My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes

"This is a book I’d like every football fan to read! I bought copies for some of my friends I was so keen for them to read it! It harks back to a time before six figure salaries, when players travelled to matches on the same bus as the fans; when players had other jobs, and when football was about the football. Sometimes I feel a little bit ashamed of where football is at the moment. It wasn’t perfect back then either, of course, and this book is partly about that period of change. Players were badly treated in the past and this mistreatment sparked the change that has got us where we are today. It’s very nostalgic, but it captures elements of the game that really mean something to me. The title, for instance. For me, and for a lot of people I think, football is a lot to do with family. Part of the fun for my lad is seeing his grandparents at the matches. That’s one of the things I think is good about football. Most of all though, this book oozes a love of the game."

"It’s a beautiful social history from a time when – it’s clichéd but true – footballers lived in the same area as the fans, they drank in the same pubs with the fans, caught the bus to the game with the fans. There was a maximum wage so there was none of your 170 grand a week. They were all ordinary working people. It’s written by Gary Imlach, a sports TV journalist, and it’s about his father, Stewart, who was a professional footballer in the 50s. He had a successful career, making the Scotland World Cup squad in 1958 and played in an FA Cup Final with Nottingham Forest. But it was a time when football had a maximum wage – on average, footballers earned less than factory workers. Imlach was sold between clubs without being asked. He was a commodity, owned by his club. What makes this book stand out is that you don’t have to care about football to read this – it’s a beautiful social history of Britain. Working-class Britain, that is. My book is called Africa United and it tells the story of football in 13 countries and uses football as a way of telling the wider story about those countries and of Africa as a whole. I’ve been based in Nairobi since 2006 and when I first moved here I was trying to get my head round Kenyan politics, which is incredibly hard to understand. There are all sorts of issues of ethnicity and corruption and money and at the same time, as a football fan, I was interested in the local football scene. But that was similarly complicated. There were two rival football associations, both claiming to be organising the local league and both setting up fixtures for the same teams on the same days in different places. The whole thing was a mess. I realised that the same issues that bedevilled Kenyan politics also had an effect on football. As soon as I started to understand one, the other became very clear. I thought, if I can understand Kenyan politics by understanding Kenyan football, is this the same elsewhere on the continent? African football has such a high profile and most clubs have an African player, but we know very little about where they come from. In the run-up to the first World Cup in Africa I thought there was an opportunity to put these African stars in context. Some of the chapters are about countries like Somalia where the fact they have a national football team at all is a huge achievement for them and it really is the playing that counts, not the winning. The stories of how they have to avoid gun battles and roadblocks just to get to training in the mornings give you the story of modern-day Somalia This is interesting because sport played such a large part in the anti-apartheid movement – the international boycott and the fact that their rugby and cricket teams couldn’t tour England and the football team couldn’t play at the World Cup. All those things were important in organising a popular campaign, but also football was one of the few things in apartheid South Africa that wasn’t banned for blacks. So you had black football associations and matches were the only places where large numbers of black people were allowed to gather, and they talked politics in the changing rooms. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Post-apartheid, if you ask anyone outside the country to name a major sporting event they’ll say the rugby world cup in 1995 when all the Springboks supporters were chanting Mandela’s name. If you ask most South Africans, though, it was a year later when they hosted the African Cup of Nations and they won it and, again, Nelson Mandela was there, wearing the team’s colours. But this was the big South African sport rather than the white minority sport and also the team was a real reflection of South Africa; it was a multi-racial team. To win that and to show that, yes, we’re back in a sport we really care about… And now the hope is the same again – they’re not going win the World Cup but they can show what South Africa has become and what it hopes to become in the future."