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Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures pp 83–108Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Fictionalising Football

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Abstract

This chapter explores the bias directed against those who write about football—from journalists to writers of fiction. It explains how the genre of New Football Writing evolved from the fanzine scene of the 1980s. Developing these ideas further, the chapter discusses the challenges of creating fictional football films, with a special focus on the era since the mid-1990s. As a case study, Nick Hornby’s 1992 fan memoir Fever Pitch is analysed in the context of post-Taylor football. Since Hornby’s text, despite its ambiguous status between fiction and non-fiction, paved the way for the genre’s evolution and served as the blueprint for many fictional texts, the discussion of Fever Pitch lays the basis for the analysis of the main corpus of texts in subsequent chapters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for example, the edited volume by Pyta and Havemann (2015) for a wide range of examples of European football and collective memory.

  2. 2.

    “Fußball ist, etwas zugespitzt gesagt, die Erinnerung an Fußball” (Biermann 2014: 56).

  3. 3.

    In Johnson’s novel, only the first and the final section have their fixed position, while all the others (loose chapters in a box) are meant to be read in random order.

  4. 4.

    Bend it like Beckham cleverly twists this into a free kick (01:25:01–01:26:01).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Cultural Studies, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Cyprian Piskurek

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Piskurek, C. (2018). Fictionalising Football. In: Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures. Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76762-8_4

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