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| Although some may argue that sport and politics aren’t a comfortable mix, in the end it’s hard to keep the two separate. Simon Kuper examines the ties that bind literature, politics and sport while Liz Crolley explores issues around women in sports writing. |
| Poet Ian McMillan had an inspired idea and talked Barnsley Football Club into helping him to achieve his goal. Here he talks about being the first poet-in-residence at a British football club. |
| Jim Sells from the Literacy Trust is manager of the Reading the Game project that aims to get young people into books through their love of football. Further details of that initiative can be found here. |
| Tim Parks has written on sport in both his fiction and non-fiction. Here he explores the dramatic impact of sporting thrills and spills in literature. |
| The British Council in Germany recently ran a project profiling football and literature. Here, British Council organiser Marijke Brouwer talks about the impact of this stunning event while writer Chris Dolan explains what it all meant to him. |
| Will Buckley and Sarah Wardle are both keen football fans and here explore this great British obsession. Will talks about how it is reflected in our literature generally while Sarah takes on football, poetry and fiction. |
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Hunter Davies offers an overview of footballing biographies and how they have changed over the years.
Football biographies are one of today’s bestselling, most popular books – much to the annoyance of many professional writers. Huge advances are paid, massive publicity and advertising and effort get put into them by the publisher concerned. That’s what upsets ‘real’ writers writing ‘real’ books. They feel they’re being ignored, short-changed.
Personally, I’m a bit embarrassed about the success of Gazza’s autobiography, Gazza: My Story. I happened to write it. So far, it’s earned about one million pounds, sold over 350,000 copies in hardback, got on The Sunday Times bestseller list for weeks, won the Sports Book of the Year award. I mention these figures because I know after forty years of writing some 40 other books that this sort of success very rarely happens to ordinary writers, however professional. They are lucky to earn £20,000 from a book and are over the moon if it sells 10,000 hardbacks. But with football today, we are into celebrity culture.
It is, however, a fairly recent phenomenon. It’s only in the last decade that footballers have become millionaire celebrities and their life stories have commanded enormous advances and attention. But of course books about football have been with us for almost as long as football itself.
Football as we know and love it today, watch and follow it, here, there and all over the world, has been with us since 1888 when the world’s first football league was formed in England.
The Football Association was formed even earlier in 1863 when the first laws of the game were laid down, but there wasn’t a league system and almost all players in the first few decades were English public school amateurs, playing amongst themselves.
Before that, for centuries, in different parts of the world, there are historic records of groups of lads chasing a ball about, but there were few rules and lots of fights. Some form of game, with some form of ball, throwing it or kicking, probably kicked off the moment we first crawled out of the caves.
So, 1888 was the 'Big Year' for football, with the arrival of that first professional league. Once there were league games, points to be won, a new profession was born – the football reporter. Sporting newspapers, which had existed, mainly concentrated till then on racing. Suddenly, they started covering football.
Football books, books covering some aspect of football, had first appeared around 1870, but they tended to be either about the rules, records or memories by public school boys of their public school teams. There were no biographies, as such.
Around the turn of the century, two of the earliest, most prized and most desirable football books did have quite a bit of detail on the leading players. In 1895, a richly illustrated book Famous Footballers 1895-1896 edited by Alcock and Hill appeared. Half was about rugby players, the other half about association football players – or soccer players as they became known (the word ‘soccer’, as opposed to rugger, was public school usage from an abbreviation of the word ‘association’).
Each star gets a full page studio photo, carefully posed, all very lush, and a short caption with the basics of their career. A good copy of this handsome book will cost you £500 today.
For a similar amount, you can also buy Association Football and the Men who Made it by Gibson and Pickford (1906). It comes in four volumes and contains some brief biogs of the leading players of the time, the clubs and administrators.
These early books were mainly about the amateur game, written by and for Oxbridge, public school types. When professionalism came in, and the leagues got formed, publishers didn’t think the life stories of horny-handed working-class players were worthy of notice. Newspapers might write about them, but there was a total lack of football biographies – i.e. a whole book devoted to the life of one player. They didn’t come in until the 1930s.
The earliest football biography I know of, in the form we recognise today, appeared in 1934. It was about Herbert Chapman, the famous manager of Arsenal and winner of many League titles in the 1930s. Then came another Arsenal-related life story – George Allison’s in 1938. Allison was a journalist, before becoming Arsenal’s manager, and he would appear to have written it himself.
After the Second World War, when football crowds reached record levels, there was a flood of football biogs and autobiogs. They usually appeared in hardback but on cheap paper; pretty slim, rarely more than 150 pages with nothing at all controversial, either about team mates or clubs and very little personal detail about our heroes.
It was suggested that they had been written by the player himself, though no reader over the age of 16 would have been taken in. They were usually written, anonymously, by a football hack on the local paper who probably only managed a few hours with the player himself and had to fill the book out with match reports. They didn’t sell many copies, 10,000 at most, and probably made the footballer no more than a few hundred pounds.
The great Sir Stanley Matthews wrote his autobiography Feet First, in 1948, published by Ewen and Dale, a firm long forgotten. No writer was credited. This did very well and Matthews went on to have several books written about his life.
One of my most treasured football biogs is Len Shackleton’s Crown Prince of Soccer that appeared in 1955. It’s famous in football circles for Chapter Nine, which is entitled The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football. When you turn to that chapter – you find a blank page. Ho ho.
The fashion set by Matthews 60 years ago, to have endless versions of roughly the same life story, continues to this day. By my reckoning, Bobby Robson has had three biogs, Alex Ferguson has done five, Keegan about seven, while George Best has done about 100. To sell well today, unlike in the past, you now have to spill the beans; about your drunken life, as with Best or Tony Adams, or your naughty behaviour. One of the fascinations of Gazza’s life was his honesty about his various obsessions.
As I write, I am about to sign a contract for another book about Gazza. But it will be a real book. Honestly.
Hunter Davies is a journalist, biographer and children’s book writer. |
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