ABSTRACT
Non- ction football writing occurs at every level of the sport’s cultural strata. Historians, reporters, sports writers, agents, players, fans, referees and hooligans have written, ghostwritten and inspired historical, topical and biographical accounts of the game and events that occur within its vicinity. In contrast, the football novel seems comparatively rare. As a result, commentators, including the editor of Norton Book of Sports, George Plimpton (1992), have dismissed football’s ction. While some writers, including D. J. Taylor (1997) and Will Buckley (2005), argue there is much in football that lends itself to storytelling, Nick Hornby, credited with football writing’s rise to quality, argues, for the same reason, there should be enough excitement in the real thing for the reader to ever turn to stories from someone’s imagination.1 Yet football ction, which has been in con rmed existence since the 1870s, is a genre with a very real and important historical longevity. It re ects the game’s everchanging culture, and o ers a literary, creative and imaginative space to better understand and examine the sport, its place and its representations in contemporary culture. To the unfortunate, though necessary, neglect of other media (including poetry, comic books and graphic novels, theatre, fanzines and short stories), this chapter will focus on the novel, as an easily isolated and comparable form (Moretti, 2003a: 67), to illustrate the length, depth and breadth of football’s ctive literature.
