Alex Allison’s new book Greatest Of All Time makes him the new custodian of the football novel
My pandemic project has outlived the plague era. Since 2020 I have spent time collecting football books, and I even had one of my own published, on the FA Youth Cup, but I’m not here to plug From Kids To Champions or my book on punditry, with the neologism Banternalysis for a title.
Instead, I’m going to recommend some pieces of football fiction: stories that use the game as a pivot around which to revolve tales of the human condition. I’ve got a whole shelf of them, ranging from Keeper by Mal Peet, which will appeal to fans of the movie Field of Dreams, to John O’Farrell’s comic novel There’s Only Two David Beckhams.
Musa Okwonga and Ian Wright, who now co-present the Wrighty’s House podcast, collaborated on Striking Out, in which Wright’s cipher named Jerome mimics the England forward’s South London upbringing. UEA Creative Writing graduate and former amateur referee Ashley Hickson-Lovence gained many plaudits for Your Show, a fictionalised telling of the story of referee Uriah Rennie, whom you may remember for being the only black ref in the Premier League years. Fun fact: Rennie is now president of Hallam FC, an amateur club founded in 1860 in Sheffield.
You might know Brian Glanville as the doyen of football writers, but he would prefer to be known as a novelist. As well as his children’s book Goalkeepers Are Different, Glanville published his own set of short stories, The Man Behind the Goal. Football is one of those subjects you cannot busk: you need to have intimately researched the world, its tempos and its mores. Adrian Duncan does this in his own set of short stories, Midfield Dynamo, whose chapters are numbered by football position – 1 is followed by 2, which is followed by 6, which is followed by 5, and eventually ends with 9 – and with sections called Defence, Midfield and Up Front.
Two stories are football themed: the one that gives the collection its title, first published in the Dublin Review in Winter 2014, is told by a son about his father, who was captain of a football team made up of ‘a bunch of long-haired and moustachio’d outlaws [sic]…for an hour and a half, twenty-two young men marauded [sic] in beautiful patterns up and down the pitch, and in between the moments of skill, vision and finesse, they kicked lumps out of each other’.
The other football-themed story is named Prosinečki, after the Yugoslav/Croatian playmaker who played for both Barcelona and Real Madrid and who, fun fact, is the current manager of Montenegro’s national team. The story’s protagonist is a ‘limited but committed midfielder’ with a ‘permanently destroyed’ knee. He recalls how he admired the playmaker’s ‘brio’ and ‘re-visualize his movement…how he span away from bewildered defenders at the least likely moment’. He ‘always made the most moral decision on the ball’; no pundit ever talks like this, or notes ‘the impotent, incidental and unforgiveable beauty’ of the game.
He appreciates how ‘it is the pragmatic that serves the aesthetic – that it is only from the core of good service that any beauty can bloom’. When he weighs up the taints and honours of his career, he concludes that he is an ‘age-thickened footballer mooching around a large circle with a line through it’. The protagonist reckons that fans go to the stadium merely ‘to be among the decaying trusses that shelter our deep single-tiered stands’ to watch a club that ‘seems to exist now only out of the ghost of some habit’. When a goalkeeper gets up after being clattered into, they ‘cheer as if he were a miner being lifted from a blast’. The story first appeared in the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly; the editor was Sally Rooney.
Greatest Of All Time is Alex Allison’s recently released tale, published by Dialogue Books. He jokes in the acknowledgements that friends ‘still maintain that the novel should be called Man On’, and then seriously dedicates it to ‘queer sportspeople, both closeted and out. We’ll be ready if and when you are’. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Allison said that he wished to explore the players’ ‘heads and hearts’ that were often missing from the general conversation about the game. It was noted by presenter Nick Ahad that there are no out gay male footballers in the Premier League, to which Allison namechecked Justin Fashanu, whose biography is called Forbidden Forward.
In a way, the tale resets Amadeus to a Premier League football club somewhere in the North-East (yes, the one you’re thinking of). The anonymous protagonist is the only homegrown player left at the club, and under the auspices of his Italian manager nicknamed The Oracle, he has to compete for his position as centre-forward with Samson, a Rwandan-born Frenchman brought in on loan from Monaco. Samson takes our hero’s number ten shirt and then takes his breath away: ‘Before he was everyone’s,’ reads the opening sentence, given its own chapter and its own page, ‘he was mine’.
Allison, whom the dust jacket tells us is an AFC Wimbledon fan, puts us in the world of professional football, starting with a pre-season camp in the Middle East. We learn that our protagonist is only 19, that his father is his agent and that the pair started out going to games, ‘embracing an identity larger than our differences’. As a striker he has ‘the steely focus of a born predator’, which seems a little like pathetic fallacy given that his prey becomes Samson, who is praised as ‘all limb and length, as though his body were set to a beat’.
With a ‘digital self’ valued by FIFA video game at £13m, he pales in comparison with Samson, who can master one of his real-life skills in moments. Soon the pair are roommates for away games, our hero deputed to ‘look after’ his antagonist. Envy turns to self-improvement: ‘I felt myself altering my behaviour as though he were watching…exaggerated the aspects of my personality that most closely mirrored his’.
We never forget that the pair are teenagers, with faces that ‘looked misplaced among the gruff beards and hardened jaws of our teammates’. We also appreciate plenty of truisms from our narrator: ‘I would need to reprogramme myself…to perceive him as a threat’, ‘I was clout incarnate, a magnet for likes’, ‘I wanted the life of my teammates – their assured confidence, the convenience of their ordinary desires’.
There are plenty of other football similes and metaphors throughout the story: ‘Searching his name had become a muscle memory, a reflex – like taking the ball down on your chest’; ‘the turf was solid, seized up like a muscle’. There is impressive verisimilitude that grounds us in the Premier League: one player ‘can’t afford to get relegated. Not at this point in my career’; the team cannot enjoy the lobster at their Christmas party, accustomed to ‘a restricted diet of lean meats, grains and fresh vegetables’; Sky Sports presenters ‘celebrated each transfer like personal triumphs’; our hero’s salary, when compared with his dad’s, has a ‘comic book inequality’.
Another player from the Netherlands boasts how ‘Ajax are responsible for the basis of the modern game’ and a Crystal Palace fan has ‘the sincere belief that his club has the best fans in the country’. At such points, Allison is adding to the experience of the non-fanatical reader, and about the only faux pas is that a team from the North East travels down to Watford for a Boxing Day fixture, something necessary for the plot but which would never happen in the Premier League, who never set teams on too long a journey on December 26. I also loved the line from a Watford mascot: ‘This is my Christmas present, but I wanted a dog’.
Samson, meanwhile, is ‘the first player from our club for twenty-nine years to find the net ten times before February’, hitting the mark with a stunning goal against Arsenal. Mimicking the real-life Cristiano Ronaldo, a fan invades the pitch and meets Samson, her idol, while young ladies throw themselves at him at a nightclub. Samson opens up to our narrator, complaining of the racism of the English, whose fans are the only ones in the world ‘who love a tackle more than a goal’. The Frenchman tells our hero that ‘the keeper is afraid of real football’ and that ‘the world around us is so ugly, but here, with just a ball, we can make a beautiful thing’.
There is editorialising from the author about how fans are ‘a living history of their clubs…curators of an endless well of legacy and expectation and suspicion’. Notably, the prospective agent, the therapist and The Oracle are all non-English, testament to the international influence on the Premier League. One scene brings in Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign to fight homophobia, which is necessary as captain Bert Kendall seems, with great dramatic irony, to be fond of queer-bashing.
There are, as with any work of fiction, crisis points where we need resolutions: our hero mulls over a new agent, and then sits down with a psychotherapist who reminds me a lot of Pippa from James Graham’s play Dear England. Hanging over the whole story is the fact that Samson is on loan from Monaco, with top European clubs interested in signing him permanently when his loan ends and he is taken from our protagonist ‘as swiftly as he had been gifted to me’.
Ross Raisin’s book A Natural offers an easy comparison to Allison’s story, because it also deals with homosexuality, in that case a little further up the British Isles in Scotland, although Raisin was born in Silsden, West Yorkshire. I’d also recommend the novelised reboot of Roy of the Rovers, an origin story which also brings in Roy’s sister Rocky to mark the interest in the women’s game, written by Tom Palmer, who is from Leeds.
But for contemporary football literature, Greatest Of All Time is pretty good.
Over 300 episodes of the Football Literary Society radio show can be found at soundcloud.com/jonny_brick.