My latest sojourn in the UK is finished, I'm back to semi-normalcy in Palo Alto (apart from the fact that I still need to find a job), and I've been reading some of the many books I picked up while I was out there.
Now, as I'm sure I've noted here before, one of the nice things about spending three months in London this time was that I could finally indulge my addiction to buying books, and also I could finally buy some books from my beloved Big Waterstones, on Piccadilly. It was one of my first stops when I arrived in January, and in the (many) subsequent visits it was driven home for me just how different the selection of books is there compared to here.
Part of that is, of course, that the Bay Area doesn't have any bookstores nearly as large as Big Waterstones, or Foyles, so the selection is always going to be a little worse. But there's also a clear difference in the types of books and authors you get there vs here, and the main one is books about football.
I spent a lot of time in the football section this year, because I had decided it was going to be my year to finally buy that history of Italian soccer that I'd been eyeing up for, I kid you not, years: Calcio, by John Foot, a magisterial and expensive tome that I'd never felt able to sufficiently justify on previous trips.
And naturally when I went looking for it in its usual spot in the travel section, it was no longer there.
It took me a couple of trips to various bookstores to find it, but I did, and I finally got to go through its 500-odd pages and learn about the origins and currents of Italian football, told from the perspective of a foreign and therefore (mostly) impartial observer. As I read it I was reminded of Sid Lowe's Fear and Loathing in La Liga, which provided a history of Spanish football seen through the lens of the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry, and that brought me to the realization that histories of European football are essentially histories of post-war Europe.
This is an impression borne out by finishing Calcio, and Brilliant Orange (a similar book about Dutch football by David Winner), and by what I've read so far of Tor!, Uli Hesse's history of soccer in Germany.
That last one is particularly important, because as I've noted before, it's frustratingly difficult to find any books that talk about German history after the Second World War. Germania, Simon Winder's otherwise excellent non-Nazi-focused history, ends in 1933, while Philip Oltermann's also excellent Keeping Up with the Germans does talk about Baader-Meinhof, football and Volkswagen, but it remains a bit too fragmented to really give a sense of the flow of things after 1945.
I did pick up an e-book copy of Norman Stone's history of the Cold War, The Atlantic and Its Enemies, because it promised a look at Germany, but what struck me is that the Cold War notwithstanding, the lack of histories of the period is probably due to the fact that not much has actually happened in Western Europe since the end of WWII.
That's not to slight the end of Communism, the end of Franco's fascist regime, or the years of lead in Italy's undeclared civil war. But the fall of the Soviet Union is something that happened on the edges of Western Europe, while the lingering effects of fascism ending or resurfacing somehow gives the impression of flying under the radar - these are all things that were of paramount importance in those countries, but haven't really had such a global import. After all, how many foreigners would know about Italy's years of lead if they haven't actually studied the country's history?
So that's one reason why I suggest that football histories can take the place of proper histories; the other reason is that of course these political currents affected what happened on and around the pitch. In Fear and Loathing, Sid Lowe starts by taking apart the myth of Real Madrid being the "right-wing" club and Barcelona being the bastion of resistance against Franco's regime. John Foot, meanwhile, talks in Calcio about how far-right politics have been a mainstay of large parts of fandom (particularly among Lazio and Inter fans), as well as giving a view of how the paranoia of the 70s led to the death of Lazio player Enrico Re Cecconi when he tried to play a prank on a shopkeeper in Rome (look it up, it's fascinating).
And it's a truism to suggest that what's happening on the pitch reflects what's happening in society. Soccer's maybe a little conservative when it comes, for instance, to racial integration, but John Barnes signing for Liverpool in the 1980s, or France dominating with its multicultural team in 1998 and 2000, indicate ways in which British and French society were opening up (though not always unopposed). Another truism is the way in which globalization's acceleration after the fall of Communism has echoed in the way footballing dominance has come straight to Europe, after decades of alternating with South America.
In graduate school I was a bit miffed when a friend suggested that Europe wouldn't be important in the decades to come, as China came into its own power. As a conversation, it's stuck with me ever since, because she was both right and wrong. In a lot of ways you can say that Europe is making itself irrelevant in geopolitics, given its position between the US, Russia and (figuratively) China. But culturally Europe is probably even more important than it's ever been, in part because of football.
After all, US fans (at least the white ones) typically have their local team and their European team (usually English, and usually Liverpool or Manchester United), while trips to Asia have become mandatory for European clubs to top up their coffers every season. The fact that so many Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern billionaires are buying up European clubs suggests that they see more upside there than in trying to buy NFL or NBA teams (though I'm aware that these are the nationalities that are probably less favored to buy US sports teams).
As far as the history aspect, I haven't been totally disappointed. Brilliant Orange, for example, linked the emergence of the Dutch national team and its Total Football with the Provo art movement of the 1960s, and interestingly links the Dutch national character to why the Netherlands never quite wins tournaments. I'm also seeing how the rise of Nazism and the progress of the war affected German football, so I look forward to seeing what Uli Hesse can tell me about the post-war period and the tension between East and West Germany.
Though as a final thought it's interesting to note that there isn't a similar book about English football. This is probably understandable when you consider that most of these books I've mentioned are written by Englishmen (except for Tor) and are aimed at explaining the local variety of football to British readers. As such an all-encompassing history of English football is probably superfluous, because everyone already knows the story - but as a non-Brit I'd find it very interesting if someone did write such a book.
One last point that's occurred to me as I wrote that last paragraph. The fascination of British readers/viewers for a specific brand of European football comes, again, from the increased globalization of the game, where you could suddenly watch Italian or Spanish football on TV in the 80s and 90s. But even before that fans would take to a specific team from memorable World Cup or European Championship performances - David Winner talks about falling in love with the Dutch team in 1974, and when I mentioned the book to my dad he also remembered their place in that tournament.
Which perhaps demonstrates my central thesis of football as being the binding cultural force of post-war Europe.
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