How did English football get so ugly?

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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TaggedBook review - English football history, the Premier League

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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

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