The Game of Our Lives – David Goldblatt

The game is football, association football to be clear, and the English game to be specific. In seven extended essays Goldblatt surveys the game as it stands in 2014, placing it in the context of its own history and more interestingly as a mirror reflecting wider social change.

Thus he argues how the moneyed Premiership has emerged inevitably from globalisation and deregulation; and describes how the consequent commercialisation of the match day experience as a packaged product has undermined but not yet destroyed the deep-seated tribal passions.

The third essay provides a whistle-stop tour of English clubs, region by region, concentrating on relationships between the clubs and their communities; too brief to be anything but an entertaining aide-memoire to those already familiar with their football, and in my view too superficial in dismissing owners, managers and players as mainly useless.

Later the ‘national’ concept of the English game is discussed relative to the other ‘home nations’ (contrast is drawn to other sports where it is the UK or Great Britain that represents national feeling); and the governance of the game gets a good pounding for its amateurishness and unpreparedness for the modern world.

Chapters on race and gender complete the book, setting out how attitudes within the game have both reacted to and shaped changing social norms. These may be the most interesting for general readers, or those more interested in sociology than football.

The mix of football and sociology works well, but the articulate Goldblatt’s prose makes no concessions to those who follow their sport in the Mail or the Mirror - this is more for Guardian readers out there. The points are well made, evidence is painstakingly referenced, and he clearly has mastery of his subject; but he mainly sets out the problems without offering suggested solutions.

An academic and though-provoking read for those with a sociological interest, delivering a comprehensive version of what its subtitle promises: “the making and meaning of English football”.