ABSTRACT
The story of football’s fiction begins in the late 1870s with novels that celebrate the sport, even as they use its narratives to convey lessons in civility, morality and class. By the late 1970s, like the game itself, readers’ tastes changed dramatically. Crime-related football fiction is prolific, literary football novels have been embraced and brief and important spells of women’s football fiction and hooligan fiction have risen and faded. As it charts the linear history of football’s presence in novelised form across 110 years, this chapter aggregates previous surveys and primary research to highlight key texts, authors and periods of production.
