Once upon a time, football was a local affair. A club really was a club, belonging to its members, who were footballers and fans alike, all drawn from the same town, village or factory. But today nothing could be more global. A Premier League side may still bear the name of some backwater that briefly flowered in the Industrial Revolution, but it will derive its players and supporters, its owners and managers, its revenue and capital from every corner of the Earth.
This transformation is relatively recent, and literature has yet to catch up. Football narratives tend to be nostalgic and parochial: the neurotic north London of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, the class-conscious Yorkshire of David Peace’s The Damned United. English writers seem unable to escape football’s myriad outdated local mythologies, a game invented by Englishmen but whose world span now far exceeds their imaginations.
