The following top 10 represent the greatest football books ever published; how many of them have you read? There are tens of thousands of football books. We have recently updated our Privacy Policy. I just had to show them the s**t you’d written. He visits three Brazilians playing for a club in a village of 1,000 people in the Faroe Islands. You might be surprised to see Provided You Don’t Kiss Me declared FFT’s greatest ever football book. BA1 1UA. You are here: Category Top subscription boxes – right to your door, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Best sports books of 2019 In a year of great sporting events, Emma John picks the standouts books – including a memoir on pigeon racing and a searing polemic on racism in football Best books … Tweet pics of your football library to #FFTshelfie, More features every day at FourFourTwo.com. Yet nobody had tackled the ultimate football country since the American sociologist Janet Lever wrote the obscure but wonderful Soccer Madness in 1983. It’s the sort of thing that a young writer needed to do.”, With a small(ish) £5,000 budget, the 22-year-old set off on a Palinesque jaunt which saw him visit 22 countries in a crazy nine-month period – “I’d go around Europe for three months, using mainly Inter Rail tickets, then come home to London and wash my clothes, fly to Cameroon, come home and then fly off to South Africa.”, His aim? Get deeper insight into the world's best teams and players. Starting with a report filed from the 1960 European Cup Final at Hampden between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, it goes on to examine two dozen of the game’s giants – Busby, Shankly, Stein, Ferguson and Dalglish, all of whom hailed like McIlvanney from Scotland’s industrial south-west – plus Clough, Paisley, Finney, Greaves, Brady, Beckenbauer, Barnes and Best. When Bellos wrote this, he was Brazil correspondent for The Guardian, and like many daily journalists he has trouble structuring a book. Simon Kuper, Buy Fever Pitch here from Amazon in paperback, hardback and on Kindle. Your privacy is safe with us. . Our most popular products based on sales. Read this and you’ll never bemoan an international break again. Uli Hesse’s Tor! We never got to the champagne. Some of the most mesmerising passages deal with the star’s status as the only free man in the vast prison camp of Stalinist Hungary in the early-’50s. It’s a generalisation, of course, but just look at the books they write. Unfortunately there has been a problem with your order, Please try again or alternatively you can contact your chosen shop on. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, I Am Third: The Inspiration for Brian's Song: Third Edition, I Beat The Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond, Pass It On: Work Hard, Serve Others . What's left of a man when his job of years is taken away instantly? David Winner’s inventive examination expertly finds parallels between the Dutch’s Total Football and everything from the country’s landscape and architecture, to its art and children’s literature. FIFA doesn’t think football and politics should ever mix. “I’ll never forget being in Turin.” David Winner, Buy The Story Of Italia here from Amazon in paperback and in hardback, The Life And Times Of A Footballing Legend – Rogan Taylor & Klara Jamrich, 1998. Think Spanish football begins and ends with Barcelona and Real Madrid? And it’s not just the players. Reng is particularly adept at adopting a nuanced approach towards the root causes of Enke's illness. In the course of his epic adventure, he interviewed an eclectic mix of players and officials, including an Argentine general with unique views on the way the game should be played, a Berliner who’d suffered persecution at the hands of the Stasi simply because he supported his local team, and most bizarrely, Cameroon star Roger Milla, who had made headlines with his attempts to organise a tournament for pygmy tribes. Finally ready for a weekend kickabout? Visit our corporate site. Clough even becomes a sort of father figure to Hamilton, albeit one feeding him whisky for breakfast. If nothing else, Tempany’s writing will leave you in no doubt that justice must be served for the 96 people killed that day. Reng explains that Enke couldn't have opened up about this when he was playing because: "....a goalkeeper, the last bastion in defence, can't be a depressive.". Add some retro cool to your match-day wardrobe. Football can make a man even more ridiculous than drink can." When looking for the best football books, we'd actually steer clear of ones written by footballers. This set him apart from the previous notion of fandom as a hobby, and from his imitators who wrote cutesy accounts of watching bad football in the rain without any of Hornby’s honesty about their own lives. The 'black dog' returned just as Enke's star was in the ascendancy once again, and he seemed set to make a big impression at the 2010 World Cup. These are the teams that have to search far and wide for eligible players, overcome crippling political situations, and navigate the aftermath of natural disasters just to play their games, even though they know their chances of qualifying are remote. Few football cultures inspire as many clichés as Germany’s: ruthless, defensive, boringly efficient.