Football Literature: The Gift That Will Always Give

Jonny Brick

26th December 2020 | 11:05 PM

Football touches on every aspect of life, which means you can put a book about the game in most sections of a library: politics, economics and social science; languages and geography, when dealing with world football; mathematics, when dealing with statistics and data; and, of course, religion.

There are certain set texts that look intimidating, in terms of page length and subject matter, but once you start reading them, you can’t stop. Here are the Pringle cans of football literature.

Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid is the gold standard in its domain.

Brian Glanville – The Story of the World Cup

Born in 1931, the don daddy of football critics still has a World Soccer column and gets his grandson to help him type up his match reports, usually of Fulham FC. Glanville started his career writing stories in the 1950s and then more or less began the discipline of football criticism, rather than straight reportage, in Britain. His World Cup chronicle was first released in 1973 and has been updated every four years.

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