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    Pray: Notes on a Football Season
    Pray: Notes on a Football Season
    Pray: Notes on a Football Season
    Ebook59 pages49 minutes

    Pray: Notes on a Football Season

    By Nick Hornby

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    About this ebook

    Nick Hornby, author of the bestselling soccer classic Fever Pitch, offers an insightful account of an extraordinary sports season. Concentrating on a number of significant games in British soccer during the 2011–2012 season, Hornby chronicles the emotional, political, and societal highlights and woes that played out on the field. There were alleged racist clashes, revealing the deep cultural fissures still present in British life. There was a fairy-tale return for the legendary Thierry Henry, and the terrifying collapse of Bolton’s Fabrice Muamba, clinically dead for seventy-eight minutes after a heart attack. Throughout, Hornby delves into the impact of the economy on the beloved sport of Britain. As sheikhs and oligarchs buy and sell teams and players at astronomical financial levels, other teams are left behind to struggle with diminished talent. And as income inequality hits all-time highs worldwide, so it does in British soccer.

    It was a season of tumultuous incident and enormous entertainment, a season more glorious than most. By the end, in May 2012, fans of most clubs had been enthralled, appalled, depressed, elated, shocked, and enraged. Along the way, soccer had somehow managed to encompass politics, high finance, the law, and matters of life and death. Read all about it, and relive it, here.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 16, 2012
    ISBN9781101614037
    Pray: Notes on a Football Season
    Author

    Nick Hornby

    Nick Hornby (Maidenhead, 1957), licenciado por la Universidad de Cambridge, ha ejercido de profesor, periodista y guionista. En Anagrama se recuperaron sus tres extraordinarios primeros libros, Fiebre en las gradas: «Memorable» (José Martí Gómez, La Vanguardia); Alta fidelidad: «Con una importancia equiparable a lo que representaron para la juventud de su tiempo El guardián entre el centeno, de J. D. Salinger, o En el camino, de Jack Kerouac» (Enrique Blanc, Reforma); y Un gran chico: «Una lectura sumamente recomendable; un tipo que escribe de maravilla» (Jorge Casanova, La Voz de Galicia). Luego se ha ido publicando su obra posterior: Cómo ser buenos: «Un clásico de la literatura cómica. El humor y la mordacidad con los que Hornby se enfrenta a la historia no están reñidos con la penetración psicológica y la profundidad» (Ignacio Martínez de Pisón); 31 canciones: «Muy inteligente y ligero en el mejor sentido. Encantador también, ya lo creo» (Francisco Casavella); En picado: «Brillante novela coral de un autor de libros tan brillantes como modernos» (Mercedes Monmany, ABC); Todo por una chica: «Nick Hornby es capaz de levantar una de sus fábulas urbanas contemporáneas y de adornarla con la principal virtud de su literatura: el encanto» (Pablo Martínez Zarracina, El Norte de Castilla); Juliet, desnuda: «Dulce y amarga a la vez, muestra al mejor Hornby» (Amelia Castilla, El País); Funny Girl: «Fina, mordaz e inteligente... Una auténtica delicia» (Fran G. Matute, El Mundo), y Alguien como tú: «Encuentra su fuerza narrativa en la capacidad comunicativa de Hornby, en la calidez y la verdad con que retrata situaciones que todos hemos vivido o podríamos vivir» (Sergi Sánchez, El Periódico).

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      Book preview

      Pray - Nick Hornby

      Pray: Notes on the 2011/2012 Football Season

      Sunday, 28 August 2011

      Spurs 1 Manchester City 5

      Manchester United 8 Arsenal 2

      Uh-oh.

      What else were you supposed to think on this third weekend of the new season, if you supported a Premiership team other than one of the Manchester clubs? Maybe you weren’t too worried if you followed Chelsea, the only team rich enough to compete with City and United. But if you were a fan of Arsenal, or Spurs, or Liverpool, and you’d begun to half wonder whether your team stood half a chance, with a fair wind and a short injury-list, of becoming champions, then this was when you woke up. And if you were a fan of a club that you knew already was going to struggle for survival, then you probably started doing some multiplication sums in your head: so Arsenal finished fourth last year, and they let in eight. We finished sixteenth, which means … And the most shocking piece of information these scores contained wasn’t revealed until the very last day of the season, nearly nine months later: this wasn’t just Manchester against North London. This was, as it turned out, the best two teams in England playing the third- and fourth-best teams in England. There was very little difference between third place and fourth in the final table; after what seemed like weeks of mediocrity, when neither team could get a win no matter who they played, Arsenal finished a point ahead of Spurs. And, of course, there was only goal difference between the two Manchester clubs. But the gap between Manchester and North London was nineteen points, or six wins and a draw.

      It hasn’t always been the biggest and richest clubs who finish champions. Seven different teams came top of the First Division in the twenty years before the Premiership began in 1992: Aston Villa (with Ipswich Town, who should have won it that year, in second place), Derby County, Nottingham Forest, Arsenal, Leeds United, Everton, and, eleven times, Liverpool – who weren’t richer than any of the others, just better and smarter and more industrious. There were several other teams who were certainly able to compete financially with any club in that list, most notably Manchester United, who not only failed to win the old First Division in that time but actually managed to get themselves relegated.

      More or less the moment the Premiership began in 1992, that all changed. TV money came pouring in, players were free to move from one country to the next, the gap between big and small clubs became accentuated. Manchester United won the first Premiership trophy, and kept on winning it, eight times in the next eleven years. Blackburn Rovers won it in 1995, four years after the multimillionaire industrialist Jack Walker took over. Walker spent £25 million in his first three years, and twice broke the British transfer record. Chelsea won in 2005, two years after a billionaire bought the club. And this year Manchester City became champions, four years after they were sold to the Abu Dhabi United Group. The lesson is clear: get yourself a sheikh, or an industrialist, or an oligarch, or, failing that, just … be the world’s richest club, like United. Only my team, Arsenal, have won the Premier League – three times – without significant financial help from outside. But Arsenal is still a big, wealthy business, with a new stadium and crowds of 60,000. They’re hardly Bash Street United. They can afford to pay players £100,000 a week or more. But they can’t pay double that, which is what Manchester City have started to do over the last couple of years, and, increasingly, that was becoming a problem – for Arsenal, and for everyone else.

      So how much money would Arsenal and Spurs and all the teams underneath them need to close that nineteen-point gap? At the time of writing, Manchester City have bought thirty-six players since 2008, at a reported cost of £476 million. (Arsenal’s record transfer fee is £15 million, for Andrei Arshavin; City have spent more than that sixteen times

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