O nce 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English writers seem unable to escape football’s myriad outdated local mythologies, a game invented by Englishmen but whose world span now far exceeds their imaginations. Joseph O’Neill’s transnational new novel is, I’m sure, the first to capture the contemporary reality of football as the predominant cultural pursuit of our globalised age. It could only have been written by a true cosmopolitan such as O’Neill, who is half Irish and half Turkish, fluent in three languages and raised in as many continents.
Like some overpaid galáctico , he even lives in a luxury hotel. (For the record, I am in favour of novelists being able to live like footballers.) The book chronicles the attempt by a pair of half-brothers – one American, the other Anglo-French.
