FOOTBALL AGAINST THE ENEMY

IN HIS LATEST PIECE ON FOOTBALL LITERATURE, JONNY BRICK HEADS BACK TO 1994, WHEN A YOUNG SIMON KUPER WENT ON A PICARESQUE VOYAGE THROUGH WORLD FOOTBALL...

- Simon Kuper

THESE days, Simon Kuper is a Renaissance man. The 55-year-old has a weekly column in the Financial Times and writes books which take in double agents, the Good Chap theory of British government and Paris, the city in which he resides.

You may have read his rather personal book on Dutch Jews and Ajax, or his contributions to a book variously known as Soccernomics and Why England Lose.

His collected interviews with footballers including Roberto Carlos, Glenn Hoddle and Diego Maradona are anthologised in The Football Men, where he also includes a chapter on the autobiographies of five footballers from the England team in the 2000s. Jamie Carragher’s book wins over those by Rooney, Lampard and Gerrard, while Kuper's comment on Ashley Cole’s memoir, that you feel ‘dirty and stupid for having read it’, deserves to be remembered as much as Cole's road-swerving line.

And so to Kuper’s debut, 1994's Football Against The Enemy, a must-have for any shelf of football literature and, after Fever Pitch, the second football book to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Kuper has said he initially felt he had overreached his ambitions, but adopted a ‘blind confidence’ that it would all work out in the end. He had already lived in the Netherlands, Germany, the USA and the UK by the time he set off for a post-uni gap year to document ‘how football affects the life of a country’ and vice versa.

In 20 tight chapters, some as short as four pages, Kuper heads to 22 nations and summarises a century of association football. In Europe, he spends an enjoyable day with Helenio Herrera, the man who developed catenaccio, where indoor football matches have shattered the windows of his house.

A visit to the Stadio Olympico to watch Paul Gascoigne’s first game for Lazio feels like ‘a Fascist rally’, while he applauds the five Slovan Bratislava fans who travel to Ferencvaros, whose hooligans curse in English.