Notes 1 The determination of one clear definition of young adult fiction – at least one to withstand the rigours of any reasonable level of scrutiny – is problematic, particularly where adolescence once formerly ended at age 18 has been extended. ‘Adultescents’, ‘twixters’, and/or ‘kidults’ – young people who delay adulthood, stay with their parents and put off marriage and families (Noxon 2006) – have stretched the definitions of young adulthood and inadvertently inspired publishers to ‘create’ and deliver ‘crossover’ and new-adult novels. Nimon and Foster see young adult fiction as literature that reflects the experience of being young, which may well be read with pleasure by adolescents (2009, 4). Bucher and Hinton suggested the form is determined by what young adults choose to read but could just as easily be determined by a publisher (2010, 6). 2 Notable works that followed The Outsiders (Hinton 1967) include: Robert Lipstye’s The Contender (1967); Ann Head’s Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones (1967); Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (1968); Where the Lilies Bloom (V and B Cleaver 1969), Go Ask Alice (edited by Sparks 1971). 3 See Joan F. Kaywell’s survey from the Conference on English Education Commission on the Study and Teaching of Young Adult Literature, which discovered a large number of overlapping definitions including: ‘young adults, ages 11–21’; ‘adolescents who are 12–18 in grades 6–12’; ‘kids . . . 10–21, grades 4 – college’ and ‘people from the ages of 12 to the early 20s’ (2001, 325). The Newbery Award for Children’s literature posits 14 years as its ceiling. World-renowned young adult prizes the Michael L. Printz Awards are based on work produced for 12–18s. As do Knickerbocker et al. (2017, 4). Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism surveys these and a number of other parameters and argues for their elongation, stretching them to at least 25 years, if not more (Cart 2010, 74). ‘New adult’ is typically considered a subcategory of adult literature rather than young adult literature. Popular titles include The Magicians (Grossman 2009), A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas 2015), Beautiful Disaster (McGuire 2012) and Fangirl (Rowell 2013).

138 Two halves 4 Created by Wayne Booth (1961) ‘the implied reader’ is the designated name for the imagined recipient the author had in mind during the work’s creation. As the theoretical basis for Seymour Chatman’s narrative structure, narrative and narrative transactions are understood as communicative acts between those sending and those receiving (Keen 2015, 33). 5 Lucy Zeezou’s Goal by Liz Deep-Jones.Text Copyright © Liz Deep-Jones, 2008. First Published by Random House Australia. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd. 6 The Handbook for Feminism, Sport and Physical Education (2018), edited by Louise Mansfield, Jayne Cauldwell, Belinda Wheaton and Beccy Watson, offers a most comprehensive collection on topics related to feminism and sport. See also: Jennifer Hargreaves’ Sporting Females (1994) on social change for women in sport and their histories; Kate Woodward’s Embodied Sporting Practices on the construction and portrayal of sporting identities and insight into the ongoing debate on gender and difference or alterity (2009); Pirkko Markula-Dennison’s edited collection Feminist Sport Studies (2005), an erudite tribute to Finnish feminist sport studies pioneer Arja Laitinen; and MarkulaDennison and Richard Pringle’s work on the social practice of sport and exercise in Foucault, Sport and Exercise (2007). 7 Striker by Hunter Davies. Text Copyright © Hunter Davies, 1992. Striker, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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140 Two halves Grossman, Lev. 2009. The Magicians. New York: Penguin. Gruner, Elisabeth. 2019. Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hale, Nick. 2010. Sudden Death (Striker 1). London: Egmont Press. Hargreaves, Jennifer. 1994. Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women’s Sport. London: Routledge. Head, Ann. 1967. Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones. New York: Putnam. Henderson, Don. 2009. Macbeth, You Idiot! Sydney: Penguin. Hinton, Susan Eloise. 1967. The Outsiders. New York: Viking. Hintz, Carrie and Eric Tribunella. 2013. Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction. London: St Martin’s. Holland, Dominic. 2004. The Ripple Effect. Durham: Flame Press. Hornby, Nick. 1992. Fever Pitch. London: Gollancz. James, Gary and Mark Brown. 2002. Atkinson for England. London: Empire. Johnson, Mitch. 2017. Kick. London: Usbourne. Kane, Mary Jo. 1998. ‘Fictional Denials of Female Empowerment: A Feminist Analysis of Young Adult Sports Fiction.’ Sociology of Sport Journal 15 (3): 231–262. Kay, Steven. 2014. The Evergreen in Red and White. 1889 Books [online]. Kaywell, Joan. 2001. ‘Preparing Teachers to Teach Young Adult Literature.’ English Education 33 (4): 323–327. Keen, Suzanne. 2015. Narrative Form: Revised and Expanded. Second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Keneally, Miranda. 2016. Defending Taylor. New York: Sourcebooks. Kerr, Philip. 2014. January Window. London: Head of Zeus. King, Anthony. 1997. ‘The Lads: Masculinity and the New Consumption of Football.’ Sociology 31 (2): 329–346. doi: 10.1177/0038038597031002008. King, Donna. 2007. Kick Off. London: Kingfisher. King, John. 1996. The Football Factory. London: Vintage. Kitchener, Caroline. 2017. ‘Why So Many Adults Love Young-Adult Literature: Over Half of Today’s YA Readers Are Over the Age of 18.’ The Atlantic www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2017/12/why-so-many-adults-are-love-young-adult-literature/547334. Knickerbocker, Joan L., Marth A. Brueggeman and James A. Rycik. 2017. Literature for Young Adults: Books (and More) for Contemporary Readers. New York: Routledge. Kummerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 1999. ‘Crosswriting as a Criterion for Canonicity: The Case of Erich Kastner.’ In Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, edited by Sandra. L. Beckett, 13–30. New York: Garland. Lilleaas, Ulla-Britt. 2007. ‘Masculinities, Sport, and Emotions.’ Men and Masculinities 10 (1): 39–53. doi: 10.1177/1097184X07299329. Lipstye, Robert. 1967. The Contender. New York: Harper and Row. Maas, Sarah J. 2015. A Court of Thorns and Roses. London: Bloomsbury. Mansbach, Adam. 2011. Go the Fuck to Sleep. New York: Akashic. Mansfield, Louise, Jayne Cauldwell, Belinda Wheaton and Beccy Watson, eds. 2018. The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Markula, Pirkko, ed. 2005. Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Experiences of Joy and Pain. New York: SUNY Press. Markula-Denison, Pirkko and Richard Pringle. 2007. Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self. New York: Routledge.

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Mauvignier, Laurent. 2008. In the Crowd, translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Faber & Faber. McGowan, Lee and Greg Downes. 2018. ‘The Challenges Remain: A “New” View of Old Perspectives on the History of Women’s Football in Australia.’ Social Alternatives 37 (2): 62–70. McGuire, Jamie. 2012. Beautiful Disaster. New York: Simon & Schuster. McIntosh, Iain. 2014. Johnny Cook: The Impossible Job. London: Blizzard. Montagna-Wallace, Neil and Mark Schwarzer. 2010. Megs and the Wonder Strike (5). Melbourne: Bounce Books. Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez. 2001. Offside. London: Serpent’s Tail. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ New Left Review 2 (1): 54–68. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps and Trees. London: Verso. Morgan, Alex. 2019. The Kicks: Switching Goals. New York: Simon & Schuster. Musgrave, Megan. 2016. Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Literature: Imaginary Activism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-58173-0. Nilsen, Alice and Kenneth Donelson. 2009. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. Boston: Pearson. Nimon, Maureen and John Foster. 1997. The Adolescent Novel: Australian Perspectives. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Charles Sturt University. Nodelman, Perry. 2017. Alternating Narratives in Fiction for Young Readers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Noxon, Christopher. 2006. Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup. New York: Crown. Palmer, Tom. 2008. Foul Play (1). London: Puffin. Palmer, Tom. 2016. Over the Line. Edinburgh: Barrington Stoke. Palmer, Tom. 2019. Roy of the Rovers: Scouted (1). London: Rebellion. Peace, David. 2006. The Damned Utd. London: Faber & Faber. Peace, David. 2013. Red or Dead. London: Faber & Faber. Peet, Mal. 2008. Exposure. London: Walker. Phillips, Barry. 2014. The Tartan Special One. Dundee: Teckle. Pielichaty, Helena. 2018, c2009. Can’t I Just Kick It? London: Walker. Pratchett, Terry. 2010, c2009. Unseen Academicals. London: Corgi. Printz Award. 2012. American Library Association. 27 February. www.ala.org/yalsa/printz-award. Raisin, Ross. 2017. TheNatural. London: Jonathon Cape. Reynolds, Kimberley, ed. 2019. International Research in Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rhodes, Dan. 2014. Fan. London: Arcadia. Rowell, Rainbow. 2013. Fangirl. New York: St Martin’s. Rowling, Joanne K. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. Sachar, Louis. 1998. Holes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sacheri, Eduardo. 2014, c2011. Papers in the Wind (Papeles en el viento), translated by Mara Faye Lethem. New York: Other Press. Salinger, Jerome David. 1991, c1951. Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown. Scutter, Heather. 1999. Displaced Fictions: Contemporary Australian Fiction for Teenagers and Young Adults. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Shen, Dan. 2005. ‘What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other.’ In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, 136–149. Oxford: Blackwell.

142 Two halves Snell, Heather, ed. 2019. Jeunesse, Young People, Texts, Cultures. Winnipeg: Hignell. Spaaij, Ramón. 2008. ‘Men Like Us, Boys Like Them: Violence, Masculinity, and Collective Identity in Football Hooliganism.’ Journal of Sport and Social Issues 32 (4): 369–392. doi: 10.1177/0193723508324082. Sparks, Beatrice. 2006, c1971. Go Ask Alice. New York: Simon Pulse. Spears, Kate. 2016. Breakaway. New York: St Martin’s. Star, Nancy. 2008. Carpool Diem. New York: Hachette. Stavrum, Arild. 2014. Exposed at the Back, translated by Guy Puzey. Glasgow: Freight. Stephens, John. 2010. ‘Impartiality and Attachment: Ethics and Ecopoesis in Children’s Narrative Texts.’ International Research in Children’s Literature 3 (2): 205–216. Taylor, David John. 1997. ‘“Rally Round You Havens!”: Soccer and the Literary Imagination.’ In Perfect Pitch 1) Home Ground, edited by Simon Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Tigelaar, Liz. 2007. Pretty Tough. New York: Razorbill. Toffoletti Kim, Jessica Francombe-Webb and Holly Thorpe. 2018. ‘Femininities, Sport and Physical Culture in Postfeminist, Neoliberal Times.’ In New Sporting Femininities: New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, edited by Kim Toffoletti, Jessica Francombe-Webb and Holly Thorpe. 1–19. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Sterkenburg, Jacco and Ramón Spaaij. 2015. ‘Mediated Football: Representations and Audience Receptions of Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Nation.’ Soccer & Society 16 (5–6): 593–603. doi: 10.1080/14660970.2014.963317. Wall, Barbara. 1991. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Walliams, David. 2009. The Boy in the Dress. London: HarperCollins. Welsh, Irvine. 1993. Trainspotting. London: Secker & Warburg. Welsh, Irvine. 2018. Dead Man’s Trousers. London: Penguin. Williams, Michael. 2013. Now is the Time for Running. London: Little & Brown. Woodward, Kate. 2009. Embodied Sporting Practices: Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yelchin, Eugene. 2014. Arcady’s Goal. New York: Henry Holt. Zapata, Mariana. 2015. Kulti. Amazon [online]. Zindel, Paul. 2018, c1968. The Pigman. New York: Harper Collins. Zucker, Jonny. 2010. Striker Boy. London: Frances Lincoln.

‘Play the whistle!’ A conclusion of sorts

The football novel began modestly, didactically, for schoolboys to read of heroes and heroic teams. The game appeared in novels before the modern dimensions of the pitch were settled. A frivolous activity to be discouraged on one hand (Riddell 1884), a healthy means of teaching young men moral standards on the other (Charles 1878). Its earliest mode of storytelling, its contradictory nature and its ability to move with the game, remain constant. The schoolboy story is more inclusive now. Less gender bias, more culturally and ably diverse. There has been a graceful intrusion of famous professional footballers, female and male, to put their names to series. To their credit, some of have even acknowledged their ghostwriters. These stories aimed at young male readers continue to encourage reading and positive values. Those aimed at young female readers are much more encouraging about playing football. This steady unbroken model continues to inform and influence the versions of these stories aimed at older readers. While they provide the formulaic heartbeat of football’s popular fiction, they have branched and aligned with Alexis Tadié’s bifurcation – the football hero and the story of the spectator (2012, 1777). Alongside its traditions, the forces of non-football fiction, the ever-shifting complexion of football culture ceaselessly creates space for the new football novel, for the discovery of the old and the celebration of what we know. Connected through their shared and divergent perspectives on the game, each work is an enactment of its communal football identity, part of an array that spans history, readerships and international boundaries. In exploring the genre’s origins and current form examining nascent futures, this book and the research that informs it have made a significant contribution to the reconciliation of our knowledge around the form. The bathetic, populist and predictable stand more comfortably with the bold, poetic and serious, the fragile, colourful and ingenious. The rise of women’s football fiction and growth in young adult fiction, featuring female players, reflect changes within the game and will lead to increased appearances of professional female players in football stories. This is just one example of how a football story does more than simply tell a story. There are some who would have you believe little has changed, who distil the genre into a literary handful of well-noted, easily recognised works. We now know

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football’s fiction will only stop evolving when the sport does. Bound to context, the football novel will continue to provide the platform for cultural meaning and a defining focus of attention, a means to understand obsession with the game and a salve for the arguments in the complex relationships enmeshed in football, family, politics and individual and national identity. They are most fascinating as a measure of how football fans and football writers locate their own and their community’s place in the world. They are also terrible and entertaining and challenging and thought-provoking. Alongside the functionalism and appeal, and perhaps because of it, this text represents some long-awaited recognition of the football novel as a neglected form. Advocacy is a fringe benefit, not its purpose. Recovering the form’s longevity and traditions should ease future research; the identification of its conventions, characteristics and divisions within the genre should ease negotiation and navigation of its increasing density and diversity. The steps from schoolboy story to cheerful pulp with its kiss of villainy (Seddon 1999, 487) is nowhere near as dramatic as the stories within them. The 1920s and 1930s are marked by their abundance of repetition and incremental changes from short novel to short novel just barely distinguishable from each other, but we did get Sydney Horler, football fiction’s most prolific writer, and the quintessential romantic football hero, Richard Marr, in his first football novel (Goal! 1920). We got McPhee in 1923, the wily Scottish manager, who offered a prescient vision of Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein. He then added the talented Tiger Standish to his repertoire. At the same time, literary football writing had emerged in Brazil (Coelho Neto 1924), Russia (Olesha 1927) and, of course, England (Bennett 1910; Wodehouse 1910; Priestley 1929; Lawrence 1934). By the late 1940s, detectives were chasing crooks through football stadiums, and organised criminals cast floodlit shadows and a splash of blood on the turf. Within a decade, football, literature and the working-class experience were completely entangled. The first real watershed moment in the genre’s history is Robin Jenkins’ novel The Thistle and the Grail (1954) – a masterpiece, one that preceded the youthful anger of David Storey and pegged down the goalposts for Sam Hanna Bell (1961), Brian Glanville (1963), Barry Hines (1966, 1968), Gordon Williams (1968) and others. In South America, Mario Vargas Llosa (1967) was planting a corner flag. The sweep of enthusiasm in the 1990s should be seen as recognition for the form, rather than its coming of age. Fever Pitch (1992) is undoubtedly a phenomenon. No single book can claim to have had the same impact. It cleared the lines, played the ball into space for peers and imitators to chase and brought significant change to football writing and football fiction, as discussed in Chapter Two. It may also have led us to I Am Zlatan (2013), which is either the moment of singularity between football fiction and non-fiction or a real-life novel-length rendition of the fake radio coverage in Esse est Percipi (‘To exist is to be seen’) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (1998, c1969). Since Nick Hornby’s debut, hooligan fiction has peaked twice, crime-related football novels have become more sophisticated and the genre has been pulled into serious relationships with other genres, romantic or otherwise. Digital publishing and collection practices provide

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the capacity to search for and hold digital re-publications of the old and undiscovered and, through their limitless, frictionless practices, allowed new writers, operating outside of traditional models, to work around them, to extend the field and build their own football fiction communities. Chapter Three demonstrates the construction of the longitudinal view of the football novel; it develops a clear sense of its scope and scale and permits consideration of the corpus as a whole. Application of a hybrid approach across Chapters Three, Four and Five moves the research from this broad level picture to its focus on the inner workings of two works within a fully realised context. The tools for literary analysis, the graphs and maps, the models used to abstract data are interpretive (Moretti 2005). The models document the emergence and existence of identifiable patterns and long-range trends. They reflect and plot relationships between individual and assemblies of texts, highlight moments, locations and times that raise questions, that warrant further exploration. Their use informs and is informed by the close reading textual analysis of two individual football novels. Drawing the distant and the close into a combined approach has been effective in far larger studies. Adoption and adaptation of the method here facilitates linking the detailed perspective to the wider football fiction context, connecting key authors, texts, tropes and devices. Overlaying these discoveries with the theory related to genre studies has allowed expansion of our knowledge of the football novel beyond the literary, achieving a simultaneous broadening and deepening of our comprehension of the form. Constants remain, commonalities exist and a text can shift from one to division into another or belong to more of one at any given time. These attributes are apparent in more established genres. This open responsiveness to the pull and push of additions and generic evolution is indicative of more established genres, too. Recognition of similarities amid the diversity expedites practical classification. Recognisable markers, anchors for identification, text-level tensions and divergences and thematic ties are revealed. This framing of the body of works in generic terms has led to richer understanding. New knowledge of the genre’s nature and behaviours has been won. The presence of a pitch and the protagonist’s relationship to football are threaded to the novel’s structure, its level of engagement with the game and the narrative situation, the voice of the narrative and characters within it. Football fiction’s ensemble cast changes with the times and the game’s culture. In the face of genre theory’s arguments against static forms, the identification of conventions and constraints do seem contrived. However, categorisation and organisation have established the platform for the creation of new knowledge of the ‘rules’ governing football’s fiction, the shapes taken, the shifts made, the old, new and enduring qualities. The comparative close reading and textual analysis carried out in Chapter Five denotes the same universal themes, football’s strength as a leveller, as a means of palliative emancipation and a natural force for unification appear in both texts, but their use of voice and manipulation of techniques of narration is patently different. The books have little other similarity beyond their reliance on and copious references to football or football culture.

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Football novels have been shown here to do much more than tell a story. They reflect the game and its seemingly ever-evolving culture. They offer space to critically examine football’s place in the world at deeper social levels and are used by their authors to challenge dominant cultural or societal narratives, including the changing ideological struggles faced by fans as a result of changes in the game (Piskurek 2018, 9). They bring life in resplendent variety and evoke discernment in our understanding of the game that other traditional forms of football writing often cannot. They give voice to migrants (Mavroudis 2013, 485); reflect issues such as class, gender and nationalism (Tadié 2012, 1776); and offer valuable perspective on the human condition (Bairner 2000, 30). Academics and historians make use of their realist or mimetic narratives to glean insight and better understand historical social contexts and specific events. For the reader, the football novel can capture the shortlived football moment, a weighted pass, a resonant left-foot postage stamp, a local team crisis and the imagined football lives that surround it. In doing so, it offers a return to pedestrian relativity, perspective on a level playing field and brings lesser aspects of the game to the fore. While its real-life counterpart offers compelling, and often incredulous, stories (Nolan 2010, 5), the football novel offers a credible departure, an opportunity to digest and glean insight and grasp meaning in the game. In a study that includes over 500 books, including 80 works that would qualify as literary fiction (an arguably high comparative proportion), we should reconsider our collective position on the football novel. Yes, in the face of non-fiction football writing, it seems marginal, but it is not limited – rather than focus on the middle- to high-brow sophistication of ‘post-Hornby’ football elitism, rather than continue to ask, as Seddon (1999) and others have, why football has not emerged as a common subject for fiction or where all the football novels are, we should consider why the work that does exist is so often dismissed. Would we dismiss the vast tranches of romance, crime, or horror fiction with the same ease? Or because they were not romantic or criminal or terrifying enough? In truth, we might, but those genres have the same longevity in their traditions, they carry the sense of their form, the same constants in their make-up, and innovation pushing them into new territories, but they are rarely subjected to the same level of scrutiny. Are we holding our football stories to a different or higher standard? Can we afford to ignore the traditions, the initiation of conventions, the growing diversity and those patterns that influence creative writing concerned with the game? Football’s fiction, literary or otherwise, presents a substantial body of work, one that warrants consideration as such, one that represents a great source of knowledge, which should be recognised for its contribution to the culture of the game. The phrase ‘Play the whistle!’ describes a commonly used instruction given to a hesitant player who might otherwise stop as a result of an action that may result in an issue that requires the referee’s intervention. In a competitive sport, the referee may demand that the action be halted. Such instances include the ball going over the line or a player being heavily tackled or distracted by an opposing player’s call of injustice. The primary actor should only stop if instructed to do so. ‘Play the whistle!’ is a shorthand instruction for, ‘You must continue to play until,

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and only when, the whistle definitively denotes that you must cease and desist’. This book may be a bound container, but it is as yet incomplete. New football novels continue to be published, re-published and translated; new football novels are waiting to be discovered. Football in Fiction is a substantial beginning. As a piece of research, it will always play the whistle.

References Bairner, Alan. 2000. ‘Football and the Literary Imagination: Sam Hanna Bell’s The Hollow Ball and Robin Jenkins’ A Would-Be Saint.’ Kunnskap om Idrett 4 (4): 30–43. Bennett, Arnold. 1910. The Card. Boston: E. P. Dutton. Borges, Jorge Luis and Adolfo Bioy Casares. 1998, c1969. ‘Esse Est Percipi.’ In Perfect Pitch 4: Dirt, edited by Marcelo Araujo and Simon Kuper, 77–99. London: Headline. Charles, H. Frederick. 1878. The Boys of Highfield, or, the Hero of Chancery House. London: Religious Tract Society. Coelho Neto, Henrique Maximiamo. 1924. Mano, livro da saudade (Mano, a Book of Emotional Longing). Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Empreza Graphica. Glanville, Brian. 1965, c1963. The Rise of Gerry Logan. London: Secker & Warburg. Hanna Bell, Sam. 1961. The Hollow Ball. London: Cassell. Hines, Barry. 1966. The Blinder. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hines, Barry. 1968. A Kestrel for a Knave. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Horler, Sydney. 1920. Goal! A Romance of the English Cup Ties. London: Oldhams. Hornby, Nick. 1992. Fever Pitch. London: Gollancz. Ibrahimović, Zlatan and David Lagercrantz. 2013. I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović. London: Viking. Jenkins, Robin. 2006, c1954. The Thistle and the Grail. Edinburgh: Polygon. Lawrence, David Herbert. 1934. Strike Pay. June Issue. https://classic.esquire.com/article/ 1934/6/1/strike-pay. Mavroudis, Paul. 2013. ‘Against the Run of Play: The Emergence of Australian Soccer Literature.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 30 (5): 484–499. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2013.782856. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps and Trees. London: Verso. Nolan, Michelle. 2010. Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930s Through 1960s. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. Olesha, Yuri. 2004, c1927. Envy, translated by M. Schwartz. New York: New York Review. Piskurek, Cyprian. 2018. Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures: Slum Sport, Slum People? London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8. Priestley, John Boynton. 1962, c1929. The Good Companions. London: Heinemann. Riddell, Charlotte Eliza. 1884. Bright Sunset, the Last Days of a Young Scottish Football Player. London: Religious Tract Society. Seddon, Peter. 1999. Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football. Second edition. Boston Spa: British Library. Tadié, Alexis. 2012. ‘Heroes, Fans and the Nation: Exploring Football in Contemporary Fiction.’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (12): 1774–1790. doi: 10.1080/09523367.2012.714944. Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1967. Los cachorros (The Pups). Barcelona: Lumen. Williams, Gordon. 1968. From Scenes Like These. London: Black and White. Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. 1910. Mike and Psmith. London: Adam and Charles Black.

They think it’s all oeuvre . . . a catalogue of football fiction

This chapter consists of a list of football novels discovered through this study and should be considered alongside previous chapters, which furnish the texts with additional detail. The structure of the list follows the taxonomy illustrated in Figure 3.1 – The historiography of football fiction –and the taxonomy from Chapter Three. In order, they are: mainstream football fiction; young adult male football fiction; speculative and fantasy fiction; crime-related football fiction; hooligan fiction; literary football fiction; women’s football fiction; young adult female football fiction; and digital only and self-published football fiction. The list includes over 500 novels, but it is by no means exhaustive. Every attempt has been made to include as many texts as possible at the time of publication. A number of texts have been missed deliberately. Only a representative sample of the 566 titles in The Football and Sports Library (Amalgamated 1921–1938) and 88 titles in the Aldine Football Novel series (Oldhams 1925–1931) have been listed. In the young adult fiction divisions, there have been some exclusions as a result of repetition and overly formulaic presentation, particularly where a representative sample is deemed sufficient. Samples of works by Rob Childs (over 70 football-related works) and Michael Hardcastle (over 140 football-related works) have been included, for example – a significant number of those excluded are also aimed at younger readers. Series consisting of more than four texts have not been listed in their entirety either. The first text in the series, unless otherwise titled, is designated with a number (1). The final book in the series is designated in the same way with the corresponding number. For example, Alex Morgan’s series has ten entries and is represented like this: Morgan, A., 2013. The Kicks: Saving the Team (1). New York: Simon & Schuster. Morgan, A., 2019. The Kicks: Switching Goals (10). New York: Simon & Schuster. A number of exclusions have also occurred in the final section of the list. Selfpublished novels relating in close or even tangential ways to football have proliferated through digital publishing practices. Aspects of self- and indie

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publishing practices are noted in Chapter Two. A selection from the last 15 to 20 years have been published. They offer varying levels of quality and relationships with football and have been noted at various points in the book where they relate to a particular division. A small number are illustrative of the general nature. Kulti (Zapata 2015) has been translated into 4 languages and has almost 25,000 reviews on platforms such as Good Reads. This is demonstrative of a cogent volume of sales. Few of the texts listed will ever attain similar levels of success. Kerry Katone’s two novels (2007, 2008) feature very little football, but she is famous for embracing the title of WAG and has written about the wives and girlfriends of players, so the texts have been included. Steven Kay’s two works, the novel The Evergreen in Red and White (2014), which highlights the trend toward dramatised biographies, and the collection of short stories Historical Football Stories (2015), bring together early examples of football fiction in short form. Some notes: 1

This list is categorised alphabetically by author’s name. The basic entry layout is: Last or family name, First name. Year. Book title. Location: Publisher;

2

3

4 5

Movie tie-ins or film novelisations are noted. Technically these works are not novels but do meet the criteria of a football novel and have been published as such; A number of untranslated works have been listed, particularly where some insight has been available in academic analysis and reviews. The original or untranslated language is included in the endnotes; Only three of the five Roy of the Rovers novels were published in 2019. Two more scheduled to be published in 2020 have not been included; The comics listed at the start of young adult male football fiction have been collated by year rather than title or author to illustrate the continuation of the form.

Mainstream football fiction 1 Ainsworth, Jim. 1998. Catholicism, Socialism, Football and Beer. Accrington: Hyndburn & Rossendale Trades Union Council. 2 Barclay, James. 1995. The Bigot. Glasgow: Lang Syne. 3 Barclay, James. 1997. Still a Bigot. Glasgow: Lang Syne. 4 Barclay, James. 2005. Always the Bigot. Glasgow: Lang Syne. 5 Barth, L. 1995. Over the Top. London: Minerva. 6 Bateman, Robert. 1958. Young footballer. London: Constable. 7 Bandyopadhyay, Santipriya.11990. Goal. Calcutta: Dey. 8 Bandyopadhyay, Santipriya. 1990. Offside. Calcutta: Dey.

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9 Bandyopadhyay, Santipriya. Ed. 2001. Srra Khelar Golpo. Kolkatta: Bijayan Prakashani. 10 Bhattacharjee, Niman. 1993. Footballar. Calcutta: Dey.2 11 Bleasdale, Alan. 1984. Scully and Mooey. London: Corgi. 12 Bolger, Dermot. 2000. In High Germany. Stillorgan, Ireland: New Island.3 13 Bottom, P.W. 1927. Dan of the Rovers. Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. 14 Bottom, P.W. 1928. The Speed-King Centre. Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. 15 Breen, Paul. 2014. The Charlton Men. London: Union Bridge. 16 Breen, Paul. 2016. Bones of a Season. London: Open Books. 17 Brentnall, Richard. 2004. Pitch Black. Leicester: Matador. 18 Brimson, Dougie. 2000. Billy’s Log. London: Headline. 19 Brimson, Dougie. 2014. Wings of a Sparrow. Kent, England: Caffeine Nights. 20 Buckley, Will. 2005. The Man Who Hated Football. London: Harper Perennial. 21 Casciari, Hernán. 2006. Más respecto, quy soy tu madre (A Little Respect, I’m your Mother) Barcelona: Random House Mondadori.4 22 Cheetham, Simon. 1994. Gladys Protheroe: Football Genius. London: Juma. 23 Cole, Gerard. 1981. Gregory’s Girl. London: Allen.5 24 Crampsey, Robert. 1982. The Manager. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 25 Curtin, Michael. 1981. The Replay. London: Deutsch. 26 Deans, Adrian. 2010. Mr Cleansheets. Melbourne: Vulgar. 27 Davidson, Paul. 2002. Oh Hec! London: Fourth Base. 28 Dillon, Des. 2005. Singing, I’m No a Billy I’m a Tim. Edinburgh: Luath Press. 29 Dillon, Des. 2000. The Return of the Busby Babes. London: Headline. 30 Dougan, Derek. 1974. The Footballer. London: Allison and Busby. 31 Endeacott, Robert. 2002. One Northern Soul. London: Route. 32 Endeacott, Robert. 2003. No More Heroes. London: Route. 33 Endeacott, Robert. 2009. Dirty Leeds. Newcastle: Tonto. 34 Endeacott, Robert. 2010. Disrepute: Revie’s England. Newcastle: Tonto. 35 Endeacott, Robert. 2012. Scandal F.C. Newcastle: Tonto. 36 Endeacott, Robert. 2019. The Gigante. Huddersfield: Ockley. 37 Fearnhead, David Alejandro. 2011. Bailey of the Saints. Scarborough, England: Great Northern. 38 Fry, Beatrice. 1907. A Mother’s Son. London: Methuen. 39 Giller, Norman, and Jimmy. Greaves. 1979. The Final. London: Arthur Barker. 40 Giller, Norman, and Jimmy. Greaves. 1980. The Ball Game. London: Littlehampton. 41 Giller, Norman, and Jimmy. 1981. The Boss. London: Littlehampton. 42 Giller, Norman, and Jimmy. 1981. The Second Half. London: Littlehampton. 43 Gilmour, Pete. 2004. Sexy Football. London: Anova. 44 Goodyear, Robert Arthur Hanson. 1934. The Old Golds: A Romance of Football. London: Lincoln Williams.

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45 Goal, Home. 1928. The Worst Team in the Army. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 46 Goal, Home. 1928. The Club on the Cliff. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 47 Graham, Harold. 1926. Benton’s Great Year. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 48 Graham, Harold. 1928. The Door to Victory. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 49 Grant, Howard. 1928. The Football Suspects. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 50 Gray, Kay. 1926. In the Final. Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. 51 Gray, Kay. 1927. Larrington Crack Shot. Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. 52 Greig, Martin, and Charles McGarry. 2012. The Road to Lisbon. Glasgow: Birlinn. 53 Grist, Merv. 1993. Life at the Tip: Les Bence on the Game. London: Virgin. 54 Holland, Dominic. 2004. The Ripple Effect. Durham: Flame Press. 55 Horler, Sydney. 1920. Goal! A Romance of the English Cup Ties. London: Oldhams. 56 Horler, Sydney. 1922. Life’s a Game. London: Hutchinson. 57 Horler, Sydney. 1922. Legend of the League. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 58 Horler, Sydney. 1923. Love, the Sportsman. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 59 Horler, Sydney. 1923. McPhee: A Football Story. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 60 Horler, Sydney. 1925. The Ball of Fortune. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 61 Horler, Sydney. 1927. The Fellow Hagan! London: Cassell. 62 Horler, Sydney. 1930. A Pro’s Romance. London: Newnes. 63 Horler, Sydney. 1923. McPhee: Prince of Trainers. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 64 Horler, Sydney. 1935. The Great Game. New ed. London: Collins. 65 Horler, Sydney. 1945. The Great Game. New ed. London: Collins. 66 Irwin, Michael. 1985. Striker. London: Deutsch. 67 James, Gary, and Mark Brown. 2002. Atkinson for England. London: Empire. 68 Jamieson, Sandy. 2013, c1997. The Great Escape. Glasgow: Ringwood. 69 Lawson, John, and Hugh Larkin. 2001. Granville Tingate: The Life & Times of a Yorkshire Football. London: Vanguard. 70 Lineker, Gary, and Stan Hey. 1993. All in a Game. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton. 71 McInnes, Mike. 2016. Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer Edinburgh: Nielsen. 72 McIntosh, Iain. 2014. Johnny Cook: The Impossible Job. London: Blizzard. 73 McPherson, T. 1922. Stick It Ginger! London: Oldhams. 74 Merrick, Phil. 1988, A Game of Two Halves. Lewes: Book Guild. 75 Montgomery, Donald. 1989. On Their Way to Lisbon. Greenock, Scotland: Seanachaidh Press.

152

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Catalogue of football fiction

Nandy, Moti. 1973. Striker. Kolkatta: Ananda.6 Nandy, Moti. 1974. Stopper. Kolkatta: Ananda. Nandy, Moti. 1990. Ferari (‘The Lost’). Kolkatta: Ananda. Nandy, Moti. 1992. Dalbalder Aage (‘Before the Change of Club’). Kolkatta: Ananda. Osbourne, Peter. 1976. The Winners. London: Plenhurst. O’Donnell, Stephen. 2012. Paradise Road. Glasgow: Ringwood. O’Donnell, Stephen. 2014. Scotball. Glasgow: Ringwood. Phillips, Barry. 2014. The Tartan Special One. Dundee: Teckle. Plenderleith, Ian. 2001. For Whom the Ball Rolls. London: Orion.7 Pryde, Helen. 1949. McFlannels United. Glasgow: Nelson. Pudney, John, S. 1948. Shuffley Wanderers: An Entertainment. London: Bodley Head. Rhodes, Dan. 2014. Fan. London: Arcadia. Richards, Nick. 2011. Memorabilia. Guildford: Grosvenor House. Roberts, David. 2011. 32 Programmes. London: Bantam. Royle, Nicholas. ed. 2001, c1996. A Book of Two Halves. London: Phoenix.8 Saye, C. 1970. The Footballer. London: New English Library. Searle, Adrian. ed. 2002. The Hope that Kills Us. Glasgow: Freight. Shindler, Colin. 2010. The Worst of friends: Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City. London: Mainstream Publishing. Simons, Eric, N. 1951. The Whistle Blew: A Football Final. London: Werner Laurie. Standish, O. J. 1928. Leader of the League. Aldine Football Novels. London: Oldhams. Stavrum, Arild. 2008. No More Free Kicks. Oslo: Oktober.9 Stein, Mel. 2008. Football Babylon. London: Penant. Taylor, Ernest. 1946. Hamilton of the Ringers: A Romance of Soccer. London: Sporting Handbooks. Thomson, David. 1997. 4–2. London: Bloomsbury. Trueman, John. 2011. Grass Roots. Cambridge: Melrose. White, Jim. 1998. The Diary of Darren Tackle. London: Warner. Williams, Greg. 1999. Football Crazy. London: Fourth Estate. Wilson, Tony. 2010. Making News. Millers Point NSW: London. Worth, Richard. 1926. A Footballer’s Romance. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. Yablonsky, Yabo. 1981. Escape to Victory. London: Severn House.10 Young, F. B. 1921. The Black Diamond. London: Collins.

Young male football fiction 107 1879–1967. The Boys Own Paper. Dundee: DC Thomson. 108 1892–1934. Chums. London: Amalgamated. 109 1902–1927. The Boys Realm of Sport and Adventure. London: Amalgamated.

Catalogue of football fiction

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

153

1907–1933. Hotspur. Dundee: DC Thomson. 1909–1915. The Boys Realm Football Library. London: Amalgamated. 1909–1931. The Lion Library. London: Amalgamated. 1921–1961. Adventure. Dundee: DC Thomson. 1922–1955. The Champion. London: Amalgamated. 1922–1973. The Rover. Dundee: DC Thomson. 1939–1959. The Hotspur. Dundee: DC Thomson: Dundee. 1954–1985. Tiger. London: Fleetway. 1970–1971. Score ‘n’ Roar. London: IPC. 1970–1975. Scorcher. London: IPC. 1971–1973. Book of Football. London: Marshall Cavandish. 1976–1993. Roy of the Rovers. London: Fleetway. 1978–2006. The Football Handbook. London: Marshall Cavandish. 1986–2003. The Football Picture Story Monthly. Dundee: DC Thomson. 1997–2001. Match of the Day. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Abela, Deborah, and Johnny Warren. 2005. Jasper Zammit (soccer legend): The Game of Life. Sydney: Random House. Abela, Deborah, and Johnny Warren. 2006. Jasper Zammit (soccer legend): The Striker. Sydney: Random House. Abela, Deborah, and Johnny Warren. 2007. Jasper Zammit (soccer legend): The Finals. Sydney: Random House. Alexander, Kwane. 2015. Booked. New York: Penguin.11 Ashley, Bernard. 2011. Aftershock. London: Frances Lincoln. Ayarbe, Heidi. 2011. Compulsion, New York: Balzer & Bray. Baker, Jimmy. 1962. The Goalmaker. London: Thomson. Bloor, Edward. 1997. Tangerine. San Diego, California: Harcourt. Blacker, Terence. 2007. The Transfer. London: MacMillan. Breslin, Theresa. 2006. Divided City London: Penguin. Brouwer, Sigmund. 2008. Maverick Mania. Victori, Canada: Orca. Burrage, Edwin Harcourt. 1893. Football in Coketown, or, Who Shall Be Captain? London: Best for Boys. Cahill, Tim. 2016. Tiny Timmy Makes the Grade (1). Sydney: Scholastic. Cahill, Tim. 2019. Tiny Timmy The Next Level (9). Sydney: Scholastic. Charles, H. Frederick. 1878. The Boys of Highfield, or, the Hero of Chancery House. London: Religious Tract Society. Childs, Rob. 1970. Soccer Stars. London: Blackie and Sons. Childs, Rob. 1980. Soccer at Standford. London: Blackie and Sons. Childs, Rob. 1983. Standford on Tour. London: Blackie and Sons. Childs, Rob. 1991. The Big Kick. London: Corgi. Childs, Rob. 1993. The Big Goal. London: Corgi. Childs, Rob. 1995. The Big Game. London: Corgi. Childs, Rob. 1996. Soccer Mad. London: Ulversoft. Childs, Rob. 1997. A Shot in the Dark (Time Rangers). New York: Scholastic. Childs, Rob. 2000. Bolt from the Blue (Time Rangers). New York: Scholastic.

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Catalogue of football fiction

149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

Childs, Rob. 2001. The Big Time. London: Corgi. Childs, Rob. 2011. Zero to Hero. London: Francis Lincoln. Cockburn, Paul. 1996. Foul! (1). London: Virgin. Cockburn, P. 1997. Red Card (8). London: Virgin. Coke, D. 1910. The School Across the Road. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Colbert, J. 2004. The King of Large. Melbourne: Lothian. Coombes, A. 2008. United Here I Come. London: Barrington Stoke. Cope. Kenneth. 1976. Striker. London; BBC Books. Cousins, Dean. 2001. Fouls Friends and Football (Charlie Merrik’s Misfits). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Creasey, John. 1937. The Fighting Footballers. London: Paul. David Beckham Academy: Bossy Boots. 2009. (1). London: Egmont. David Beckham Academy Away from Home. 2011. (7). London: Egmont. Dean Myers, Walter. and R. Workman. 2011. Kick. New York: Harper. Dequier, Bruno. 2017. Louca. Brussels: Europe Comics. Dragomán, György. 2005. A Fehér Király (‘The White King’), translated by Paul Olchváry. London: Doubleday. Dygard, T.J. 1990. Soccer Duel. London: Puffin. Freedman, Dan. 2007. The Kick Off (1). London: Scholastic. Freedman, Dan. 2014. Skills from Brazil (7). London: Scholastic. Gibbons, Alan. 1995. Ganging Up. London: Orion Childrens. Gibbons, Alan. 1998. Julie and Me and Owen Makes Three. London: Orion Childrens. Gibbons, Alan. 1998. Treble Trouble (1). London: Orion Childrens. Gibbons, Alan. 2010 c1998. Final Countdown (10). London: Orion Childrens. Glanville, Brian. 1964. Goalkeepers Are Crazy. London: Longman. Glanville, Brian. 1998 c1971. Goalkeepers Are Different. London: Virgin. Gleitzman, Maurice. 2002. Boy Overboard. Sydney: Penguin. Gleitzman, Maurice. 2014. Extra Time. Sydney: Penguin. Goodyear, Robert Arthur Hanson. 1920. Forge of Foxenby. London: Sampson Low. Goodyear, Robert Arthur Hanson. 1928. Strickland of the Sixth. London: Sampson Low. Greenwood, Arthur. 1961. Soccer Circus. London: P. R. MacMillan. Hale, Nick. 2010. Sudden Death (Striker 1). London: Egmont Press. Hale, Nick. 2010. Close Range (Striker 2). London: Egmont Press. Hale, Nick. 2011. The Edge (Striker 3). London: Egmont Press. Hardcastle, Michael. 1966. Soccer Is Also a Game. London Heinemann. Hardcastle, Michael. 1966. Shoot on sight. London Heinemann. Hardcastle, Michael. 1967. Soccer Is Also a Game. London Heinemann. Hardcastle, Michael. 1973. United! London: Methuen. Hardcastle, Michael. 1974. Free Kick. London Heinemann.

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185

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186 Hardcastle, Michael. 1976. Breakaway (Mark Fox series 1). London: Armada. 187 Hardcastle, Michael. 1982. Attack (Mark Fox series 7). London: Armada. 188 Hardcastle, Michael. 1986. No Defence. London: Deutsch. 189 Hardcastle, Michael. 1986. One Kick. London: Faber & Faber. 190 Hardcastle, Michael. 1986. The Team that Wouldn’t Give In. London: Mammoth. 191 Hardcastle, Michael. 1992. The Away Team. London: Faber. 192 Hardcastle, Michael. 1998. Eye for a Goal (Goal Kings series 1). London: Faber. 193 Hardcastle, Michael. 1998. Shoot-Out (Goal Kings series 2). London: Faber. 194 Hayden, Peter. 1994. The Great Premium Bond Swizzle. Stourport: Crazy Horse. 195 Hayens, Herbert. 1922. Play Up, Greys! London: Collins. 196 Hayens, Herbert. 1924. Play Up, Magpies! London: Collins. 197 Hayens, Herbert. 1928. Play Up, Lions! London: Collins. 198 Hayens, Herbert. 1930. Play Up, Kings! London: Collins. 199 Henderson, Don. 2009. Macbeth, You Idiot! Sydney: Penguin. 200 Higgins, Bob. 1998. Problems of a Teenage Footballer. London: Minerva. 201 Home-Goal, E. R. 1952. The Roving Rovers. London: Henkel Locke. 202 Hopkins, Tim. 1979. Jimmy Swift. London: Macdonald and Jane. 203 Johnson. Mitch. 2017. Kick. London: Usbourne. 204 Klass, David. 2004. Home of the Braves. New York: Harper. 205 Lampard, Frank. 2015. Frankie’s Magic Football: Frankie Save Christmas (1). London: Little Brown. 206 Lampard, Frank. 2019. Frankie’s Magic Football: Game Over! (20). London: Little Brown. 207 Law, Dennis, and Ken Wheeler. 1967 The Golden Boots (Sportaces Novels). London: Pelham. 208 Lee, James. 1960. The Big Shot. London: Oliver & Boyd. 209 Lind, Anton. 1937 Rags, the Invincible. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. 210 Lind, Anton. 1937 Rags, the Airman. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. 211 Lind, Anton. 1939 Dingy and Pips Ltd. Detectives London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Reissued in 1961. London: Purnel. 212 McKenzie, Sophie. 2009. The Fix. London: Barrington Stoke. 213 McLean, Dirk. 2018. Team Fugee (Soccer United: Team Refugee 2). Toronto: Lorimer. 214 McLean, Dirk. 2018. Tournament Fugee (Soccer United: Team Refugee 4). Toronto: Lorimer. 215 Montagnana-Wallace, Neil, and Mark Schwarzer. 2007. Megs & The Vootball Kids (1). Melbourne: Bounce Books.

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216 Montagnana-Wallace, Neil, and Mark Schwarzer. 2010. Megs and the Wonder Strike (5). Melbourne: Bounce Books. 217 Morris, Stanley. 1928. The Penalty Area. London: Nelson. 218 Naughton, Bill. 1968. The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and other stories. Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited. 219 Palmer, Tom. 2006. Shaking Hands with Michael Rooney. London: Puffin. 220 Palmer, Tom. 2009. Boys United (BU 1). London: Puffin. 221 Palmer, Tom. 2008. Foul Play (1). London: Puffin. 222 Palmer, Tom. 2010. Killer Pass (5). London: Puffin. 223 Palmer, Tom. 2010. Captain Fantastic (BU 6). London: Puffin. 224 Palmer, Tom. 2010. The Secret Football Club. London: Puffin. 225 Palmer, Tom. 2011. Own Goal. London: Puffin. 226 Palmer, Tom. 2016. Over the Line. Edinburgh: Barrington Stoke. 227 Palmer, Tom. 2019. Roy of the Rovers: Scouted (1). London: Rebellion. 228 Palmer, Tom. 2019. Roy of the Rovers: Teamwork (2). London: Rebellion. 229 Palmer, Tom. 2019. Roy of the Rovers: Play-offs (3). London: Rebellion. 230 Panckridge, Michael. 2003. Over the Wall. Melbourne: Black Dog. 231 Peet, Mal. 2003. The Keeper. London: Walker. 232 Peet, Mal. 2006. The Penalty. London: Walker. 233 Peet, Mal. 2008. Exposure. London: Walker. 234 Poole, Michael. 1928. The Duffer of Danby. London Nelson. 235 Poole, Michael. 1928. Quinton Kicks Off. London Nelson. 236 Rai, Bali. 2004. Dream On. London: Barrington Stoke. 237 Rai, Bali. 2008. Soccer Squad: Stars (1). London: Red Fox. 238 Rai, Bali. 2008. Soccer Squad: Missing (4). London: Red Fox. 239 Rayner, Robert. 2011. Falling Star (1). Toronto: Lorimer. 240 Rayner, Robert. 2012. Suspended (5). Toronto: Lorimer. 241 Roeder, Mark. 2002. The Soccer Field Is Empty. San Jose, California: Writers Club Press. 242 Riddell, Charlotte, Eliza. 1884. Bright Sunset, the Last Days of a Young Scottish Football Player. London: Religious Tract Society. 243 Roirdan, James. 2003. Match of Death Oxford: Oxford University Press. 244 Sheridan, Phillip. 1965. Johnny on the Spot. London: MacGibbon and McKee. 245 Smith, Texi. 2019. Introducing Jarrod Black. Sydney: Fairplay Publishing. 246 Smith, Texi. 2019. Jarrod Black: Hospital Pass. Sydney: Fairplay Publishing. 247 Sotabinda, Maurice. 1996. Fineboy. London: MacMillan. 248 Starr, David. 2018. Golden Game (Soccer United: Team Refugee 1). Toronto: Lorimer. 249 Starr, David. 2018. Golden Goal (Soccer United: Team Refugee 2). Toronto: Lorimer. 250 Stewart, Paul. 1997. Football Mad. London: Scholastic. 251 Stewart, Paul. 1998. Off side. London: Scholastic. 252 Stewart, Paul. 1999. Hat-trick. London: Scholastic.

Catalogue of football fiction

157

253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265

Stewart, Paul. 2000. Teamwork. London: Scholastic. Swindells, Robert, E. 1986. Staying Up. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Reginald. 1962. The Boy from Hackston. London: Hamish. Tulloch, Jonathon. 2000. The Season Ticket. London: Vintage. Waddell, Martin. 1981. Napper Goes for Goal. London: Puffin. Waddell, Martin. 1981. Napper Strikes Again. London: Puffin. Waddell, Martin. 1993. Napper’s Luck. London: Puffin. Waddell, Martin. 1993. Napper’s Big Match. London: Puffin. Waddell, Martin. 1993. Napper Super-Sub. London: Puffin. Walcott, Theo. 2010. TJ and the Penalty (1). London: Corgi. Walcott, Theo. 2010. TJ and the Winning Goal (4). London: Corgi. Walliams, David. 2009. The Boy in the Dress. London: Harper Collins. Williams, Michael. 2013. Now is the Time for Running. London: Little, Brown. 266 Yelchin, Eugene, 2014. Arcady’s Goal. New York: Henry Holt. 267 Zucker, Jonny. 2010. Striker Boy. London: Frances Lincoln.

Speculative or fantasy football fiction 268 Deeping, Warwick. 2000, c1925. Sorrell and Son. London: Cassell Illustrated. 269 McInnes, Michael. 2016. Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer. Edinburgh: Passiens. 270 O’Farrell, John. 2015. There’s Only Two David Beckhams. London: Black Swan. 271 Pelé, and Herbert Resnicow.1988. World Cup Murder. New York: Wynwood. 272 Pratchett, Terry. 2010 c2009. Unseen Academicals. London: Corgi. 273 Rankin, Robert. 2004. Knees Up Mother Earth. London: Gollancz. 274 Turner, Simon. 2017. If Only: An Alternative History of the Beautiful Game. Worthing, Sussex: Pitch. 275 Williams, Gordon, and Terry Venables. 1994, c1971. They Used to Play on Grass. London: Penguin. 276 Wilson, John. 2008. The Ayresome Angel. Middlesborough: Juniper. 277 Wilson, John. 2009. The Return of George Camsell’s Football Boots. Middlesborough: Juniper.

Crime-related football fiction 278 279 280 281 282 283 284

Andrews, Paul. 1999. Own Goals. London: Sceptre. Andrews, Paul. 2000. Goodnight Vienna. London: Sceptre. Ayris, Ian. 2012. Abide with Me. Kent England: Caffeine Nights. Bartlem, Neil. 1993. Soccer Ace Gunned Down. Southport: Tabloid. Bateson, David. 1959. This Side of Terror. London: Hale. Bearcroft, Michael. 2012. Dangerous Games. London: Dynasty. Bruce, Steve. 1999. Striker. London: Paragon.

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Catalogue of football fiction

285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297

Bruce, Steve. 2000. Sweeper. London: Paragon. Bruce, Steve. 2000. Defender. London: Paragon. Creasey, John. 1949. Inspector West Kicks Off. London: Paul. Douglas, George. 2004, c1975. Final Score. London: Hale. Evans, Philip. 1973. The Bodyguard Man. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Evans, Philip. 1988. Playing the Wild Card. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Freeman Gregg. Cecil. 1960. Professional Jealousy. London: Methuen. Ghosh, Siddhartha. ed. 1994. Khela aarKhela. Calcutta: Dey.12 Giminez, Mark. 2008. The Abduction. New York: Vangaurd. Gray, Alex. 2008. Pitch Black. Edinburgh: Sphere. Gregson, James Michael. 2010. Only a Game. London: Severn House. Gribble, Leonard. 1939. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. London: Harrap. Gribble, Leonard. 1950. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery: The Replay. London: Herbert Jenkins. Gribble, Leonard. 1950. They Kidnapped Stanley Mathews. London: Herbert Jenkins. Hatton, Charles. 1960. The White Hart Lane Mystery. London: Longacre. Horler, Sydney. 1932. Tiger Standish. London: Long John. Horler, Sydney. 1935. The Man Who Saved the Club. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1936. The Grim Game: A Tiger Standish Story. London: Collins. Horler, Sydney. 1939. The Phantom Forward. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1939. Tiger Standish Takes the Field. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1940. Tiger Standish Steps on It. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1941. Tiger Standish Does His Stuff. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1943. Tiger Standish Has a Party. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Horler, Sydney. 1945. The Great Game. London: Jenkins. Humphreys, Neil. 2009. Match Fixer. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Humphreys, Neil. 2011. Premier Leech. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Horler, Sydney. 1949. Whilst the Crowd Roared. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Hyot, Richard. 1995. Red Card: A Novel of the World Cup 1994. New York: Forge. Jamieson, Sandy. 1997. Own Goal. Glasgow: Ringwood. Jardine, Quinten. 2001. Thursday Legends. London: Headline. Kavanagh, Dan. 1980. Duffy. London: Jonathan Cape. Kavanagh, Dan. 1985. Putting the Boot In. London: Jonathan Cape. Kerr, Philip. 2014. January Window. London: Head of Zeus.

298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317

Catalogue of football fiction

318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335

159

Kerr, Philip. 2015. Hand of God. London: Head of Zeus. Kerr, Philip. 2015. False Nine. London: Head of Zeus. Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez. 2001. Offside. London: Serpent’s Tail. Newman, Brendan. 1950. Cup Final Murder. London: Gollanz. Palmer, Frank. 1998. Final Score. London: Constable. Stavrum, Arild. 2014. Exposed at the Back. Trans. G. Puzey. Glasgow: Freight. Roncagliolo, Santiago. 2014. La pena máxima (‘The Maximum Penalty’). Lima: Alfaguara.13 Stein, Mel. 1980. Danger Zone. London: HarperCollins. Stein, Mel. 1996. Marked Man. London: Southbank. Stein, Mel. 1997. Red Card. London: Southbank. Stein, Mel. 1997. White Lines. London: Southbank. Taylor, Craig, M. 2011. Premiership Psycho. London: Corsair. Verner, Gerald. 2015, c1939. The Football Pool Murders. London: Wright. Warner, D. 2000. Murder in the Off-Season. Sydney: Pan MacMillan. Yuill, P.B. 1974. The Bornless Keeper. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P.B. 1975. Hazell Plays Solomon. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P.B. 1976. Hazell and the Three Card Trick. London: MacMillan. Yuill, P.B. 1977. Hazell and the Menacing Jester. London: MacMillan.

Hooligan fiction 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348

Allen, Richard. 1970. Skinhead. London: New English Library. Allen, Richard. 1975. Terrace Terrors. London: New English Library. Anderson, Gavin. 1996. Casual. London: Low Life. Brimson, Dougie. 1999. The Crew. London: Headline. Brimson, Dougie. 2001. Top Dog. London: Headline. Brimson, Eddie. 1998. Hooligan. London: Headline. Draper, Alfred. 1972. The Death Penalty. London: MacMillan. Gallivan, Joseph. 1998. Oi Ref!: A Novel About Love, Hate and Football. London: Sceptre. Home, Stewart. 1989. Pure Mania. Edinburgh: Polygon. Mitchell, Joe. 1994. Saturday’s Heroes. London: Low Life. Morland, Dick. 1974. Albion, Albion! London: Faber and Faber. Sampson, Kevin. 1998. Away Days. London: Vintage. Tadman, Phil. 2003. Domestic Football. London: Athena Press.

Literary football fiction 349 Aldritt. Keith. 1979. Elgar on His Journey to Hanley. London: Deutsch. 350 Arguedas, José María 1998, c1958 Los ríos profundos. Madrid: Cátedra.14 351 Atxaga, Bernardo. 1998. The Lone Man, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Harvill Secker.

160

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352 353 354 355 356 357 358

Barstow, Stan. 1980. A Brother’s Tale. London: Michael Joseph. Bennett, Arnold. 1910. The Card. Boston: E. P. Dutton. Bennett, Arnold. 1912. The Matador of Five Towns. Boston: E. P. Dutton. Bello, Antoine. 2013. Mateo. Paris: Gallimard.15 Bissett, Alan. 2011. Pack Men. London: Hachette Scotland. Bowers, Mick. 1998. Football Seasons. Pulp Books. Carr, Joseph Lloyd. 2005, c1975. How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup. Kettering, England: Quince Tree Press. Cartwright, Anthony. 2009. Heartland. Birmingham: Tindal Street. Cartwright, Anthony. 2016. Iron Towns. London: Serpent’s Tail. Coelho Neto, Henrique Maximiamo. 1924. Mano, livro da saudade. (‘Mano, A Book of Emotional Longing’). Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Empreza Graphica.16 Coutinho, Edilberto. 2006. c1980. Bye Bye Soccer, translated by Wilson Loria. New York: Host.17 Davies, Hunter. 1972. Body Charge. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Davies, Hunter. 1992. Striker. London: Bloomsbury. Doyle, Roddy. 1991. The Van. London: Minerva. Echenique, Alfredo Bryce. 2007, c1968. ‘Su mejor negocio’ (‘His Best Deal’). In Huerto cerrado (‘Closed Orchard’), dited by David Wood. Manchester: Manchester University Press.18 Esterházy, Péter. 2010. Not Art: A Novel, translated by Judith Sollosy. New York: Ecco. Esterházy, Péter. 2006. Utazás a tizenhatos mélyére. Budapest: Magvető.19 Faulks, Sebastian. 2009. One Week in December. London: Hutchinson. Glanville, Brian. 1970. The Rise of Gerry Logan. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Glanville, Brian. 1976. The Dying of the Light. London: Secker and Warburg. Glass, Rodge. 2012. Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs. Birmingham, England: Tindal Street. Goldemberg, Isaac. 1984. Tiempo al tiempo (‘Time to Time’). Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte.20 Goldsworthy, Peter. 1996. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Sydney: Harper Collins. Hanna Bell, Sam. 1961. The Hollow Ball. London: Cassell. Handke, Peter. 2007, c1970. Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. (‘The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick’), translated by Michael Roloff. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Hines, Barry. 1966. The Blinder. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hines, Barry. 1968. A Kestrel for a Knave. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Hodkinson, Mark. 2006. Believe in the Sign. Keighley, West Yorks: Pomona. Hornby, Nick. 1992. Fever Pitch. London: Gollancz. Hudson, Robert. 2009 The Kilburn Social Club. London: Jonathon Cape. Jenkins, Robin. 2006, c1954. The Thistle and the Grail. Edinburgh: Polygon. Jenkins, Robin. 1978. A Would Be Saint. Edinburgh: Polygon.

359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366

367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376

377 378 379 380 381 382 383

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384 Jökulsdóttir, Elísbet. 2003. Fótboltasögur (tala saman strákar) (‘Football Stories (Communicate Lads)’), translated by Baldur Ingi Guðbjörnsson and Katherine Connor Martin. Reykjavík: KSI. 385 Johnson, B. S. 1969. The Unfortunates. London: Panther (Secker and Warburg). 386 King, John. 1996. The Football Factory. London: Vintage. 387 King, John. 1998. Headhunters. London: Vintage. 388 King, John. 1999. England Away. London: Vintage. 389 King, John. 2008. Skinheads. London: Vintage. 390 Kishon, Ephrain. 1971. The Fox in the Chicken-Coop: A Satirical Novel, translated by Jacques Namiel. Tel Aviv: Bronfman.21 391 Lancaster, John. 2012. Capital. London: Faber and Faber. 392 Legge, Gordon. 2003. In Between Talking About the Football. Edinburgh: Polygon.22 393 Martin, David. 1966. The Young Wife. Melbourne: Sun Books. 394 Manesse, Eva. 2006. Vienna, translated by Anthea Bell. London: Pheonix. 395 Masetto, Antonio Dal. 2005, c1998. Hay unos tipos abajo (‘There are some guys below’). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. 396 Mauvignier, Laurent. 2008. In the Crowd, translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Faber & Faber. 397 Nielsen, Hans-Jørgen. 1981, c1979. Fodboldenglen (‘The Angel of Football’), second edition. Copenhagen and Varde: Skov, Dansklærerforeningen.23 398 Olesha, Yuri. 2004, c1927. Envy, translated by Marian Schwartz. New York: New York Review Books. 399 Pasulka, Brigid. 2014. The Sun and Other Stars. New York: Simon Schuster. 400 Peace, David. 2006. The Damned Utd. London: Faber and Faber. 401 Peace, David. 2013. Red or Dead. London: Faber and Faber. 402 Priestley, John Boynton. 1962, c1929. The Good Companions. London: Heinemann. 403 Raisin, Ross. 2017. The Natural. London: Jonathon Cape. 404 Rivera Letelier, Hernán.24 1999. Donde mueren los Valientes. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. 405 Rivera Letelier, Hernán. 2010, c2006. El Fantasista (‘The Fantasist’). Madrid: Santillana. 406 Roberts, Gareth, R. 2013. Whatever Happened to Billy Parks. London: The Friday Project. 407 Sacheri, Eduardo. 2014, c2011. Papers in the Wind (‘Papeles en el viento’), translated by Mara Faye Lethem. New York: Other Press. 408 Salazar, Jorge. 1980. La Opera de los Fantasmas (‘The Opera of Ghosts’). Lima: Mosca Azul/Ediciones Treintaitre. 409 Sen, Asoke. ed. 1998. Kishar Golpo Khela. Kolkatta: Dey Publishing.25 410 Shindler, Colin. 2010. The Worst of Friends: Malcolm Allison, Joe Mercer and Manchester City. London: Mainstream. 411 Sillitoe, Alan. 1994, c1959. The Match. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London: Flamingo.

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412 Skármeta, Antonio. 1986, c1975. Soñé que la nieve ardia (‘I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning’), translated by Malcolm Coad. London: Readers International. 413 Stein, Shaun, and Nicolás Campisi. Eds. 2016. Idols and Underdogs. Glasgow: Freight.26 414 Taylor, David John, 1996. English Settlement. London: Vintage. 415 Thorndike, Guillermo. 1978. El revés de morir (‘The Opposite of Dying’). Lima: Mosca Azul.27 416 Trueba, David. 2010. Learning to Lose (‘Saber Perder’), translated by Mara Faye Lethem. New York: Other. 417 Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1967. Los cachorros (The Pups). Barcelona: Lumen.28 418 Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1995, c 1977. Aunt Julia and the Script Writer (La tía Julia y el escribidor), translated by Helen R. Lane. London: Penguin. 419 Wells, Harold, C. 1950. The Earth Cries Out. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 420 Welsh, Irvine. 1993. Trainspotting. London: Secker and Warburg. 421 Welsh, Irvine 1994. ‘Granton Star Cause.’ In Acid House. London: Secker and Warburg. 422 Welsh, Irvine. 1995. Marabou Stork Nightmares. New York: W.W. Norton. 423 Welsh, Irvine. 2015. A Decent Ride. London: Jonathon Cape. 424 Welsh, Irvine. 2018 Dead Man’s Trousers. London: Penguin. 425 Williams, Gordon. 1968. From Scenes Like These. London: Black and White. 426 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. 1910. Mike and Psmith. London: Adam and Charles Black.

Women’s football fiction 427 1921. Meg Foster Footballer. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 428 1922. Captain Meg. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 429 1922. Football Island. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 430 Apodoca, Jennifer. 2004. Ninja Soccer Moms. New York: Kensington. 431 Bhattacharya, Nalinska. 1992. Hem and Football. London: Secker & Warburg. 432 Bhattacharya, Nalinska. 1993. Hem and Maxine. London: Secker & Warburg. 433 Brady, Karren. 1997. United! New York: Time Warner. 434 Brady, Karren. 1998. Trophy Wives. New York: Time Warner. 435 Coldwell, Elizabeth. 2010, c1998. Playing the Field. London: Headline Liaison. 436 Curham, Siobhan. 2001. Sweet FA. London: Coronet. 437 Grey, Don. 1922. Bess of Blacktown. Football and Sports Library. London Amalgamated. 438 Harding, Robyn. 2006. The Secret Desires of a Soccer Mom. New York: Random.

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439 Hey, Stan. 1989. The Manageress. London: Penguin.29 440 Hinckes, C. M. 1922. Ray of the Rovers. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 441 Kenner, Julie. 2005. Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom (1). New York: Jove. 442 Kenner, Julie. 2009. Demon Ex Machine (5). New York: Jove. 443 Nelson, S. 1922. Nell O’ Newcastle. Football and Sports Library. London: Amalgamated. 444 Star, Nancy. 2008. Carpool Diem. New York: Hachette.

Young female football fiction 445 Abrahams, Peter. 2006. Down the Rabbit Hole. London: Harper Collins. 446 Childs, Rob. 1991. Girl in Goal (Sports Bag). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 447 Cole, Hannah. 1989. Kick Off. London: Walker. 448 Costello, Emily. 1998. Foul Play (1). Topeka, Kansas: Econo-Clad. 449 Costello, Emily. 1999. Teaming Up (8). Topeka, Kansas: Econo-Clad. 450 Crowley, Cath. 2004. The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain. Melbourne: Pan MacMillan. 451 Crowley, Cath. 2006. Gracie Faltrain Takes Control. Melbourne: Pan MacMillan. 452 Crowley, Cath. 2008. Gracie Faltrain Gets It Right. Melbourne: Pan MacMillan. 453 Deep-Jones, Liz. 2008. Lucy Zeezou’s Goal. Sydney: Random House. 454 Deep-Jones, Liz. 2010. Lucy Zeezou’s Glamour Game. Sydney: Random House. 455 Danakis, John. 2011. Soccer Showdown. Toronto: Lorimer. 456 Dhami, Narinder. 2004. Bend It Like Beckham. New York: Welcome Rain. 457 Dhami, Narinder. 2009 Hannah’s Secret (1). London: Orchard. 458 Dhami, Narinder. 2011 Katy’s Real Life (8). London: Orchard. 459 Diersch, Sandra. 2011. Play On. Toronto: Lorimer. 460 Diersch, Sandra. 2011. Alecia’s Challenge. Toronto: Lorimer. 461 Diersch, Sandra. 2011. Out of Sight. Toronto: Lorimer. 462 Diome, Fatou. 2006. The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman. London: Serpent’s Tail. 463 Dyer, Jonah Lisa and Stephen Dyer. 2016. The Season. New York: Penguin. 464 Fitzgerald, Dawn. 2007. Soccer Chick Rules. New York: Macmillan. 465 Flint, Shamini 2017. Ten: A Soccer Story. Boston MA: Clarion Books. 466 Guest, Jacqueline. 2010. c2003. Soccer Star. Toronto: Lorimer. 467 Halpin, Brendan. 2011. Shutout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 468 Keneally, Miranda. 2016. Defending Taylor. New York: Sourcebooks. 469 King, Donna. 2007. Kick Off. London: Kingfisher. 470 Martin Bossley, M. 2007. Kicker. Victoria, Canada: Orca.

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471 Morgan, Alex. 2013. The Kicks: Saving the Team (1). New York: Simon & Schuster. 472 Morgan, Alex. 2019. The Kicks: Switching Goals. (10). New York: Simon & Schuster. 473 Panckridge, Michael. 2004. Offside, Upfront. Melbourne: Black Dog. 474 Perry, Ellyse, and Clark, Sherryl. 2017. Magic Feet. Sydney: Penguin Random House. 475 Pielichaty, Helena. 2018, c2009. Do Goalkeeper’s Wear Tiaras? (1). London: Walker. 476 Pielichaty, Helena. 2018, c2011. Has Anyone Seen Our Striker? (11). London: Walker. 477 Sloan, Holly Goldberg. 2002. Keeper. La Jolla, California: Scobre. 478 Spears, Kate. 2016. Breakaway. New York: St Martin’s. 479 Spring, Debbie. 2010. Breathing Soccer. Saskatoon, Canada: Thistledown. 480 Swanson, Julie. 2004. Going for the Record. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 481 Tigelaar, Liz. 2007 Pretty Tough. New York: Razorbill. 482 Trufinov. David. 2017. Snow Soccer. Toronto: Lorimer. 483 Wolden-Nitz, Kristi. 2004. Defending Irene. Atlanta, GA: Peachtree. 484 Wyen, Suzanne. 2007. Gracie. New York: William Morrow.30

Digital only and self-publishing 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502

Arrons, Carrie. 2016. Red Card. Amazon. Brown, Koko. 2011. Player’s Ultimatum. Amazon. Carrell, Matt. 2014. Matter of life and Death. CreateSpace. Chance, Lynda. 2010. The Mobster and the Soccer Mom. Amazon. Choat, Beth. 2010. Soccerland. Skyescape (Amazon). Christie, Kate. 2016. Training Ground. Bella Books. Christie, Kate. 2016. Game Time Bella Books. Christie, Kate. 2018. Outside the Lines. Bella Books. Christie, Kate. 2019. The Road to Canada. Bella Books. Contreras, Claire. 2016. The Player. Amazon. Crowe, Liz 2011. Caught Offside. Smashwords. Crowe, Liz, 2013 Man On. Tri-Destiny. Crowe, Liz, 2013 Red Card. Tri-Destiny. Crowe, Liz, 2015 Shut Out. Tri-Destiny. Crowe, Liz, 2015 Hat Trick. Tri-Destiny. Daws, Amy. 2016. Challenge. Stars Hollow. Erasmus, Lourens. 2014. Soccer Farm. Berrett-Koehler. Exall, K.P.C. 2008. Football Mad!: A Modern Satire of a Very Old Sport. Authorhouse. 503 Exall, K.P.C. 2009. Football Wild!: The Sequel to Football Mad. Authorhouse. 504 Flinn, Christian. 2014. Sunday League: A Novel. CreateSpace. 505 Freedman, Dan. 2014. Born to Play. I am Self-publishing.

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506 507 508 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527

Gialcoletto, Loetta. 2010. Lethal Play. Amazon. Grant, Cathryn. 2010. Demise of the Soccer Mom. D2C Perspectives. Grey, Rachel, S. 2014. Scoring Wilder. Amazon. Gunther, Rachel and Judy Holstein. 2007. Soccer Mom Secrets. AuthorHouse. Harlem, Lily. 2012. Scored. Amazon. Hampson, H. J. 2012. The Vanity Game. Blasted Heath. Hickling, Margaret. 2008. Football Widows. Authorhouse. Katone, Kerry. 2007. Tough Love. Ebury. Katone, Kerry. 2008. A Footballer’s wife. Ebury. Kay, Steven. 2015. Historical Football Stories. 1889 Books.31 Kay, Steven. 2014. The Evergreen in Red and White. 1889 Books. Leiden, Drew. 2018. Keep Possession: A World Cup Fictional Thriller. CreateSpace. Ludwig, Barton. 2019. Blitzball. Heartlab. Mininni, Gianni. 2006. Soccer: The Novel. AuthorHouse. Manning, Walt. 2006. The Cup. Amazon. Matsushita, Rob. 2009. Soccer Moms. CreateSpace. Plenderleith, Ian. 2012. The Chairman’s Daughter. Amazon. Porteus, Alan. 2010. Gloryhunting. Authorhouse. Russell, Ken. 2005. Violation. Authorhouse. Sage, Leann. 2016. Zilla. Amazon. Winston, Samantha. 2004. A Grand Passion. Ellora’s Cave. Zapata, Mariana. 2015. Kulti. Amazon.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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All of Santipriya Bandyopadhyay’s works were published in Bengali. Bengali. A novella published for adult learners. Spanish. Novelisation of a film screenplay. All of Moti Nandy’s novels were published in Bengali. Collection of short stories. Critically acclaimed and renowned short story collection. Norwegian. Novelisation of a film screenplay. Novel in verse. Bengali. Spanish. Spanish. French. Portuguese. A collection consisting of three short stories by a renowned football writer. Collection of short stories; Spanish. Hungarian. Spanish. Hebrew. Collection of short stories.

166 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Catalogue of football fiction

Danish. Both Hernán Rivera Letelier novels are in Spanish. Bengali. Anthology of translated South American short stories. Spanish. Spanish. Adapted from screenplay of the television show. Novelisation of a film screenplay. Collection of short stories.

Index

Page numbers in italics and bold indicate Figures and Tables, respectively. Abela, Deborah 63 abstraction models 9, 10 adult female readers 61, 79 adult football novels 23, 119, 127–128, 135–136 adult male readers 80, 119, 129 Albion! Albion! (Morland) 29 Aldine Football Library series 18–19 Alldritt, Keith 31 Allen, Richard 29, 88 All Played Out (Davies) 44 alternative history 85 Amis, Martin 34–35 Angry Young Men 25 anti-sport novels 25 Araujo, Marcela 15 Argentinian literature 58 Arsenal Stadium Mystery (Gribble) 22, 35 Atkinson for England (James and Brown) 109 Atxaga, Bernard 49–50 Auden, W.H. 107 Australian literature 27, 49, 59–60, 64, 89 Austrian literature 32 autobiographies 3–4, 45–47, 59, 130, 133, 135 Ball Game, The (Giller and Greaves) 33–34, 35 Barclay, James 49 Barnes, Julian 34 Barstow, Stan 33–34 Beckham, David 63, 93 Bell, Sam Hanna 25, 89 Belly of the Atlantic (Diome) 64 Bend It Like Beckham (film) 93 Bengali football 51

Bennett, Arnold 17, 112 Bess of Blacktown (Grey) 20 Bhattacharya, Nalinaksha 50–51 Big, The . . . (series) 48 Bigot, The (Barclay) 49 Big Shot, The (Lee) 22 biographies 31–32, 54 see also autobiographies Bioy Casares, Adolfo 27 Bissett, Alan 90 Blanchflower, Danny 26 Bleasdale, Alan 34, 110 Blinder, The (Hines) 26–27 bloody crime scenes 86 Body Charge (Davies) 29, 86 body-image issues 84 Booth, Bessie (fictional character) 20 Borges, Jorge Luis 27 Bornless Keeper, The (Yuill) 30 Bourdieu, Pierre 105 Bowers, Mick 47–48 Boy Overboard (Gleitzman) 64 Boys of Highfield, The (Charles) 83 Boy’s Own Paper, The (comic book) 83 Brady, Karen 50 Braudel, Fernand 75 Brazilian literature 21 Breakaway (Spears) 94 Breathing Soccer (Spring) 61 Breen, Paul 61, 110 Breslin, Theresa 64 Bright Sunset (Riddell) 16 Brimson, Dougie 87–88, 113–114 Brother’s Tale, A (Barstow) 33–34 Bruce, Steve 87 bullies 94 Bulson, Eric 77

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Index

Cahill, Tim 63 Camus, Albert 6, 32 Capital (Lancaster) 90 Card, The (Bennett) 17, 95 Carpool Diem (Star) 92 Carr, J.L. 30 Cartwright, Anthony 60–61, 107–108 Casciari, Hernán 58 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) 120 centre of consciousness 8–9 Chadha, Gurinder 66n6 Chancer, A (Kelman) 34, 90 Chandler, Daniel 106 character development 130–131 character interaction 17 character(s): bisexual 34; ensemble cast changes 145; as reflector 9, 34 Charles, John 55 Charlton Men, The (Breen) 110 children’s picture books 121 Childs, Rob 93 Chilean literature 32, 59 Chocolate War, The (Cormier) 120 climax of the novel 131 close reading: animalistic similes 132; character development 130–131; clichés, use of 131; climax of the novel 131; football-specific registers 134; gender identity 132; language choices 129; line-level sentence structure 135; metaphors 132, 134; non-specific positional statements 133; on-pitch football 130–131; for study of literature 77; target audiences 135; see also distant reading Clough, Brian 54–55 Coelho Neto, Maximiamo 21 Coldwell, Elizabeth 50 Cole, Hannah 93 collectivism vs. individualism 21, 64 comic books: 1930s 16; 1940s and 1950s 22; 1970s 28; 1980s 33; 1990s 48; for adult readers 81; commercial production of 28; demand for 22; diminishing interest in 33; increasing popularity of 83; in mainstream popular culture 121; Roy of the Rovers series 48; schoolboy-style stories in 16, 21; Striker (Davies) 81 conventions: cast of characters 111–112; language and voice 113–114; narrative structure 111; narratorial voice 113–114;

pitch 107–111, 118; setting 107; voice 109 Costello, Emily 49, 93 creative non-fiction writers 46, 51 Crew, The (Brimson) 87, 113–114, 126 crime-related football fiction: bloody crime scenes 86; catalogue of 157–159; contemporary 62–63; detective novels 23, 61–62, 63; as division of football fiction 79; highlighting innovation in the field 29; historiography of 86–87, 86; incorporating real teams, players and events 22–23; mimetic approach in 112; organised crime 86; political thrillers 62; real teams, players and events incorporated into 49–50; using stadium as setting 126; World Cup Murder 33 cross-dressing footballer 84 crossover novels 121 Crowley, Cath 61, 108, 118 Cup Final Murder (Newman) 22–23 Dal Masetto, Antonio 50, 112–113 Damned Utd, The (Peace) 54–55, 109 Darwin, Charles 75 Davies, Hunter 29, 47, 86, 129 Davies, Pete 44 Dead Men’s Trousers (Welsh) 53–54 Deepdale 1 Deeping, Warwick 20, 85 Deep-Jones, Liz 61 Delaney, Terence 4 detective novels 23, 61–62 see also crimerelated football fiction DeWitt, Anne 76 Diary of Darren Tackle, The (White) 49 Die Angst des Tormanns bein Elfmeter (Handke) 32 digital publishing 50, 56–58, 65, 144–145, 164–165 see also self-publishing novels Ding and Pips Ltd. Detectives series 21 Diome, Fatou 64 Dirty Leeds (Endeacott) 55 Disaffection, A (Kelman) 34, 90 Disrepute (Endeacott) 55 distance from the pitch 124–126, 125 distant reading 73–77 see also close reading Divided City (Breslin) 64 Domestic Football (Tadman) 87–88 Dougan, Derek 28–29, 55 Douglas, George 29, 86 Down the Rabbit Hole (Abraham) 61–62

Index Dragomán, György 64 dramatised narrator 9 Dying of the Light, The (Glanville) 28, 108 Earth Cries Out, The (Wells) 24 Echo Falls detective series 61–62 Eco, Umberto 107 El Fantasista (Rivera Letelier) 59, 108 Elgar on the Journey to Hanley (Alldritt) 31 El revés de morir (Thorndike) 31–32, 55 Endeacott, Robert 55 English Football League 1, 103 Envy (Olesha) 20–21 erotic writing 50, 92 Esphinge (Coelho Neto) 21 Esse est Percipi (Borges and Bioy Casares) 27, 89, 144 Estadio Nacional disaster 34 Esterházy, Péter 59 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom) 66n5 exploitative novels 92 Exposed at the Back (Stavrum) 62 Exposure (Peet) 64 Extra Time (Sampson) 51 family, weight of and on 33 Fan (Rhodes) 110 fan culture 119 fan fiction 57 fantasy fiction 63, 79, 85, 85, 121, 157 fantasy football 63 Fehér Király, A (Dragomán) 64 female characters 127–128 female footballers 18, 50–51, 92–93 female readers see young female readers, novels for Fever Pitch (Hornby): aspiring football writers 3–4; defining moment for football fiction 43; diarised structure of 44–45; Glanville on 45; impact of 144; storytelling mode of 45 Final Score (Douglas) 29, 86 Flint, Shamini 94 football: evolution of 73, 146; modern line-markings 73; reflecting changing culture 146; rules 73; as setting, not plot development 81 Football and Sports Library, The series 18, 20 football culture: national and individual identity and 53; parodying 34; shifts in 43–44

169

Footballer, The (Dougan) 28–29, 55 Footballer’s Companion, The (Glanville) 26 footballers’ wives’ novels 50, 62 Football Factory, The (King) 6, 57, 110–111 football fiction: 1920s and 1930s 18–21; 1940s and 1950s 22–24; 1960s 24–27; 1970s 28–33; 1980s 33–35; 1990s 48–51; as acceptable form of literature 43; for adult readers (See adult football novels); advent of 3; aimed at adults 49; crime in (See crime-related football fiction, hooligan football fiction); definition of 5–8; as dialect fiction 7; early development 16–17; female footballer as lead role in 50–51; as a genre 104; historiography of (See historiography of football fiction); lack of quality in 6; literary qualities of (See literary football fiction); mainstream (See mainstream football fiction); moral lessons 16–17; novel-length 16; origins of 16–18; as platform for cultural meaning 144; published in languages other than English 31–32, 35; real teams, players and events incorporated into 22–23, 25–26, 30, 49, 54; re-publications 57, 65; romance and 62; taxonomic divisions of 79; transformative moment in 44; twentyfirst century 58–64; see also mainstream football fiction football hero 83 football heroine 19 Football Literature in South America (Wood) 93 Football Mad! series 48 Football Seasons (Bowers) 47–48 Forever (Blume) 120 formulaic football stories 18 Foster, Meg (fictional character) 20 Fox in the Chicken-Coop, The (Kishon) 32 Free, Marcus 57 French, Philip 107 French novelists 64 From Scenes Like These (Williams) 27, 113 gangster chic 52 Gelder, Ken 105 gender bias 143 gender conventions 84 gender identity 132 gender roles 64

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Index

gender stereotypes 93 genres: analysing 106–107; boundaries 85; continual adjustment over time 106; generic evolution 145; overlap 23, 62; as semiotic construct 106; textual transcendence 105–106; theoretical development 105; traditional definitions of 106 genre theory 103–107, 114 geographic maps 118–119 Gibbons, Alan 48 Gigante, The (Endeacott) 55 Gilbert, William 114 Girl in Goal (Childs) 93 Girls F.C. series 61, 128 Glanville, Brian: contributing to football literature 24–25; Dying of the Light, The 28; on Fever Pitch 45; Footballer’s Companion, The 26; Goalkeepers Are Crazy 25–26; Goalkeeper’s Are Different 28; Rise of Gerry Logan, The 26; on scarcity of football literature 4 Gleitzman, Morris 64 Global Game, The (Turnbull) 32 Glory Game, The (Davies) 129 Goal (Horler) 19 Goalkeepers Are Crazy (Glanville) 25–26 Goalkeeper’s Are Different (Glanville) 28 Goalkeeper’s Revenge, The (Naughton) 25–26 Goal Kings series 48 Goldemberg, Isaac 34 Golden Boots, The (Law and Wheeler) 25 Good Companions, The (Priestley) 20 Gracie Faltrain series 61, 118 graphic novels 121 Graphs: distant reading method and 75–76; as model of abstraction 77; see also historiography of football fiction Great Escape, The (Jamieson) 49 Great Game, The (Horley) 22 Gribble, Leonard 22 hagiographic biographical novels 31–32 Hamilton, Ian 4 Handke, Peter 32 Harry Potter series 121 Hay unos tipos abajo (Dal Masetto) 50, 112–113 Hazell series 23 Heartlab 56 Heartland (Cartwright) 60, 107–108

Hem and Football (Bhattacharya) 50–51, 128 Hem and Maxine (Bhattacharya) 50–51 hero stories 81 high-brow fiction 105 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster 45, 60, 66n2 Hines, Barry 25, 26–27 historiography of football fiction: crimerelated football fiction 86–87, 86; hooligan football fiction 87–88, 87; literary football fiction 88–91, 89; mainstream football fiction 80–82, 80; Moretti on 75; outlier ‘hero’ stories 81; speculative and fantasy football fiction 85, 85; Tadié’s second categorisation 81; taxonomic divisions 78–79, 78; women’s football fiction 91–93, 91; young adult female football fiction 93–94, 93; young adult male football fiction 80–85, 82 ‘hit and tells’ 52 Holes (Sachar) 120–121 Hollow Ball, The (Bell) 25, 31 Home Ground (Welsh) 60 homosexuality 47–48, 92, 128 hooligan football fiction: catalogue of 159; examples of 29–30, 51–54, 79; fading of 64–65; historiography of 87–88, 87; origins of 51–52; Sampson on 51; supporting a team vs. attending a match110 Horler, Sydney 18, 19, 22 Hornby, Nick: as editor and contributor to My Favourite Year 43; Fever Pitch 3–4, 43; influences to Fever Pitch 45; on reading football fiction 15 horror genre novels 81 Hotshot Hamish Annual, 2009 83 Howell, Rabbi 55 How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup (Carr) 30, 111 Hughson, John 57 Hungarian literature 59, 64 I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Ibrahimovic and Lagercrantz) 4, 144 Iceland literature 58 If Only (Turner) 85 implied author 9 implied reader 122, 135–136, 138n4 independent publishing 55–56, 79 see also digital publishing, self-publishing novels

Index Indian literature 31, 48, 50–51 individualism vs. collectivism 21, 64 institutional racism 34 intellectual football writing 46 international espionage 84 In the Crowd (Mauvignier) 58 Iron Towns (Cartwright) 60–61, 108 Israeli literature 32 Jamieson, Sandy 49 January Window trilogy 87 Jasper Zammit trilogy 63 Jenkins, Robin 30–31 Johnny Cook (McIntosh) 109 Johnson, B.S. 27 Johnson, Mitch 64 Johnstone, Jimmy ‘Jinky’ 111 Jökulsdóttir, Elísabet 58 Kay, Steven 55–56 Keane, Roy 66n3 Keep It Simple, Stupid (MacNeil) 49 Kelman, James 34, 90 Kerr, Philip 62, 87 Ketona, Kerry 92 Khadem, Amir 76 Kick (Johnson) 64 Kick Off (Cole) 49, 93 Kick Off (King) 61 Kicks, The (Morgan) 61 King, Donna 61 King, John 52–53, 79, 88 Kishon, Ephraim 32 Kulti (Zapata) 92, 108 Lagercrantz, David 4 Lampard, Frank 63 Lancaster, John 90 language and voice 113–114, 129 La ópera de los fantasmas (Salazar) 34 La tía Julia y el escribidor (Vargas Llosa) 31 Law, Denis 25 Lawrence, D.H. 17 Laws of the Game (IFAB) 73, 103 Lee, James 22 lesbian and gender-neutral readers 92 Lester, Ray (fictional character) 20 Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain, The (Crowley) 108 Lind, Anton 21 Lindon, Richard 103 literary analysis 2, 73, 74–75, 123, 136, 145

171

literary football fiction: analysis tools 145; catalogue of 159–162; Football Seasons 47–48; historiography of 88–91, 89; homosexuality in 47–48; lack of 33; literary qualities of 5; literary techniques in 79; from other countries 144; politics and 90; Thistle and the Grail, The (Jenkins) 23–24; twenty-first century 58–59 literary theory 75–77 London Fields (Amis) 34 Lone Man, The (Atxaga) 49–50 Los cachorros (Vargas Llosa) 27 low-brow fiction 105 Lucy’s Glamour Game (Deep-Jones) 133 Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (Deep-Jones) 61, 129–130, 135 Macbeth, You Idiot! (Henderson) 108 MacNeil, Mack 49 mainstream football fiction 80–82, 80, 149–152 Making News (Wilson) 59–60 Maps 75, 118–119 mature young adult fiction 84–85 Mauvignier, Laurent 58 May, Anthony 53 McFlannels United series 22 McIlvaney, Hugh 46 Megs Morrison series 63 Melling, Alethea 7 metaphors 132, 134 Mexican literature 15 Mike and Psmith (Wodehouse) 17 militaristic honour and loyalty 53 mimetic fiction see realist fiction Mitford, Mary 123 Moffat, James 88 Moretti, Franco 74–75, 118–119, 122–123 Morgan, Alex 61 Morland, Dick 29 murder mystery 87 Murphy, Jason Burke 110 My Favourite Year anthology 43, 46 Nandy, Mori 31, 51 narrative structure 111 narratorial voice 113–114 Natural, The (Raisin) 60 Naughton, Bill 25–26 Navakov, Vladimir 6 new adult (NA) fiction 121–122

172

Index

Newman, Brendan 22–23 non-fiction 4 see also creative non-fiction writers Northern English writers 25 Not Art: A Novel (Esterházy) 59, 126 novel-length football fiction 16 Olesha, Yuri 20–21 on-pitch football 126, 130–131 organised crime 86 Oriard, Michael 7 Osbourne, Philip 30 Our Village collection 123 outlier ‘hero’ stories 81 Outsiders, The (Hinton) 120 Over the Line (Palmer) 63 Pack Men (Bissett) 90 Paddy’ Clarke Ha Ha (Doyle) 47 Pamuk, Orhan 15 Papers in the Wind (Sacheri) 88 paratextual experimentation 27 Parsons, Tony 46 Peace, David 54–55, 64, 90, 109 Peet, Max 64 Peruvian football literature 24, 31, 34 Petticoat Influence (Wodehouse) 17 Pielichaty, Helena 61 pitch 107–111, 118, 124–126, 125, 145 Plague, The (Camus) 6 Plimpton, George 4 political discourse 21, 31 political thrillers 62 popular fiction 105 porn novels 50 Pratchett, Terry 113 Prendergast, Christopher 77 Preston North End (PNE) 1 Pretty Tough (Tigelaar) 61, 128 Priestley, J.B. 20 print on demand 57 see also digital publishing professional footballers: authorship 84; endorsements 63, 84 protagonists: cartographical insight 122–123; distance from the pitch 124–126, 125; female 128, 130; football and 145; gender 126–129, 127; in young adult fiction 136 Pryde, Helen 22 psycho-thrillers 49–50 pulp fiction 18 Putting the Boot In (Barnes) 34

Race, Roy (fictional character) 48 racism 34, 64 Rags, the Invincible (Lind) 21 Raisin, Ross 60 Ray of the Rovers (Hinckes) 20 Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees (Goodwin) 76 realist fiction 8, 25–26, 51, 64, 90, 112–113 Redhead, Steve 79 Red or Dead (Peace) 55, 109 religion 30–31 Religious Tract Society 16–17 reluctant readers 48, 63, 83 re-publications 57, 65 restricted production 105 retribution fantasy 87 Riddell, William 16 Rise of Gerry Logan, The (Glanville) 26 Rivera Letelier, Hernán 59, 108 Road to Lisbon, The (Greig and McGarry) 55 romance novels 62, 91–92, 94, 95 Romanian literature 64 Rosetti, Mark 49 Roy of the Rovers series 48 Russian literature 20–21 Sacheri, Eduardo 88 Sage, Leanne 94 Salazar, Jorge 34 Sampson, Kevin 51 schoolboy-style stories 18–21, 25–26, 48, 82–83, 114, 143 Scully and Mooey (Bleasdale) 34, 110 Season, The (Dyer and Dyer) 92 Season of Bones (Breen) 61 secondary source material 76, 77 Second Curtain, The (Fuller) 6 Secret Desires of a Soccer Mom, The (Harding) 92 sectarianism 64 self-publishing novels 50, 54–57, 164–165 see also digital publishing, independent publishing serials 18, 19 Seventeenth Summer (Daly) 120 short stories 25–27, 31 similes 132 Simon, Eric 22 Skármeta, Antonio 32 Skinhead (Allen) 29, 52 slave trade 84 small presses 56–57

Index soccerati, the 46–47, 65, 79, 90 Soccer Mad series 48 soccer mom fiction 62, 91, 92, 109–110 Soccer Stars series 49, 93 social integration 34 soft-porn novels 30, 50 Soñé Que la Nieve Ardia (Skámeta) 32 Sorrell and Son (Deeping) 20, 85 South American literature 7, 24, 27, 31–32, 33, 58 Spanish literature 49–50 Spears, Kat 94 speculative and fantasy football fiction see fantasy fiction Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 76 sports fiction 7, 11n4, 31, 51 see also anti-sport novels, football fiction Sports Literature Association 11n4 Spring, Debbie 61 Starr, David 83 Stavrum, Arild 62–63, 87 Stead, Peter 17 Stephens, John 121 Stewart, Paul 48 Stopper (Nandy) 31 Storey, David 25 Strike Pay (Lawrence) 17 Striker (Davies) 47, 129, 130, 133–134, 135 Striker (Nandy) 31 Sweet FA (Curham) 92–93 Tadié, Alexis 53, 80, 83 Tadman, Phil 87–88 taxonomic divisions of football fiction 79 Taylor, D.J. 5, 17 Ten (Flint) 94 They Kidnapped Stanley Mathews (Gribble) 22 They Used to Play on Grass (Yuill) 30 This Sporting Life (Storey) 25 Thistle and the Grail, The (Jenkins) 23–24, 109, 111, 144 Thorndike, Guillermo 31–32, 55 Tiempo al tiempo (Goldemberg) 34 Tigelaar, Liz 61 Tiger (comics) 48 titillation books 33–34 Top Dog (Brimson) 87–88 Total Football series 48 transtextuality 105–106 Trees 75 Trophy Wives (Brady) 50

173

Turkish literature 15 Turner, Simon 85 undramatised narrator 9 Unfortunates, The (Johnson) 27 United (Brady) 50, 92 Van, The (Doyle) 47 Vargas Llosa, Mario 27, 31, 144 Victorian boys’ journals and magazines 16 Villoro, Juan 15 violent narratives 21, 22 see also crimerelated football fiction, hooligan football fiction voice (narrative situation) 109 vulcanised uniformity 114 WAG novels 91, 92 Walcott, Theo 63 Warren, Johnny 63 Wells, Harold C. 24 Welsh, Irvine 52, 53–54, 79 Welsh, Louise 60 Wheeler, Kenneth 25 Whistle Blew, The (Simon) 22 White, Jim 49 Williams, Gordon 25, 27, 113 Wilson, Tony 59–60 Winners, The (Osbourne) 30 Wodehouse, PG 17 women’s football 28, 93–94, 118 women’s football fiction: catalogue of 162–163; crossover novels 95; emergence of 2; examples of 61; football heroine in 19–20, 35; game from the pitch 107–108; historiography of 91; protagonists in 91–93, 128; rise in 143; romantic football fiction 91–92; soccer moms (See soccer mom fiction) Wood, David 24, 93 working class writers 25–27 Would-Be Saint, A (Jenkins) 30–31 young adult fiction: age range 121–122; amount of football in 130–131; characteristics of 122; crossover novels 121; defining 119–120; definition of 137n1; expanding audience 120; fantasy fiction 121; female protagonists 128; graphic novels 121; market for 28; market growth 121; multiple genres in single narrative 120–121; pitch 108;

174

Index

protagonists 136; starting point for 120; subject matter and story lines 122; see also new adult (NA) fiction young adult football fiction: aimed at male readers 33; characteristics of 122–123; mature 84–85; protagonists 126–129; sophisticated characters in 28; sophisticated themes in 64 young female football fiction 61, 93–94, 93, 163–164 young female readers, novels for: emotional complexity in 119; female protagonists in 54, 129; on-field play in 132; Kick Off (Cole) 49; Lucy Zeezou’s Goal (Deep-Jones) 119, 129; in twentyfirst century 93

young male football fiction 82–85, 152–157 young male readers, novels for: 1970s 28; 1980s 33; 1990s 48; Aldine Football Library series 18; encourage reading 143; hard-hitting stories for 28; narrative structure in 82; oriented to match results 119; positive values in 143; reluctant readers and 48; sophisticated themes in 28; twenty-first century 58 Young Wife, The (Martin) 27 Yuill, P.B. 30 Zapata, Mariana 92 Zilla (Sage) 94