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Books

How did English football get so ugly?

In a review of David Goldblatt’s The Game of Our Lives, television sponsorship, pampered star players and the vanity of oligarchs are blamed for the current sad state of English football

29 November 2014

9:00 AM

29 November 2014

9:00 AM

The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football David Goldblatt

Penguin/Viking, pp.416, £20, ISBN: 9780670920587

Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t just a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that.’ But as David Goldblatt shows in this penetrating study, it was a sport then in apparently terminal decline.The

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