BOOK REVIEWS

The Age Of Football by

David Goldblatt (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £10.49 (PBK), saving £2.50 on rrp) PUBLISHED in paperback towards the end of 2020, the enormous breadth of David Goldblatt’s The Age Of Football proves a worthy successor to his last work, The

Ball Is Round: A Global History Of Football.

At almost 700 pages long, this is not a book you’re likely to devour in a single sitting. Nor would you want to. After all, the dominant themes running through The Age Of Football (an exploration of

21st century society, politics and economics, as well as football) justify the space Goldblatt devotes to them.

Essentially, Goldblatt charts the beautiful game’s burgeoning popularity, highlighting the degree to which governments, global corporations and institutions have woven themselves into the game’s fabric – and not always for the better. No surprises there, then, but football’s unwitting globalisation continues to proceed handin-glove with those who merely seek to exploit its money-making capabilities.

Corruption is never far away from Goldblatt’s narrative, whether he’s considering the game’s popularity across South America, Africa, Asia, Europe (where it’s rife) or the Middle East where he highlights the degree to which rich Arab states can use football as a foreign policy tool; the acquisition of PSG is a case in point.

In a book with many hair-raising tales of corruption at its heart, it’s inevitable that so much space is devoted to FIFA, a law unto its grubby self which avoided detailed scrutiny of its officers and financial accounts for years. The definitive, true story of FIFA is yet to be written, but Goldblatt whets the appetite here, even though I suspect he may only be scratching the surface.

One interesting aside is Goldblatt’s (pre-pandemic) examination of the League of Ireland. Domestic Irish football was, surprisingly, in decline from the late 1960s, but this has accelerated since the early 1990s ever since the Premier League was born.

Goldblatt estimates that more than 100,000 Irish fans travel as football tourists every year, primarily to watch top-flight English matches, as their domestic competition rots on the vine.

That football should be woven into society’s fabric and politics isn’t surprising, but the game’s ability to generate extraordinary volumes of cash has, inevitably, attracted an often dominant cohort of owners, administrators and other hangers-on who are not football fans, merely associates. Beware: reading this could make you angry.