Taking Our Ball Back

The politics of football culture is starting to mean something again, and Martin Cloake - the best writer on the subject today - has sketched the bases of English football's culture wars. Beautifully written, this collection of his pieces in New Statesman, Thin White Line, The Football Pink and elsewhere are absolutely indispensable for anyone remotely interested in how the so-called beautiful game could become so dirty, sordid, greedy and plain stupid and yet still hold the attention of 'the people' who were invoked in all those homilies about the 'people's game'.