B/R World Soccer Page Christmas 2008 Book Recommendations

Over the last couple of weeks, I've contacted many of the regular contributors of the World Soccer page on Bleacher to recommend their favourite reads for Christmas presents.

I'd like to thank them all for the time they put into contributing to this article, a community-wide piece that has brought a list of great books together so that everyone should find at least something that would pique their interest, or at least be a good book to give someone as a present.

I apologise if I didn't contact you to contribute, and feel free to add anything you feel is worthwhile. After-all,  it is a community wide article.

So please enjoy the list of books. I'll definitely be picking some up.

Regards and Happy Christmas,

Willie

Andrew McNair's recommendations

I recommend two books, the first being Left Foot Forward by Garry Nelson. It is a MUST read for any football fan. It's the story of his second last season as a pro with Charlton Athletic in the first division back in '94-95 before the money rolled in. Talks of his troubles paying his mortgage (imagine not knowing if you'd get a new contract with bills to pay) and amazingly car sharing to keep travelling costs down.
 
A lifetime away from modern football, but not so long ago. Nelson was also Charlton's PFA rep and it's full of great little insights. I've read it twice.
 
The second is My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach.

Stuart Imlach was once an FA Cup final Man of the Match (back when it really meant something), but after his death his son Gary realised he didn't know that much about his dad's career. So he decided to research it and write a book about it.
 
Within a year of his Man of the Match performance, Imlach was playing third-division football after two transfers (in those days, clubs owned players). Shockingly revealing and a gripping tale.

Willie Gannon's recommendations

Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino by Paul Kimmage and Tony Cascarino.

For those who don't know, "The Ice Cream Man" is one of the most beloved soccer players ever to play for Ireland. Except he wasn't from Ireland. He was Italian, and left that little detail out when Ireland came looking for him.

Charting the life story of Cascarino, and starting out with him wanting to be a hairdresser while his dad wanted him to work on building sites, this book is probably the  most honest sports book ever written. The book offers a brutal assessment of Cascarino as a player, admitting he had the same skills as a wheelbarrow. But offers insights into his battles with the mental side of the game, with his constant wars with the voice.

But most interestingly the book offers you a birds-eye view of his life off the field, from his infidelities that eventually lead to his marriage's breakdown, to the inferiority complex instilled in him by his family, and ultimately to his triumphant return to top-level football in France after clubs in England and Scotland wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole.

Cascarino leaves no stone uncovered, and often dismisses large chunks of his career to concentrate on his life off the field.  Cascarino is one of the few athletes to actually allow the reader to see him as a person, warts and all.

I couldn't recommend this book highly enough to every fan—but especially soccer fans.

Only a Game? by Eamon Dunphy.

Eamon Dunphy is one of the most controversial journalists and analysts in the media today. But few people realise he was a professional footballer in the '60s and '70s. And although he wasn't blessed with great skill, he did have a great work ethic.

Only a game? follows Dunphy as he played for Millwall in the 1973-74 season. By this stage of his career, Dunphy had become somewhat of a journeyman and an outspoken figure within the game who wasn't afraid to air his views.

But realising he hasn't got too long left in the game, he is relishing the new season with his club. With a few decent signings they should easily win Division Two and get promoted to the top league, where the likes of Leeds Utd and Liverpool lie in wait.

Told in diary form, Only a Game follows Dunphy and Millwall from the start of the season where everyone is optimistic about promotion, to Dunphy being dropped from the team and eventually sold. It shows Dunphy's despair as the best players at the club are sold, only to be replaced by tippy-tappy kids who now think they've made it.

The book also shows how the clubs at the time really owned the players.  The houses they lived in and the cars they drove could be taken away by merciless managers. It offers an insight into player's lives, where you don't exist if you're not in the team and all of sudden your social circle is removed. It shows that football in the '70s was a harsh world where nothing was tangible.

Dunphy shows the professional side of the game to the reader in an unglamorous way and that professional footballers are filled with the same fears as the rest of us. Dunphy slowly realising that Millwall want to get rid of him, but that they own the house he and his wife live in is a particularly good example.

The book doesn't offer a fairy-tale ending because the season didn't have one—for either Dunphy or Millwall. Essential reading for anyone interested in knowing what professional sportsmen go through—especially in the '70s.

Guido Merry's Recommendations

More Than Just A Game by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close.

This is the astonishing story of how a unique group of political prisoners and freedom fighters found a sense of dignity in one of the ugliest hellholes on Earth—Robben Island.

Despite all odds, regular torture, beatings, and daily backbreaking hard labour, these extraordinary men turned soccer into an active force in the struggle for freedom. For nearly 20 years, the political prisoners on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was infamously incarcerated, somehow found the energy, spirit and resolve to organise a 1,400 prisoner-strong, eight-club football league which was played with strict adherence to FIFA rules.

The prisoners themselves represented a broad array of political beliefs and backgrounds, yet football became an impassioned and unified symbol of resistance against apartheid.

They refused to let their own political differences sway their devotion to the sport, which allowed them to organise and maintain leadership right under the noses of their captors. This league not only provided sanctuary and respite from the prisoners' cruel surroundings—it kept their minds active, and many credit it with keeping them alive.

When Friday Comes by James Montague.

While religion often violently divides the Middle East, the countries of the world's most explosive region share one thing - a deep and obsessive love of the beautiful game.

James Montague travelled there for three years, observing the region's cultures and politics through the prism of football and interviewing all the major teams along the way. He soon realised that to understand the game there is to understand its people.

For as much as football forms an unlikely common thread between different countries, the sport also reflects what is unique in the national characters of those who play, support and organise it.

When Friday Comes is an insightful and humorous account of Montague's journey, during which he gets stoned with the Yemeni FA, harangues Iran's Deputy President at the World Cup, has a gun pulled on him by genocidal Lebanese football fans, encounters a rioting group of fanatical young Jews singing 'I'm West Ham 'til I Die' in mockney English, and was made to strip and then dance for the Iraqi national team.

Joe Guarr's recommendations

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinnis was a remarkably-entertaining read. Joe McGinnis takes on a role as a sort of "embedded journalist" with a small football club in rural Italy.

He chronicles their improbable rise out of the depths of Serie C2 all the way up to two seasons in Serie B. McGinnis writes about a club owner involved in shady business, a stubborn manager, and scandal in Italian football years before Juventus was dropped down to Serie B.

The team had no business competing with teams who had spent time in Serie A, but somehow they did enough to be competitive.

Castel di Sangro had some notable players in their history as well. Carlo Cudicini, Vincenzo Iaquinta and Gionatha Spinesi all spent time with the club.

Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos by Gavin Newsham is one of my favorite books. It gives a great account of the beginnings of the NASL and its rapid demise, through interviews and player and owner accounts.

There are stories of Pele arriving in New York and suddenly making football relevant. We also learn how the Cosmos went from a struggling franchise in a struggling league to a football juggernaut with the likes of Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto on their roster.

Even more impressive than the club's rise is how quickly everything fell apart when Pele finally left.

It makes an American football fan glad that MLS isn't following the same path.

Among The Thugs by Bill Buford. If you want an up-close look at hooliganism, you need to read this book. It's by far the most disturbing work of non-fiction I've ever read.

Buford gets very hands-on with his research, spending time with several groups of hooligans throughout England and Europe. The book ends with Buford getting beaten up by Italian police at World Cup 1990.

Buford learns that many hooligans don't particularly care for football at all, and for them hooliganism is just a means for political expression.

As disturbing as it was, it was also impossible to put down. It's fascinating to get into the minds of those involved with the hooligan culture.

Will Cooper's recommendations

Football Lexicon by Leigh and Woodhouse

For the true football connoisseur—an A to row Z of the many footballing clichés we all use.

It's full of great explanations of the many ridiculous phrases that outside the football world are meaningless. From the upper echelons of football literature, this is the ultimate book for the budding football journalist.

I've had hours of fun and laughs with friends and family over this book, I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

 
Boo-boys: Those fans that barrack or "get on the back" of their own players. Commentators invariably itch to describe the "bit of skill" or, better still, the goal by the reviled player that will "silence the boo-boys", the first stage in "winning them over".

Torrid Time: Experienced particularly by weak full-backs, faced by the "mazy" runs of a winger "Giggs was giving young Parnaby a torrid time down the left flank"

Your: "Your Klinsmanns, your Stoichkovs..." The second person possessive allied to a plural guarantees the sententious force of the phrase. The plural has the paradoxical effect of pointing up the uniqueness of the player: "To compete with your Zidanes, your Henrys, you have to be a bit special."

Christopher Potter's recommendation

In my pursuit of multi-lingual supremacy, I am not afforded many opportunities to read football books, let alone any books in the English language.

However, I was fortunate enough to recently stumble upon Andy Mitten's Mad For It: From Blackpool to Barelona: Football's Greatest Rivalries, thanks to a recommendation from a friend.

Once you get past the rather cumbersome and colon-tastic title, this 350-pager is a real Christmas cracker.

Despite being published nearly five months ago, this book has not received the attention it perhaps deserves, nor the author the praise.

Journalist Mitten recounts the histories and stories behind some of football's greatest rivalries with colour and imagination. He also has a keen eye for detail and has clearly researched his topic area thoroughly.

The real reason I recommend this book is not, however, for the stories of glamorous rivalries and much-publicised incidences such as pig head-gate involving Barcelona fans and traitor Luis Figo at the Camp Nou.

No, the real reason is the energy with which Mitten tells of football's more lowly but no less important rivalries, and the fascinating writing that Scottish and Argentinian lower-league rivalries can engineer.

This book really hits home what it is to be a fan(atic) in its truest sense. A present for football fans, anoraks, connoisseurs, or even just those who sit in front of the television and just don't get the obsession. Mitten makes sense of it all. 

Barney Corkhill's Recommendations 

Sir Bobby Charlton - The Manchester United Years

A great autobiography documenting the United days of perhaps the greatest player England has ever produced. From growing up and playing alongside Duncan Edwards, to Munich, to winning the European Cup in 1968, he describes his whole United career here. I've seen it for £5 and you can't go wrong!

Bill Shankly - From Glenbuck to Wembley

To understand just why Shankly is so highly regarded, you need to read this book. The amount of stories and quotes that are mentioned, and the nature of them, make you think what a great manager he was, and there are countless more left out. A must-have for any Liverpool fan especially, as it tells the story from the childhood to the death of perhaps our greatest manager.

Provided You Don't Kiss Me - 20 Years With Brian Clough

A first hand explanation of everyday life in the company of one of the most unpredictable and eccentric managers to ever grace the game. As with the Shankly book, it only serves to enhance the legend that Clough has already become.

Pele - The Autobiography

This has got to be my top recommendation. The story of the greatest player to have ever kicked a football from the days when he swapped football stickers to get his first real ball after playing with rolled up socks for years, through his legendary career with Santos and Brazil, and ending with his days at Cosmos, and life after football. A great football book, and a must for any football fan!

Hope there's something there for everyone, and if not then feel free to add your own.