Book reviews

My life in football
by Howard Kendall
De Coubertin Books, £20
Reviewed by Simon Hart
From WSC 323 January 2014

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There is a lovely anecdote in Howard Kendall’s new autobiography about the day he signed Dave Watson for Everton from Norwich City. It was two days before the start of the 1986-87 season and Kendall’s attempt to complete the deal by five o’clock, so ensuring Watson’s availability for the opening fixture, had failed. Undeterred, he had the clock on the wall turned back an hour and got Watson to pose for a photo beneath it. “The Football League accepted it and Dave made his debut,” he writes.

Timing is a recurring theme in this recounting of Kendall’s career. He was ahead of his time as both a player and manager. He became the youngest player in an FA Cup final when, at 17 years and 345 days, he appeared for Preston against West Ham in 1964. At 20 he was wanted by Bill Shankly but joined Everton instead. He entered management with Blackburn at 33, winning promotion immediately. With Everton, he won the League, FA Cup and European Cup-Winners Cup before his 39th birthday.

So much so young, yet Kendall’s timing was out in one crucial respect: the post-Heysel ban denied Everton European Cup football and he cites this as the reason he left for Athletic Bilbao in 1987 (as a 45-year-old Alex Ferguson was still settling in at Old Trafford). Familiar stuff but what is new here is the revelation that an unnamed “Liverpool executive” had recommended him to Athletic after blocking their move for Kenny Dalglish – a “grim irony” indeed for Evertonians.

Written with James Corbett, who collaborated on Neville Southall’s autobiography, Love Affairs & Marriage: My Life in Football is very much what the second part of the title tells us. As befits an old-school gentleman, Kendall barely mentions his private life and dwells only briefly on potential controversies such as his departure from Notts County amid “ridiculous allegations” (unspecified here but drink-related). Yet there is much to enjoy nonetheless, not least the account of how he assembled his great Everton side in an era when a manager could create something special with a combination of homegrown talents, astute transfer dealings (he recalls the gambles taken on the injury-prone Peter Reid and Andy Gray), a trusting chairman – and morale-building Chinese dinners.

Kendall, with his man-management skills and love of the training pitch, differed so much from his own Everton boss Harry Catterick – from whom, he notes, he learned just one football lesson in six and a half years – yet the big question mark of his career is why after so much early success, his only subsequent trophy was an Anglo-Italian Cup with Notts County in 1995. Kendall reflects on his two less happy spells at Goodison in the 1990s, noting the lack of boardroom support and arguing that the influx of big money into the game meant it was no longer possible to build success on a budget. “Players were harder to sign,” laments the man whose first Everton buy, Southall, was recommended by a friend who ran a Llandudno pub. The end result is he was effectively finished as a manager at just 52 – a man out of time once more.

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by Sven-Göran Eriksson
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Barney Ronay
From WSC 323 January 2014

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When it comes to blockbusting autumn autobiographies this was always destined to be the Other One. Ah, Sven. Is there a more glazed, jaded and – here at least – unexpectedly fascinating major player in English football’s most recent decade of plenty? Sven-Göran Eriksson may not have Alex Ferguson’s trophy haul, planetary-scale publisher’s advance or enduring sense of heft. He may have spent the last five seasons in retreat from the years of Peak Sven, when he seemed permanently ensconced among the sober suited managerial elite, catnip to the billionaire, darling of the tabloids, golden-handshaked by assorted FAs and fossil-fuel newbie-powers.

He may have emerged at the end of it all, at least judging by Sven: My Story, as an oddly chastened and soulful one-time master of the universe, assailed not just by law suits and malevolent ex-girlfriends but by doubts, fears and regrets. But he definitely has the more interesting book, and by some distance too. In fact My Story is a genuine treat from its oddly fractured opening pages, all present tense and angsty, existential regret – “it is early December and the first snow has just arrived” – the football manager’s autobiography as reimagined by Bret Easton Ellis.

As early as page six we find Sven being swindled out of his fortune by a financial adviser and dismissing Nancy Dell’Olio with “We met in Rome during my time at Lazio. She was irresistible, then”. This is the familiar softly spoken, equivocal Sven, but fretted now with melancholy and producing after some delicately sketched lines on his childhood (“I was born into secrecy”) one of the more memorable football books of recent years.

There is a brilliant, and at times rather forgotten, managerial story in here: from the rise to precocious success at IFK Gothenburg, to glory in Portugal and Italy, to the initially giddy England years. There are plenty of laughs, many of them unintentional (as a young man Sven wrote a doctoral thesis on the 4-4-2 formation, and its unbending application in all circumstances). And there is footballing insight too, from the “revolution against individualism” of Sweden’s tactical awakening in the 1970s (sped by the young Roy Hodgson), through Sven’s dealings with Boniek, Baggio, Beckham and the rest.

Plus there is of course lots of sex. Before long we’re hearing about Sven’s first girlfriend whose father “ran a support group for people who had been caught shooting moose illegally”. Later indiscretions include the occasion Sven was discovered reclining nude on the sofa of a cuckolded husband and ended up walking home through the streets of Stockholm without his trousers, through the familiar tabloid narrative of Nancy, Ulrika Jonsson and assorted others.

Throughout it is a strangely taut and vulnerable account, with a jarring skin of honesty. This is not so much a football book as the story of a man trapped in a series of scenes, a machinery of desire and ambition that seems at times to have overwhelmed him. Towards the end, while coaching in China, Sven describes going out for a bicycle ride on his own just after reading the proofs of My Story for the first time. “I felt depressed. Where had the years gone? My children? Friends? The women? Time? It hurt to think back.”

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Barcelona vs Real Madrid
by Sid Lowe
Yellow Jersey, £18.99
Reviewed by Dermot Corrigan
From WSC 322 December 2013

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“Barcelona good, Madrid bad” is a pretty common idea among English-speaking football fans. Even those who question the Catalan club’s “football philosophy”, or its board’s financial dealings with Qatar and Brazil, still often see Barça as purer than, and morally superior to, their rivals from the Spanish capital.

This idea can be traced all the way back to George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia – and is just plain wrong, according to Sid Lowe’s new contribution to the growing pile of English language books on Spanish football.

Fear And Loathing In La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid takes a broader approach than most, looking closely at the impact of political and cultural trends on the game, including epigraphs from writer Antonio Machado and Swansea City attacker Michu. The early 20th century poet’s quote is of “the two Spains”, a famous line referring to the pre-Civil War right-left political divide. But Lowe appears to agree more with the modern player’s preference to avoid choosing one or the other.

The strongest chapters consider the effect of the 1936-39 conflict on football and turn over some pretty widely held preconceptions. Madrid (the city) was not Franco’s base, instead it suffered the fiercest nationalist attacks. This meant Real Madrid had to stop playing official games, their ground was ruined, and their republican club president Rafael Sánchez Guerra was imprisoned when the city finally fell to Franco’s forces. Barcelona was less directly impacted by the fighting, so FC Barcelona kept playing in the Catalan Championship and Mediterranean League, then toured North America.

During the first 15 years of the dictatorship the Catalan club were also more successful, winning five La Liga titles to Real Madrid’s none. In those years the Barça boardroom was stuffed with well-connected businessmen, just as it is now. Professional football clubs – in Spain under Franco, just as in England under Tony Blair – tend to go with the political flow. Which explains Barcelona’s current embrace of Catalan nationalism.

Lowe’s impressive list of interviewees includes Alfredo di Stéfano, Johan Cruyff, Luís Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Andrés Iniesta. He uncovers new archival evidence about how Barça president Josep Sunyol died in 1936, and why Di Stéfano joined Madrid not Barça in 1953. There are also neat mentions of Barça’s (unwitting) role in the murder of Leon Trotsky, as well as Madrid’s links to the Beatles in the 1960s and Pedro Almodovar in the 1980s. It’s a rare book that discusses ETA (the Basque separatist organisation) and Michael Owen on the same page.

The weakest section is towards the end, as by now there is little new to say on José Mourinho the ex-translator versus Josep Guardiola the former ballboy. But that’s a minor quibble. We have already seen how closely Spain’s two biggest clubs have mirrored each other through the years. Real Madrid and Barcelona do not represent different strands in Spanish history, or competing political points of view, they’re just two sides of the same coin.

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The unknown story of football’s true talent spotters
by Michael Calvin
Century, £14.99
Reviewed by Terry Staunton
From WSC 322 December 2013

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Shaun O’Connor arrived at the Potters Bar pitches to check on the progress of some under-12 players who’d shown potential, but when the referee for a neighbouring game between teams of under-9s failed to show, he volunteered to officiate. He was about to start a new job with Arsenal’s academy and one eight-year-old, playing on the wing for Luton, caught his eye.

“This kid was quick. His close control, running with the ball, was the best I’d ever seen. He had fantastic balance, and didn’t mind leaving his foot in. He had that nasty streak you need, had such a will to win.” The kid in question was Jack Wilshere, but while there’s an obvious romanticism to O’Connor’s right-place, right-time tale, it’s hardly typical of the experiences of the scouts Michael Calvin, a writer for the Independent On Sunday, focuses on in this engrossing book.

True, there are equally fortuitous stories about the discoveries of the likes of Raheem Sterling and Jack Butland, but for the most part the author paints a picture of an aspect of the football world where the hours are long and lonely, while the rewards are few. More common are the examples of scouts dragging themselves to lower-league and youth matches for little more than petrol money and a half-time sandwich, the unsung shadows of the game where talent-spotters spend as much time watching each other for leads as they do the action on the pitch.

The bottom end of the business offers little in the way of job security, Calvin finds, as changes in the higher echelons of a club can result in new brooms bringing in their own people to scour the UK and beyond for the future Wilsheres of the game. He also draws intriguing contrasts between clubs’ attitudes to scouting; whereas one unnamed old school manager has yet to embrace email, David Moyes went as far as setting up a “secret” room at Everton where sports scientists and strategists kept him updated via the internet on as many as 200 potential signings at any one time.

Calvin learns that this modern approach owes a lot to Billy Beane, the American baseball figure whose use of statistical analysis turned around the underperforming Oakland Athletics, a rags-to-riches story that became the Oscar-nominated film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Beane. Arguably, the shift towards such practices has been propelled by the influx of US owners into the English game, but television and the internet play equally significant roles, the availability of matches to be watched and rewatched meaning clubs are less reliant on the humble bloke on the terraces scribbling away in a notebook.

Ultimately, The Nowhere Men scores on two fronts: as a history of scouting and its increasingly quaint and outdated traditions, and as a pointer towards the more scientific methods that look likely to determine how most future stars are found and nurtured, as the financial investments – and potential payoffs – grow ever larger.

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Partizan pleasure, pain and paranoia
by James Moor
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Marcus Haydon
From WSC 322 December 2013

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The collapse of communist-era structures had a profound effect on football in central and eastern Europe, but the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia created even deeper fault lines. Modern-day Serbia, which was home to Europe’s best team 22 years ago, now has the continent’s 25th best (or 29th worst, depending on your perspective) league according to the UEFA coefficients. Its historic powers, Partizan and Red Star Belgrade, perpetually battle for supremacy in a competition whose numbers are topped up by minnows from the country’s provinces and capital’s suburbs.

With the competitiveness of the Yugoslav era gone, the corruption and off-field problems that blight the game seem to carry added importance. Clubs are no longer arms of the state but continue to be exploited for political and commercial reasons. On the terraces xenophobia is a persistent issue, leading to attacks founded on race or, as is more common in this part of Europe, ethnicity. For James Moor, an Arsenal fan posted in Belgrade by the Foreign Office, football presented him with a conduit through which to observe and attempt to decode Serbia’s complexities. Initially it is his way of making local friends – it is they who are responsible for his allegiance to Partizan – but it ends up taking him across the country to experience firsthand the varied ethnic tapestry and supporter culture.

The book is presented chronologically, following Partizan during a season in which they are eliminated from the Champions League qualifiers by Shamrock Rovers, lose three times to rivals Red Star, sack their management team mid-season and see their two main supporters’ groups at constant loggerheads. Oh, and they win the league. Taking his posting seriously, Moor engages quickly with the country and its language, and while his anecdotes about watching Arsenal title successes on television and a clumsy description of the “English Championship League One” can leave you suspicious of his credentials, he makes up for it in the context of his new surroundings with a strong awareness of regional history and contemporary politics. A trip to Novi Pazar, where the population has a Bosniak (Slav Muslim) majority, is carefully framed with valuable non-footballing context and his detailed translations of chants, banners and terrace conversations add cultural currency to what are otherwise just descriptions of Serbian league matches from two years ago.

Despite making a living from diplomacy, Moor manages to avoid the occupational trait of using a great number of words to say very little of note on complex or controversial issues. Equally, he is also not guilty of simply feeding the reader polemics from his terrace acquaintances without first coupling them with some objective analysis of his own. The prose can at times get drawn a little too much into the “banter” of the matchday experience – a questionably large number of things are “awesome” – but the enduring feeling is that it’s heartening to see work such as this published.

As Jonathan Wilson points out in the foreword, this is essentially “a book about the second most famous team in Belgrade” and, accordingly, both Moor and his publisher deserve great credit for bringing it to print at all. Hopefully the knowledge and insight offered in this example will inspire more publishers to show similar faith.

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