The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin, 2007), the definitive historical account of the world's game, and of Futebol Nation (Penguin, 2014), a highly acclaimed footballing history of Brazil. For a number of years he wrote a sports column in Prospect magazine and has made a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and for the World Service, including ones on football in Jerusalem and the politics of the game in Kenya. He has also taught the sociology of sport at the University of Bristol, at De Montfort University, Leicester, and at Pitzer College, Los Angeles. He lives in Bristol.

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Praise for The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football

'A tour de force of brilliant writing, historical colour and sporting vignette. A great read for anyone who wants to better understand the history of our strange times' Observer

'An impeccably researched and impressively scholarly work that contains just about all you will ever need to know about how and why a game played in a handful of nineteenth-century English public schools rose to become the global industry it is today' Independent on Sunday

'Stunning ... will be the measure against which all other such volumes are judged' Guardian

'A major intellectual achievement - easy to read and unlikely to be surpassed in breadth or depth' History Today

'A remarkably clear explanation of how the history of the game has shaped and been shaped by shifting social, economic and political tides. Magnificent' FourFourTwo

Praise for Futebol Nation:A Footballing History of Brazil

'A gripping account of how football captured a nation' Daily Telegraph

'Examines in absorbing detail the special place of the sport in the country's history' Guardian

'Like all the best books about football, this is not about football... David Goldblatt's tour de force tells the history of Brazil through its football' The Times Literary Supplement

Aus dem Klappentext

When the dust settled on post-Thatcherite Britain its core working-class industrial and political institutions had been eviscerated. Social housing was sold off, and the local boozer was closing as the wine bar arrived. Blackpool was down-at-heel and Butlin's were closing their camps, good now for sit-com nostalgia rather than family holidays. Yet among the rubble of industrial Britain, football was still standing. And nearly three decades later football has made the transition from a dying sport to a booming sector of the entertainment industry.

Once merely popular, even widespread, now football is ubiquitous and its status in both popular and elite cultures greatly elevated. Football fills more pews than the Church of England and sells more tickets than the theatre; a publicly advertised interest in football has become the norm among Britain's politicians; and the nation's commentators have taken on football as a metaphor for the country's achievements and ills. How did it happen and what does it mean? David Goldblatt - author of the highly acclaimed history of world football, The Ball is Round - tracks the changes in the game which uncannily mirror the momentous economic, political and social changes of society generally in the post-Thatcher era.

In all of these domains, the last twenty-five years of English football have seen advances and reverses. The economic penury and dismal infrastructure of the past have gone, but the creeping anodyne uniformity of consumer capitalism has replaced it. Crowds are bigger, the football is better, but the atmosphere, more often than not, falls short of expectations. The culture of football has been opened up to women and minorities, but its ruling masculinities remain stuck in a narrow groove. Football fans are more organized and networked than ever, but the governance of the game feels less democratic.

We have been mourning the passing of industrial Britain for over two decades. The further we are removed from that era, and what we remember as its values, the more football has kept those notions imaginatively alive. Yet at the same time its ruling institutions have created an economic model and a system of governance that nurture their opposites. In The Game of Our Lives, David
Goldblatt argues that football is among our last and most precious collective projects in an atomized society. Football is a social-democratic game in a neo-liberal world.