For many English football supporters, the state of the game in the 21st century is characterised by the “opulence and squalor” identified by David Goldblatt in The Game of Our Lives (Penguin Viking). It is a condition in which, as Goldblatt writes, the considerable benefits of a process of radical globalisation have been “sequestered by the few”.
Principal among those few are the leading members of the Premier League, the individual clubs who wallow in the revenue streams that gush from worldwide television deals and commercial partnerships (including, the author tells us, Manchester United’s East Asian “official noodles sponsor”), that enable them to pay promising teenage players £25,000 a week and their top performers 10 times that and more.
Goldblatt presents a clear-sighted, sometimes scathing and frequently depressing guide to the path by which the game reached this gilded but also troubled state, in which humbler clubs, now denied the comfort of a stable and vaguely equitable league structure, are condemned to stumble through penury towards extinction while their betters can enter sums in excess of £10m on their annual balance sheets in payments to players’ agents – a new class of super-rich – alone.
It’s easy to believe that, by cutting them off from the lives of their fans, such immoderate affluence has squeezed the humanity out of the present generation of footballers. The autobiography of Andrea Pirlo, the Italian midfield genius and one of very few of modern football’s superstars to have evaded the Premier League’s recruiters, suggests otherwise. I Think Therefore I Play (Back Page) refrains from the self-justification and score-settling to be found in the volumes published in the name of so many members of our own tarnished “golden generation”, preferring – with the aid of a ghostwriter, Alessandro Alciato – to display a mischievous wit and an acute gift for observation.
Pirlo witnesses a near-lethal training-ground fight involving the wayward talent Zlatan Ibrahimovic (“the only mean Swede”), gives us an interesting view of Silvio Berlusconi as a football-club president, recounts bollockings administered by a series of distinguished Italian coaches, and generally proves that a man obsessed with PlayStation games can also be in possession of an intellect as precise and graceful as his passing.
Louis van Gaal escaped the Premier League’s clutches during two decades of success around Europe, but Manchester United finally lured him this summer, and English football is still working out what to make of this aloof, abrupt, occasionally combustible Dutch manager, whose most famous words were delivered to a hapless journalist: “Am I so clever or are you so stupid?” The Dutch writer Hugo Borst’s O, Louis (Yellow Jersey) is a hugely entertaining free-form biography blending personal encounters with obsessive character analysis and will be required reading as Van Gaal attempts to lead United into a new era.
For 30 years, Phil Shaw’s The Book of Football Quotations (Ebury) has provided infallible entertainment. The ninth edition has competition in the shape of A Matter of Life and Death (Head of Zeus), in which Jim White contextualises and meditates on 100 famous football sayings from throughout the game’s history. Both writers know football; both books are richly enjoyable.
Two distinguished new cricket books from the same publisher stand at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of scale and mood. Chris Waters’ 10 for 10 (Wisden) applies a macro lens to the story of how the great Yorkshire left-arm spinner Hedley Verity walked off the field at Headingley at the end of one summer’s day in 1932 with those satisfyingly symmetrical bowling figures, having set a new world record in dismissing every one of Nottinghamshire’s batsmen. This is a beautifully researched vignette from the days when thousands would routinely turn out to watch matches between county sides made up almost entirely of locals.
Edited by Andrew Renshaw, Wisden on the Great War (John Wisden) is the cricketing equivalent of a Commonwealth war cemetery: page after page of cricketing lives lost between 1914 and 1918. Not just the 1,788 casualties whose obituaries appeared in the celebrated Almanack during the war, but many others whose stories subsequently came to light. Read it and weep at the sense of waste.
Weep, too, for Reeva Steenkamp, the model whose death at the hands of her boyfriend, the Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius, was the subject of a murder trial televised around the world this year. With Chase Your Shadow (Atlantic), John Carlin – whose book about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Springboks inspired the film Invictus – has given us the best account we are likely to get of the tragedy and its aftermath, with proper attention to the role of the remarkable judge Thokozile Masipa, whose insistence on considering only the facts as she reached her verdict certainly created controversy but did the reputation of her country’s legal system a big favour.
Standing out from the flood of books exploiting Britain’s cycling boom, Nicole Cooke’s The Breakaway (Simon & Schuster) is the bracing, often abrasive story of an outsider who found her own route to an Olympic gold medal and the world championship in the summer of 2008, fighting the system all the way.
• To order these titles with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to bookshop.theguardian.com.
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