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Simon Kuper

Financial Times columnist and author of Football Against the Enemy and, with Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics.

5 books on the record · 30 Sep 2016 – 30 Sep 2016

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

recommends it

All Played Out by Pete Davies

Pete Davies really started off English football literature, and when I was going around London publishers in 1991, trying to sell them my first football book, people said to me, 'Oh yes, we know football books sell, because Pete Davies wrote this very good book called All Played Out.'

on fivebooks.com · 30 Sep 2016

loved it

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

It's not depressing! It's very funny and was also almost the book that started this all off.

on fivebooks.com · 30 Sep 2016

loved it

Goalkeepers Are Different by Brian Glanville

As a teenager I must have read it five or eight times, and I've subsequently met other people who've had that experience too. It was a book about what you always dreamed of, of being a professional footballer, but it was rendered with grittiness and accuracy and it just has the pace of a really good novel.

on fivebooks.com · 30 Sep 2016

recommends it

Only A Game? by Eamon Dunphy

This is a cult book among those of us who like reading about football. It came out in the 1970s when really no one was publishing books about football.

on fivebooks.com · 30 Sep 2016

Everything Simon Kuper recommends — not just books — on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.