football n fiction, ...they started walking out together.

Now I've talked about defining it. I've talked about the books. I've talked about the history of this lovely wee genre. I've even talked about how it works. Now it's about time I start putting it all together. It's going to take weeks. The progression will be fractured and distracted with all the usual nonsense - journal entries, updates on my PhD, spurious argument and obviously football books as I find them. [It's been beyond mental in thesimplestgame back office. It's nice to be back]

The first question I need to address is... Is football fiction really a genre?

Football fiction may have started with Shakespeare. In act one, scene four of King Lear (1606), the Earl of Kent kicks and taunts Oswald with the line, “Nor tripped neither, you base football player.” I have read too that there are references in The Comedy of Errors (1592). So, it's possible that football fiction has been around for longer than the modern version of the game, which developed some 260 years later. I doubt it though.

In Ray of the Rovers: the working class heroine in popular football fiction 1915-1925 Alethea Melling puts football fiction's roots in working-class “factory or dialect fiction”. But there are examples of football fictions existing before that. In The Encyclopedia of British Football, Cox and company do a good job of contextualising the history of 'football literature', but in following Alethea's lead, they spurn the chance to create a definition themselves.

The only other uses of the term football fiction I have encountered are for classification purposes on the East Sussex (England) public library website and on a gay erotic fan fiction site. I hope the two never get mixed up, the East Sussex WI's knickers' would be so twisted for so long, there would be tears in every brown eye.

In an attempt to broaden the field to include other forms of football writing (a practice I want to steer things away from), including non-fiction, plays, revues, photography collections and poetry, DJ Taylor, in Rally Round You Havens! and John Turnbull, Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, in The Global Game have assigned the collective works of football writing the distinction of being soccer or football literature.

This was the definition I developed (in an earlier blog). It raised a couple of eyebrows during the auld confirmation process.

Any work of fiction with a significant reliance on football as a central or substantive element of the narrative.

It's still a little spongy. It'll need some reworking, particularly around what qualifies as significant or substantive, but what it does is offer a centre spot, somewhere to play from until the field firms up. Otherwise where would you start?

Do you include Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave (1969) for example? As John Turnbull pointed out on this site, it’s about a boy and his bird, but there is also a single, narratively ‘significant’, 20 page game (in a book of 159 pages). Do you include John King’s The Football Factory (1996) even though the reader rarely sees any actual football?

Albert Camus and the boy Nabakov have both written about football - particularly their own experiences as players, (see the Global Game site, its full of great stuff like this), should I consider their work? The Plague (1970) is full of football references, well not full, but it is mentioned a number of times.

I would say no to Shakespeare on the grounds of historical perspective. King’s trilogy The Football Factory , Head Hunters (1997) and England Away (1998), works of stunning violence and football hooliganism, are saturated in the parlance of football culture and are assuredly first eleven. Barry Hines makes the subs bench as Billy Casper, the wee boy in A Kestrel for a Knave, is colourfully and clearly developing as a character in the scene that, more importantly, is a sustained description of a football game. As for Camus and Nabakov, I’m not so sure.

This all seems well and good, except people have been making stuff up about football since football began; in skewed match reports, transfer speculation filled newspapers, websites and ‘pub-storytellers’ recounting great events. If you counted everyone who’d allegedly attended Scotland’s defeat of England, then reigning World Champions, in 1967 in Glasgow, the stadium would have been filled at least three times over.

It'll do though. More next week.

...so far so few

Right in the middle of writing another book review I remembered that I’m supposed to be looking at this for my Pee Haitch Dee where I'm going to be looking at mapping football fiction. Ye know carving out the corners of my own shadows and an area of expertise, a wee niche if ye like, so if nothing else, the peeps at Uni think I know what I’m talking about. Regular readers of this wee bubble in the bath full of washing liquid world that is blogger may already have worked out the ruse.

Okay seriously, this is where thesimplestgame is up to.

As far as I can tell and this is absolutely disputable, there are maybe 60 -70 books which could be classed as football fiction. I reckon that’s about three good shelves worth in my artistic hovel.

The young adult fiction in Gracie, Megs, Jasper and a couple of other very similar examples, its probably the only place in the book world where the concentration is so great. Almost a whole shelf worth by the time you tie in the sequels.

There’s the Hoolie lit with the likes of your John King trilogy, the largest part of the Dougie Brimson collection (see Dougie's own site)) and more recent discoveries such as Away Days by Kevin Sampson giving fans with a taste for football related pugilism something to read. It's a section which probably takes up about the next most space. It's an area I’m going to revisit soon.

There are, relatively speaking, loads of good short story collections from Nicholas Royle’s A Book of Two Halves, For Whom the Ball Rolls by Ian Plenderleith and my personal favourite The Hope that Kills Us edited by Adrian Searle are all good examples.

There’s lipstick football fiction with the likes of Karren Brady and Siobhan Curham specialising in the WAGS – wives and girlfriends – view of the game.

In Dominic Holland and Des Dillon’s books The Ripple Effect and ...The Busby Babes respectively, if not respectably, there’s the tales of teams saved from extinction by hair brained schemes and ghosts of football past.

There are crossovers too. In Pitch Black there’s dark emotive lad lit. and other male masculinity crises in the likes of The Man Who Hated Football by Will Buckley. In Sexy Football there’s some soft porn and there's even some detective stuff in the Montalban book Offside.

And of course there’s The Damned United, the literary end of the football fiction shelf, while fan fiction like that of Roddy Doyle in The Van and other places, Jonathon Tulloch's The Season Ticket and at a non-fcition stretch Hornby's Fever Pitch all mingle in the stand.

I’ve to review some of these yet and there’s a few more I know of that I aim to acquire in the coming months.

If this article felt like one of those episodes in a sitcom where they sit on the couch and remember all the funny stuff that happened to them over the years (usually for lack of a script), that’s because it was. Mind you, this wasn’t about saving myself anything, it was about keeping track. There’s nothing worse than when you stop to watch a game in the park and it’s half way through and you don’t know what the score is. Well now you do. Football fiction eh? There’s a bit more to it than I expected.

The Hand of God and the 2008 Euros.

I’ve been feasting on the European Championships. If football was food I’d look like Maradona does now… but I’ll get back to him.

There’s nothing for it, Austria and Switzerland have played host to an awesome display of the beautiful game. Has to be one of the best international tournaments in my life time. I can’t remember watching better.

Not a single team had a solid defence. Poor for the players, excellent for spectators. Goals everywhere. Analogies with sieve’s and other things with holes in have been rife. People thought there was no way Russia would lose that many goals to the Spaniards a second time not after the way they done the Dutch. The ball is round right enough.

Thanks must go to the nations of Europe who, in leaving their defensive tactics at home, made a valuable contribution to a rare football extravaganza, one that really has lived up to the hype.

Only a couple of games have been a bit lumpy, most notably Italy vs Spain (wince!), but the plot, being completely unpredictable, thickened all the way to the finale where the Spanish Armada finally grabbed the gold. I'm pleased for them and for football too.

With so many twists, turns and goals the entire football show had all the makings of a good drama. It made me wonder if the novella I’m knocking together for my PhD, which is tied to the 2010 World Cup, will maintain the same level of excitement. I also wondered if there’s any other football fiction set at or during a specific international tournament.

I did think of three which come close…

The third, and arguably best written, of John King’s ‘hoolie-lit’ trilogy England Away sees his Chelsea head hunters make some violent appearances in Holland and Germany on their way to watch their national team clash in an international fixture. I don’t think it would count as a tournament based football fiction.

The same would be said for me old mate, Dougie Brimson’s (see the interview) The Crew. It's about a team of football fans, three crews actually, who plan and execute a hoolie-handed Italian Job while England play the Azzuri in Italy. The old bill try to stop them scoring, but their defence is a bit like the Germans.


The Hand of God Squad are a couple of opportunistic Scotland fans who’ve named themselves after that famous moment in Argentina’s defeat of England in the World Cup (22 June 1986). Gordon Legge penned a wee cracker for the The Hope That Kills Us about the lads and how girls and love get in the away of their international game attendance record. Again its not tournament based, but it has the most games in it.

I will take a closer look at the football fiction of Legge and King in future posts.

I can’t think of any other examples. Maybe you know some, maybe you’re writing one. I’d really appreciate it if someone could point me towards any good, bad or indifferent offerings. They'd be worth their weight in eh...burgers?