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The End is Nigh

As football’s contest approaches its climax Philosophy Football’s MARK PERRYMAN reviews books for those who measure their years out in seasons not months. 

THE Carabao, or those of us a tad old skool, League Cup Final, is long gone. The FA Cup staggering its past-the-sold-by-date towards the final, ditto the Champions and Rich Runners-Up League.  

Up and down the divisions clubs have jostled their way to win promotion, staved off relegation or clung on to mid-table mediocrity.  And for the few, not the many, the Premier League title.

Before you know it, all this will be done and dusted ready for it to begin all over again — the 2019/20 edition. 

What better time, therefore, to reflect on the modern meaning of our much-fabled people’s game?  

For a comic-strip insight mixing fine art with bittersweet commentary, there’s none better than David Squires. His strips, 2014-18 handily now collected in one very tasty volume Goalless Draws. 

Stuart Roy Clarke likewise takes a visual approach to locating the lost meaning of football, this time, though, via a photography that he has made his own under the rubric “homes of football.” 

Clarke’s latest collection, The Game, combines the finest photographic record of the changes in football, with a superb accompanying text from the one of the founders of football’s academia, John Williams. Together they make for a superlative double act.  

Part of Clarke and Williams’s argument is that there really is no substitute for “being there.” This is an experience that has changed markedly since the ’89 Hillsborough tragedy, a moment caught most poignantly by David Cain’s book-length poem Truth Street.  

For the most part those changes have been for the better but no-one can pretend that “being there” is the same any more as it once was, a point expertly made by Duncan Hamilton in his new book Going to the Match, a journey to games which confirms that despite all the worst efforts of corporate homogeneity, the proverbial wind and the rain of 90-plus minutes in the stands cannot be beaten. 

What the modern “match-day experience” (ugh!) has become is the effort to convert our fandom from active participants to passive consumers. 

Dave Roberts is having none of that. In Home and Away he travels round non-league football to find a game largely untouched by the trappings of what has become disapprovingly known as “Mod£rn Football.”

Another way of escaping how our domestic game is consumed can be via a European away weekend. For an excellent starting point towards choosing such a trip, read Neil Frederik Jensen’s Mittel and discover the appeal of heading off to see a game in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.  

A more familiar trip would, of course, be to La Liga or the Bundesliga. For the former, pack a copy of Jonathan Wilson’s latest, The Barcelona Legacy in which Wilson provides his now customary digest of tactics to better understand the game unfolding before our eyes.  

And for Germany, take with you Uli Hesse’s Building the Yellow Wall for a superb account of this most idiosyncratic of clubs, not least because this was where Jurgen Klopp learnt his managerial trade and Jadon Sancho is currently building his formidable playing career. 

But of course, the biggest — and proved to be the best — away trip of the past 12 months has to be the one those lucky England fans made to World Cup 2018, bringing home England’s first World Cup semi-final appearance in 28 years for their troubles. 

In How Football (Nearly) Came Home, Barney Ronay tells the full, and unforgettable story of that glorious English summer of football.

Of course some football destinations are more welcoming than others.  

That’s not to say fans shouldn’t take the risk of being pleasantly surprised. Andrew Hodges helps readers towards that happy outcome by unpicking the more complex reality behind the fearsome reputation of Croatian football in Fan Activism, Protest and Politics: Ultras in Post-Socialist Croatia.

Michael Calvin has an unrivalled reputation for chronicling football’s pluses, and all too many minuses, via a series of award-winning books. 

His latest, State of Play, ranges over stories of players, managers and clubs to create the kind picture of English football that rarely makes it on to the back pages yet is way more important than who scored what against whom. 

Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s The Club doesn’t have much doubt what has caused the perversion of the sport, the unseemly wealth and disruptive influence of the Premier League.

The latest edition of Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski provides a highly accessible, and entertaining, framework to understand the Premier League’s evolution. 

Or for an unashamedly radical deconstruction of the entire edifice Gabriel Kuhn’s Soccer vs The State, also now available in a new edition, should satisfy all who harbour such an ambition. 

If on the other hand the preference is for an alternative universe of football then David Wardale’s Wasting Your Wildcard is a hugely entertaining — not to mention indispensable — guide to that mid-1990s throwback, Fantasy Football, and I add that historical footnote writing as the co-founder of another football-inclined mid-1990s throwback.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled “sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction” aka Philosophy Football

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