The glut of tournament-related magazines and largely terrible, though still addictive (for some of us) one-off guides that used to fill the shelves of newsagents might, like the newsagents themselves, be a thing of the past, but in the build-up to Euro 2016 the number of books published provides a reminder that football is still an important market for publishers.
It has been a decent crop, covering a range of sub-genres, and a couple, such as Oliver Kay's biography of the Manchester United starlet Adrian Doherty, Forever Young, or Rory Smith's Mister, are sure to make those end-of-year award shortlists that fuel the Christmas market. There have, though, been less obvious items of interest too.
There seems little point in adding here to Michael Walker’s assessment a few weeks ago of the Doherty book, a work he described as “tender . . . a sincere, elegant reflection on a young man touched by genius”, in a piece that was itself remarkably touching. The list is long and several other titles certainly deserve some space.
Rory Smith's Mister: The Men Who Gave the World the Game (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) takes its name from the informal title given to team managers in various parts of the world where the English played a particularly direct role in establishing the game they gave the world.
Smith recounts the story of the former colonial governor, Sir Richard Turnbull, telling then government minister Denis Healey that the legacy of the British empire would essentially boil down to two things after it had finally vanished from the map: association football and the phrase “f*** off”. Sure enough, some 50 years on, a good deal less of the globe is painted red but both are surviving rather well.
His book is the story of the men who took the game to other countries and, in many cases, laid the foundations of the footballing powers that would ultimately undermine England’s own pre-eminence. Men like Jimmy Hogan, a rather run-of-the- mill player in his day who went on to play a key role in the development of some of Europe’s greatest sides.
Having had his own career ended prematurely, Hogan first took a coaching job with a local club in the Netherlands and ended up helping to run the national team in his spare time. Full of energy, ideas and, apparently, a genuine appetite for adventure, he would go on to work in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Hungary, among other countries.
He was central to formulating the philosophy behind the “Magic Magyars”, the Hungarian team that shocked England at Wembley in 1953, and coached some of its best players. As disciples spread his teachings, his influence spread and he is credited with shaping the development of the game as far afield as Brazil.
There is an argument, too, that in the purist passing style of modern-day teams like Barcelona and Bayern Munich, Hogan’s legacy endures, and the pity is that he was never entirely appreciated back in England, where the powers that be always believed they knew better.
Hogan, as it happens, never stopped trying to convince those he encountered that they were wrong: in the first instance by way of business cards that bore the title “Football Professor”, and later by signing communications as “the world’s number one football coach”.
His is just one of many intertwined tales engagingly told here.
Hogan, as it happens, was an early believer in the gaining of marginal advantage: proper diet, opposition analysis, acclimatisation . . . the list goes on. While many of his preoccupations have become mainstays of management now, they were often considered eccentric 100 years ago when he was plying his trade.
A century on and with the stakes exponentially greater, the effort to get even the slightest edge over opponents can be huge, and mathematicians have increasingly been added to a manager’s army of advisers.
There are several books on the area, but David Sumpter's Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury Sigma, £11.89) is as good a starting point as any, with the British-based academic providing a highly readable account of some of the basic theories involved, as well as something of a field study in their practical applications when he starts betting on games.
Anybody who doubts the importance attached to this type of work within the game should read the leaked list of Manchester United players’ complaints against Louis van Gaal, and consider what the manager was basing his sometimes complex instructions on. Detailed analysis of issues like player performance, pass completion and use of space would certainly have contributed.
That the numbers can ultimately yield something apparently more obvious is evident, though, by the statistical analysis behind Carlo Ancelotti’s game plan at Real Madrid, which ultimately boiled down to not much more than “give the ball to Ronaldo”.
Alan Dunne would not have featured nearly so prominently in any Millwall manager's team talk, but after a long career at the London club that few aspiring professionals would have aspired to at 12 but almost all would settle for at 20, he has produced an interesting account of life in England's lower leagues. Dunne it the Hard Way: The Remarkable Story of a Millwall Legend, by Alan Dunne with Chris Davies (Pitch Publishing, £15.58) is rounded off with a chapter on his remarkable family background that might in itself have yielded a book as compelling as Kay's, but, he admits, he wrestled hard to overcome the challenge involved in providing even the few pages we get here.
In The Turbulent World of Middle East Football (C Hurst and Co, £15.99 ), James M Dorsey ably demonstrates the way in which the game can be a tool for good or ill in a part of the world where guns are not only weapons used to defend or topple regimes.
As one player and academic observes in relation to Lebanon: “Football was one of the few things that could have helped create a national identity that could compete with sectarian ones.” It didn’t happen there but the struggle continues elsewhere.
The (often laboured) metaphor is a staple of football reporting, but who needs them when the best team in Syria was run by the army, stole other sides’ leading players via conscription, and was run itself by a hierarchy of officers strictly according to rank.
In a precursor to the uprising, the country’s association bravely challenged the military’s authority and, by extension, the Assad regime itself by enforcing the rules and, for a time, it succeeded. All of that is gone now, observes a former official.
All of that and so much more.
Emmet Malone is Irish Times Soccer Correspondent
