David Goldblatt

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A Footballing History of Brazil

Futebol Nation

A Global History of Football

The Ball is Round

The Game of Our Lives

Brilliantly incisive. Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been. Goldblatt's book could hardly be more impressive

Offers an enlightening, enriching experience. It is based on a formidable range of sources, personal observation and a pleasingly sardonic turn of phrase. Not all football writers know their stuff, let alone the socio-economic context, but Goldblatt does. Altogether this is an exceptional book

Not just the best soccer book in many years but an exemplary account of the changing character of British society in the post-Thatcher era

David Goldblatt examines [English football] peerlessly ... A superb history of a sport and of a nation

Goldblatt is a trusted guide ... Rich with statistics, this is an admirably balanced account of the beautiful game

Prodigious research and a fluent writing style ... this is a fine book which should have an appeal much beyond the game

An encyclopaedic portrait of English football stripped of all the non-stop hype. The beautiful game is, after all, a dirty business

An intensely readable socioeconomic study of English football in the age of globalisation

A book that informs and inspires, a truly great piece of writing

The best pub talker of a book for years

Goldblatt has a gift for exploring the way the game holds a mirror up to our lives ... His deconstruction of the modern game could hardly be bettered

[A] bold analysis of Britain's economic and social change refracted through football

A salient overview of the past quarter-century

The Meaning and Making of English Football

WINNER of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2015 
 
In the last two decades football in Britain has made the transition from a peripheral dying sport to the very centre of our popular culture, from an economic basket-case to a booming entertainment industry. What does it mean when football becomes so central to our private and political lives? Has it enriched us or impoverished us? 
 
In this sparkling book David Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon tracks the momentous economic, social and political changes of the post-Thatcherite era in a more illuminating manner than football, and no cultural practice sheds more light on the aspirations and attitudes of our long boom and now calamitous bust. A must-read for the thinking football fan, The Game of Our Lives will appeal to readers of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby and Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. It will also be relished by readers of British social history such as Austerity Britain by David Kynaston. 
 
'Brilliantly incisive. Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been. Goldblatt's book could hardly be more impressive' Sunday Times

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.

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.

In the last two decades football in Britain has made the transition from a peripheral dying sport to the very centre of our popular culture, from an economic basket-case to a booming entertainment industry. What does it mean when football becomes so central to our private and political lives? Has it enriched us or impoverished us? 
 
In this sparkling book David Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon tracks the momentous economic, social and political changes of the post-Thatcherite era in a more illuminating manner than football, and no cultural practice sheds more light on the aspirations and attitudes of our long boom and subsequent bust.

The Game of Our Lives

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David Goldblatt

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