Recommendations from our site
“Nick Hornby doesn’t revel in, ‘Oh I’m such a football geek, isn’t that funny?’ He treats it as something suspect. And he describes how he uses supporting Arsenal to escape his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and lots of things like that. It’s also a bit of a social history of England from the 1960s through to the 1980s. And nobody had written a book like it – it was completely original. Nick Hornby was a not very successful, lower-middle-class bohemian, and when he was telling friends at the time, ‘Oh I’m writing a book about being an Arsenal fan,’ his friends all thought, ‘Oh God! Poor Nick.’ Nobody expected this book. It’s completely honest and it’s very funny. “ Read more...
Best Football Books (in English)
Simon Kuper, Journalist
” I picked this book, not just because it’s a terrific book—it’s largely a personal memoir, with the fate of the Arsenal football team through the 1970s and ‘80s as a kind of backbone upon which to hang Hornby’s story—but also because it highlights the peculiar nature, the kind of obsessive but also accidental nature, of sporting fandom. Sporting fandom is very interesting philosophically: it’s a case of partiality, partisanship, valuing something when you can see that what you value isn’t going to be valued by other people.” Read more...
The best books on Philosophy and Sport
David Papineau, Philosopher
“It sets the standard for writing about football that isn’t just statistics and ‘this is who won the FA Cup in 1918’. In about 1990 there was this sea change in the way people expressed themselves about football – more emotionally. Nick’s book sets the stall out for that. It shows the inner life of the football fan and describes how men can be thinking about football all the time – that it’s always there, that it is the backdrop to your thoughts if your team is about to play an important match. It’s very easy to read and very easy to connect to if you’re a football fan.” Read more...
David Baddiel, Comedians & Humorist
