The Football Agent: The most hilarious, absurd, revealing and personal book about football you’ll ever read
by Knut Hoibraaten
(Knut Hoibraaten;
2 edition) £9.99

ME REVIEWING a book about football is a little like the Pope rating a Good Sex guide: you could justifiably argue that we lack the practical knowledge. I’ve made it my life’s work to avoid “sportsing” of almost any kind like pontiffs (should) avoid hook-ups — religiously.

But I came across former big-time Norwegian agents Knut Hoibraaten’s no-holds-barred footballer exposé when proofreading for his translator, and couldn’t, as they say, put it down. There is, of course, a considerable amount of football in it. But even I found that engagingly described, and warmed to his unwavering attachment to the “team of his heart,” Bergen’s S K Brann.

At the bottom, however, this is a story of an intelligent, amiable everyman trying to find his way in life — and, by his own admission, regularly sabotaging himself along the way — that anyone can relate to. 

Even at the height of his career, Hoibraaten remained at heart a fan. His book is a tale told not by the member of an elite but by “one of us,” albeit with killer access. Hoibraaten uses that access to sneak the reader in through the boardroom door to witness the absurdities that happen beyond it.

Insider-writers often boast of fearlessly exposing this or that but Hoibraaten can lay some claim to that particular T-shirt, having been sued by the Norwegian football association’s president.

I thought I detected a socialistic turn to Hoibraaten’s ethics — and, I suppose, the fact that someone in such a big-money game had any at all. From his groundbreaking USP of actually telling the truth about players’ strengths and weaknesses, to handing over his entire commission to a player with a sick father. 

There is also egalitarianism and generosity in his writing, fans who have yelled at the telly that they (if not their five-year-old or poorly sighted cat) could pick better players, will be gratified to know Hoibraaten agrees — such is the wheeler-dealing and obfuscation that abound at professional level, it’s a hit-and-miss affair.

Asking Hoibraaten about his politics, I was interested to hear that both his parents are Morning Star subscribers. His father Kjell spearheaded the unionising of a local shipbuilding company in the 1980s, the young Hoibraaten attended Communist Party summer camps and still celebrates May Day.

His father, living in Albania after divorce from Hoibraaten’s mother, would go on to start a football team — as you do — founding Ilir Viking FC in capital city Tirana.

Hoibraaten spent some time in Albania too, and it was in a beach bar, of all places, that one of his life’s defining moments occurred.

Aged about 20, he was playing the slot machines with the help of the bar’s only other customer and had just literally hit the jackpot when a car screeched to a halt outside.

A man rushed in and began a horrifyingly vicious assault on Hoibraaten’s companion, described in unsparing detail. It would leave the victim dead and Hoibraaten staring in disbelief at a policeman across the street who silently watched events unfold — only to walk away as the man lay dying.

Kneeling in the sand scrubbing the blood from his hands afterwards, Hoibraaten would never be the same. He was left with post-traumatic stress disorder, undiagnosed and untreated for several years. This affected him particularly in times of stress, when the murder would replay endlessly in his head as if he was perpetually trapped inside “my own private micro-movie theatre, with the inside of my eyelids as a screen.”

The trauma would later serve as a warning sign when Hoibraaten’s life had spun out of control.

But at first, his rise as an agent seemed unstoppable. His honesty meant he was soon trusted within the field. Jumping through the required hoops to become an officially accredited Fifa agent was a little less straightforward but didn’t hold him up for long.

Hoibraaten would be infuriated by the labyrinthine process, from the legal wording that stated only a human being could become an agent (this is precisely as surreal in Norwegian, I’m assured) onwards, but eventually passed the examination. Just how, is not revealed until the book’s final pages.

Along the way there are scrapes and Boys’ Own adventures. Entire floors of hotels are flooded, Hoibraaten becomes business partners with a childhood hero, former Brann centre forward Per-Ove Ludvigsen, and we are treated to the eye-watering story of the astonishing healing technique Ludvigsen endured for the sake of his football career years earlier.

Suffice to say that once a day, in the middle of a Norwegian wood, he experienced “an unknown, and probably raving mad, man’s finger poking around” where it had no right to be.

Brann itself suffers such vicissitudes over the years that Hoibraaten is moved to wonder if there isn’t some Zoroastrian demon of chaos lurking on the board incognito and learns from the inside how often, and why, bad signings are made.

He skewers the myth that star players necessarly make star directors. “He’s scored more than a hundred goals in his career, it’s obvious he’s going to make a good director. Hell, no!”

Just when he’s reached the pinnacle of his career, however, this self-confessed “student of self-destructive behaviour” pushes it too far.

When the crash comes, it is absolute. He finds himself in therapy and on the Norwegian equivalent of the dole — but his leftie principles don’t desert him and he is full of praise and appreciation for the counsellor and case workers who help him back on his feet, in a country where such genuine welfare is still possible.

As the book ends, Hoibraaten’s life is transformed — the former party boy is revelling in the joys of a straightforward job which he can ditch at day’s end for a farm outside Bergen, with fiancee Lena, two daughters and herds of sheep and ducks.

Hoibraaten clearly doesn’t miss the big earnings and glamour of his football life one bit but appreciates the real lesson of his own real-life leftie fairytale: that a happy man is one who has learned to “fall on his face, (and) how to get back up again.”

• Louise Raw is the author of ‘Striking a Light: the Bryant & May Matchwomen and their Place in History’ (Bloomsbury).