Author: Lanterne Rouge
Dilemmas of Football Ownership: Property is Theft
Once upon a time, earlier on in my real career in book publishing, I was present at some tense negotiations in which a nicotine moustachioed representative of the National Union of Journalists lost the room a bit with the old adage that ‘property is theft’.
At the time, our smooth operator of a company MD plunged his head into his hands, the look on his face something akin to …
TTU Go Predicting: a Club-by-Club Championship Preview 2014-5
Following on from John McGee’s freeform assessment of League 1 yesterday, here is a somewhat more plodding assessment of the level above. That, however, is no reflection on the ins and outs of this season’s Championship - a competition where extortionate transfer fees, underqualified managers and frankly terrifying owners hold sway, where parachute payments warp the competition and everyone is indulging in the filthy scramble for Premier League …
Book Review: Futebol Nation
Futebol Nation by David Goldblatt
Published by Penguin
2014, £9.99
In a very modest afterword to his new book Futebol Nation, David Goldblatt, author of that all-encompassing and well-nigh definitive history of the sport itself, The Ball is Round admits that the outcome is in many ways but ‘an exploratory essay’ and with that admission, he confirms the opinion of this reader at least.
For this is rather …
Book Review: Punk Football
Punk Football by Jim Keoghan
Published by Pitch Publishing
2014, £12.99
The rise of the supporter ownership model in England has been a slow and drawn out process in recent years and despite the wonderful coverage provided by When Saturday Comes and a host of websites, it has often been hard to step back and assess its progress.
Jim Keoghan, therefore, has done us all a massive service in …
Book Review: The Evergreen in Red and White
The Evergreen in Red and White by Steven Kay
Published by 1889 Books
2014, £8.99
We have devoted some attention before on this website to a call for a ‘great football novel’, something to plug a gap which cricket and baseball in particular have filled more successfully - a solution to the presumption that football as narrative is somehow unsuited to literary treatment. To date, despite a number of …