Top 5 soccer books

I have already said more than once that my thing was never to kick the ball, at least not with the minimum of grace. And yet, around the age of 10 or 11, I discovered that football and literature could also have a meeting place.

It happened that by the end of the year, we all exchanged invisible friend-type gifts. I got a book with the cover of a boy kicking a ball on the field. From the indifference of the moment, after beginning her reading, I passed to admiration for that novel and for her character that gave her its title: «Senén«.

It is probably the most recommended book I can suggest on the beautiful game for children. Because it is no longer just the football theme that can win over the boy or girl on duty. There is also a lot of chicha, empathy with the different and an exciting action with a point to the Forrest Gump to the Spanish.

Later, much later, I too was encouraged by my own novel about football. And so it came «Real Saragossa 2.0«. And also in her the excuse was the green of the grass to propose a suggestive plot in the parallel playing field of life.

But presentations and ramblings aside, we go there with a good selection of books about football, a review between fiction and non-fiction to find interesting volumes loaded with goals, action, passion, mystery or even philosophy of life ...

Top 3 recommended soccer books

Soccer in sun and shadow

Eduardo galeano write like few. Also in a book like this one about football before it became completely show business. Because there are melancholic prospects for those heroes in shorts that seem to be dying out more and more.

I mean and Eduardo refers to the days of footballers with their parents or teachers mustache strangely short. Men of yesterday among whom strange beings occasionally sneaked in, dribbling them mercilessly as if doing magic among monsters, like Quixotes in front of mills capable of throwing you through the air with a mowing ...

Perhaps it is a matter of age, of idealized sports feats over the years. But there is something right in all this of the loss of authenticity in football. And although we continue to vibrate with the new millionaires who run through the field in a now almost algorithmic game, there will always be that hope to see a new idol leaving the schemes, going through the lining schemes and so on.

Now that happens with Messi and little else. Perhaps the 90s were the last years in which this type of heroes proliferated with greater assiduity, so that any fan could enjoy the chaos against order, the epic about the schemes ...

Written from the passion of a true fan ("a beggar for good football", in his own words), but also from the nostalgia of someone who has witnessed the kidnapping of football by commercial interests unrelated to the purely sports, this book is one of the deepest and most heartfelt tributes to the most popular sport in the world. The present and definitive edition includes the text that Galeano wrote about the 2014 World Cup, held in Brazil.

Soccer in sun and shadow

Fever in the stands

I have always said it, football or any other hobby that distracts us, is as necessary as breathing. No bread and circuses. The real question is that without something turned into a rallying passion with religion, we would end up discovering the cardboard to all this of life, peering into uncertain abysses of boredom.

That is why football is magnificent with its tension and its orgasms made goals. That's why Hornby makes us see what it means to him to be from Arsenal. And from there to understand the bizarre vital decisions to be able to continue loving Arsenal as the unsatisfied lover.

This is the autobiographical account of the author's tumultuous relationship with football and with his team, London's Arsenal. With infectious enthusiasm and characteristic irony, Hornby tells us what happens when one lets football give content to a few gaps that should have been filled by other issues.

This soccer addict rejects wedding invitations because that day Arsenal plays at home, or associates their first great love breakup with the loss of an emblematic player. Hornby wonders here about the essence of this obsession and describes with humor what it really means to be a fan of a team.

Fever in the stands is also a lucid X-ray of the sporting and social ins and outs of this sport and ends up becoming a heartfelt declaration of devotion and loyalty to a sport, to a club and, above all, to the community of long-suffering fans that make up its true essence.

Fever in the stands

Soccer. A religion in search of a God

As well Vazquez Montalban he succumbed to the idea of ​​writing his book on soccer. Only in his case he put aside fiction to move on to sociological analysis, or at least to the consideration and measurement of the meaning of football in our society.

The new gods of Olympus without a doubt. The heroes in the absence of battles. The matter completely falls apart when circumstances force us to look the other way out of necessity or urgency, such as the recent Covid-19.

But meanwhile, under normal conditions they are the new totems. Because they are young and represent the best of our physical condition; because the game itself accumulates that nerve and that epic rarely achieved in intensity of its goals with other sporting events ...

What has happened in football, in teams, in hobbies, so that this noble sport has become a transcendent spectacle? Are the great stars of the ball reincarnations of the ancient Olympian gods? Is football the new religion of the XNUMXst century? As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán ironically explains, stadiums look like cathedrals, fans "adore" the colors of their teams and the protagonists of the show, conditioned by the market, have become bearers of advertising messages, authentic media icons.

This posthumous book, whose final edition has been in the care of Daniel Vázquez Sallés, explores the dangers, glory and future of the "most beautiful sport in the world" in a lucid and scathing analysis as could only come from the pen of one of the most intelligent observers of the contemporary world.

In the first part, Vázquez Montalbán presents the evolution of the sport that he played in the streets and admired football as a marketing on the posters of his neighborhood and exposes a sociology of football designed by FIFA as a new secular «religion» organized for the benefit of the multinationals and televisions.

In this tour he examines the trajectory of idols such as Pelé, Di Stéfano, Cruiff or «the fallen angel», Diego A. Maradona, to the role of new myths such as Ronaldo or Zidane. Below he presents a selection of his best articles on football published in the press (1969-2003) that offer the possibility of enjoying his reflections on Fútbol Club Barcelona ("Barça is more than a club or more than a real estate company"), the real Madrid ("White isbeatiful"), the confrontation between the two or about other protagonists of the world of the ball such as José María García, Jesús Gil y Gil or Silvio Berlusconi.

Soccer. A religion in search of a God

False nine

We go there with a high voltage novel of the great Philip kerr. In football slang there are still suggestive terms between the tiredness of the hackneyed and the kick to the dictionary. If we analyze the term "false nine", beyond its meaning at grass level, we find an unparalleled dichotomy in the literary and even in the philosophical.

Abstracted from any football connotation, a "false nine" attentive to mathematics and approaches the esoteric, and Philip Kerr has managed to rescue that name to give the title to a mystery novel about the most universal of sports. Certainly the narrative proposal reminds me of my aforementioned novel Real Zaragoza 2.0, which I put out years ago on paper and which can be obtained now on Amazon for only € 2, with its prologues by illustrious footballers such as Alberto Zapater or Xavi Aguado.

Mystery, goals and a dark side around football. Similar topics to make clear what we already intuited, that economic interests pervert everything ..., or at least transform it. Until someone gets out of hand ...

Scott Manson is the protagonist of this novel. A coach subjected to the frenzy of a market in which disappearing from the front line can be a complete forgetfulness. A position as a mister in Shanghai seems to be the only possible horizon. And yet Barça also knocks on his door, only for a very different function.

A missing franchise footballer, a coach like Scott Manson busy finding him ..., a world of sports gutted on the channel to discover its guts, the internal organism of such a beautiful sport seems to be inhabited by parasites capable of everything to transact commissions, to increase salaries ... , to the point that everything will be considered lawful for the Machiavellian end.

Scott Manson gets to know the world of football that he loved so much in his absolute contemplation. Touring cities around the world in the footsteps of the missing person, you will find reasons to distrust everything.

False nine

Papers in the wind

Okay, maybe it is the least soccer of the books that I have brought here. At least in the strict theme or in its scenography. But precisely the tangential stories end up splashing our imaginary with greater vividness around a worldwide shared passion.

Because around football there are worlds that pass with their unexpected vicissitudes. Around the fields, among the fans that populate (or rather populated pre-covid) the stands, we find fascinating shared passions, mixed feelings when life is the one that throws the trip ...

Alejandro, "El Mono," has died. His brother and his friends, a group of iron since childhood, hardly take time for pain. They are concerned about Guadalupe, the Monkey's daughter. They want to give him all the love they felt for his friend and ensure a future for him. But there was not a peso left in the bank. El Mono invested all the money he had in the purchase of a soccer player, a boy who promised but stayed in promise. Now he is on loan at a shabby club in the Interior. And the three hundred thousand dollars that his pass cost, about to evaporate.

How to sell a striker who does not score goals? How to move in a world whose rules are unknown? How to remain friends if failures are opening fissures in old loyalties? Fernando, Mauricio and the Russian, with the few tools they possess, will deploy a series of strategies born of ingenuity, clumsiness, bewilderment or inspiration, to achieve their goal.

Eduardo Sacheri once again demonstrates his ability to build endearing characters and tell stories that immediately reach the reader. Papers in the wind it is a hymn to friendship, and a proof that love and humor are stronger than melancholy. An invitation to think about the power of life to break through pain and set the wheel of days in motion again.

Papers in the wind

Soccer books for kids

Everyone knows the football series of Robert Santiago. I have thought about making this appendix to point out those children's readings that also revolve around soccer, trying to get the best out of this sport for boys.

I do not know how many deliveries this series has, which has already become a generational reference for many boys of our days.

Soccer is a great claim to get them into great adventures, in excitement, in team values. But the way of facing each plot of the saga invites on many occasions to deep reflection on many values ​​such as the integration of others, empathy, also competitiveness as an exercise in personal improvement in the first instance.

A set of stories that can always be read with our little ones to enjoy entertaining narratives while establishing so many blurred values ​​today.

All of them available HERE.

5/5 - (17 votes)

2 comments on “The 5 best football books”

  1. Very good contribution, I have already read "false nine" and I think it is very good since it is part of football in recent times, one of my favorites is "short and at the foot", although in this sense there are many quite good books. Greetings…

    Reply

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