The Football Factory (The Football Factory Trilogy, 1) - Softcover

"The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now" (Irvine Welsh)

"Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager. Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe – the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap." (Glasgow Herald)

"Not only an outstanding read, but also an important social document... This book should be compulsory reading for all those who believe in the existence, or even attainability, of a classless society" (Sunday Tribune)

"Powerfully written and tells you more about the mentality of those who disrupt football matches than all the theses of the sociologist academics put together" (Daily Mail)

"Bleak, thought-provoking and brutal... Has all the hallmarks of a cult novel" (Literary Review)

The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned 'Chelsea hooligan' who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex - and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division.

Graphic and disturbing, sometimes very funny, and deeply affecting throughout, The Football Factory is a vertiginous rush of adrenaline - the most authentic book yet on the so-called English Disease.