ABSTRACT
Understanding football fiction, a body of work with a relatively lengthy and unwieldy timeline, requires a clear sense of overall connection, of movement and change as it occurs across texts and informs and is informed by individual works. Franco Moretti’s distant reading models of abstraction are adapted here to facilitate codification of football’s fiction, including the inception, evolution and maturation of significant or emblematic modes, divisions or assemblies that occur within the body of works. This chapter develops a historiographic reading of the history of football fiction explored in previous chapters.
