Abstract
The discussion of contemporary football fiction is grouped into three thematic clusters (Chaps. 5, 6 and 7), the first of which focusses on the depiction of players, managers and chairmen. The chapter argues that conventional success narratives prevail, in which the achievement of underdogs highlights the utopian potential of sport, although the figure of the traditional hero is increasingly replaced by the caricature of glamorous stars who have lost touch with reality. Club chairmen and owners have in recent years frequently been portrayed as foreign, often Oriental, intruders, in line with public concerns over foreign investment in English football. In contrast, the fictional football manager remains a relatively stable anchor point against anxieties that post-Taylor football has brought about.
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- 1.
- 2.
The sequel to Goal! in which Santiago plays for Real Madrid proves just that.
- 3.
Campbell, one of King’s heroes, is a radio and television presenter, known for his work on consumer rights programme Watchdog.
- 4.
‘Wag’ is a yellow-press acronym to describe football players’ ‘wives and girlfriends’.
- 5.
- 6.
Although critically acclaimed, what brought the novel even more media attention were public outcries by the Clough family and a partly successful court case in which former Leeds player Johnny Giles sued the author for libel.
- 7.
The club is now called Hartlepool United.
- 8.
In his later career, it surfaced that Clough had profited immensely from backhanders for transfers (Bower 2007: 28–29).
- 9.
Kelner has called this meeting, not without reason, “half an hour of the most riveting television you will ever see” (2012: 133). The broadcast can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws4S3mPSJ3Q.
- 10.
A number of factual errors occur, however: Dave Mackay in the film is still a player with Derby when he is being offered Clough’s job (59:03–59:15), Clough does not manage a single Brighton & Hove game after signing with them before going to Leeds (1:08:08–1:09:26), and Leeds lose Clough’s final match against Luton instead of drawing against them (1:11:56–1:12:01). The film’s title also differs slightly from the novel’s: The Damned Utd becomes The Damned United.
- 11.
Reviewers are not unanimous about the style of Red or Dead: Segura calls the constant repetitions “an endurance test” and suggests that “massive chunks of the narrative could be lopped off” (2014: 33), while Graff lauds the “dense tapestry of short, declarative sentences [which build] each scene with painstaking, poetic repetition” (2014: 16).
- 12.
Officially, Manchester City is not owned by Sheik Mansour but by an investment vehicle called the City Football Group (itself a holding company for Abu Dhabi United Group).
- 13.
This system restricted the movement of players between clubs: from 1893 on, players could only register with a new club if the old club agreed; otherwise clubs could retain a player even if the new contract offered lower wages. This system was a response to the introduction of professionalism in the 1880s and remained in place until the right to ‘retain’ was ruled unlawful in 1963; only with the Bosman ruling in 1995 was the ‘transfer’ aspect abolished as well.
- 14.
Although it did not attract the same attention as Wimbledon F.C.’s move to Milton Keynes, Scottish football experienced a similarly controversial case when Meadowbank Thistle were relocated to Livingston in the mid-1990s (Keoghan 2014: 89).
- 15.
Note that even a non-football text like Guy Ritchie’s 2008 gangster film Rocknrolla has among its cast of characters a Russian magnate who holds business meetings in ‘his’ football stadium.
- 16.
In 2012, Malaysian owner Vincent Tan controversially changed Cardiff City’s club colours from blue to red and exchanged the bluebird in the club crest for a red dragon. Although the change of club colours was reversed in 2015 and the bluebird now shares the crest with the dragon, this is widely regarded as one of the most drastic assaults on a club’s tradition by a foreign club owner.
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Piskurek, C. (2018). Players, Managers and Chairmen. 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_5
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