Five books for football fans

Posted on 1 October 2025 • Arts, Arts and social sciences

Football isn’t just played on the pitch – it lives on in the pages of countless captivating books that capture the drama on and off the turf. With the football season well under way, Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill, lecturer in creative writing at the OU has a selection of books to feast your eyes on.

1. Football against the enemy by Simon Kupar (published by Orion, 2003)

As a youth Simon Kupar went on a round-the-world trip to discover the significance of football in the culture and politics of some of the world’s most successful (and not so successful) football-playing nations. Part travelogue, part history, this book has become a classic of sports writing.

Kuper, whose father was an anthropologist, approaches his writing with a sociologist’s eye for the cultural details that make the game distinctive in different places.

From Brazil to Russia, the book considers how politics, cultural norms, and national characteristics influence football culture and styles of play: why do the Brazilians play with such technical brilliance and that carefree fluidity, for instance? Across 22 countries, Kupar attempts to answer this and other observations and explores the ways football has influenced politics and history, and vice versa.

2. A People’s History of Football, by Mickaël Correia (published by Pluto Press, 2023)

This is a history of the origins of football, sports teams and fandom. Correia recounts how the game began, from the schools, factories, and communities of Britain that then spread across the world.

He identifies two versions: the global monster that is the football industry in late capitalism, and an older and deeper current in the game often served as an expression of working-class identity, and a site of protest and solidarity.

He looks at its significance in popular movements across the world, encompassing the fan clubs in the Arab Spring protests.

And he observes the role the game played (and still does) in the struggles for women’s rights, and its significance in anti-colonial movements from Palestine to West Africa.

It offers a study of the uses the game has been put to by dictators and regimes and highlights its use as a focus for nationalism, and struggles for emancipation across the world.

3. Red or Dead by David Peace (published by Faber and Faber, 2014)

This fictionalised work is based on the story of Liverpool Football Club during the club’s first golden era: its elevation from being a second division also-ran to England champions and, ultimately, the cusp of becoming champions of Europe and Britain’s most successful club.

Peace has written several football-themed bestsellers, the best known being his novel The Damned United, about Brian Clough’s time at Leeds United.

In Red or Dead, we read how in 1959, a struggling Liverpool appoints Bill Shankly as manager. The Scot from an Ayrshire mining community, was a tough football man, but an innovator and one of the first football managers to become a charismatic public celebrity.

He reformed Liverpool to make it a club that played with a new style, a passing game devised in alignment with Shankly’s egalitarian ideals, where all players were part of the attacks. In so doing, he built a community at the club where everyone from the cleaner to the team captain was equal.

At the height of his powers, Shankly resigned, and motives remain unclear, but the speed with which he was marginalised by the club gives Peace’s novel a note of tragedy.. An epic work described by screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce as ‘a masterpiece’.

4. Inverting the Pyramid: the History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson (published by Orion, 2008)

From mass kickabouts in villages across Britain, to the factory teams that were all about relentless attack, and to the modern game where avoiding loss is the focus, this book charts the changes that have shaped the sport. Wilson is lead football writer for The Guardian and this is perhaps the most successful football book of recent times.

Meticulously researched and rich in detail, Wilson describes how the game has evolved. He details the changes in the social function and significance of the game, and the ways these changes affected tactics, club organisation and economics, and he chronicles the way the mass media has covered the sport.

The title refers to the inversion of the early tactical formation where teams would be set up with as many as ten attacking players in a triangular structure, coming to a point with the defence in the apex of a single player, the goalkeeper. It’s a must for any armchair fan, and a great guide for those discovering the game.

5. Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner (Bloomsbury, 2001)

The subtitle says it all: Winner examines the factors that made the Netherlands – one of Europe’s smaller countries – into a world football power, and how its liberal, inclusive, collaborative Protestantism shaped the Dutch game.

Winner describes how Liverpool, under manager Bill Shankly, played with an egalitarian ‘socialist’ style, where every player was expected to be technically skilled enough to hold up the ball and play it forward in quick, decisive passing moves.

This style was picked up and developed by Dutch coach Rinus Michels, who evolved the concept of ‘Total Football’ where any player could become part of the attack.

Michels managed Amsterdam club Ajax to numerous honours before moving to Barcelona, bringing his signature style of play – and his star player Johan Cruyff – with him, and influenced the Barça style of play to this day.

Barcelona would emerge the most successful team of the late 20th century and Cruyff was voted European Player of the Century in 1999. Michels went on to manage the Netherlands national teams of the 1970s and 1980s in four different spells, guiding them to World Cup Finals and to the European Championship win of 1988.

Picture: Pixabay