Can any sports-fan readers out there reunite an old bloke with a long-lost friend of his, shaped like a big fat coffee-table book? It’s all this build-up to the South Africa World Cup that’s got me nostalgic, you see – because I’ve always found the pleasures of football and reading to be closely related, indeed reflective of each other. (Just hear me out on this, please.)

The first World Cup I followed avidly was the Argentine Copa Mundial of 1978. I didn’t know it at the time, but part of the pleasure was that England hadn’t qualified, and so one was spared the national soap opera of angst that attends their every appearance in a big Finals. With England back home, watching the telly – no chance of John Motson getting shrilly excited for Our Boys, or The Sun declaring war on our next opponents – one could simply enjoy the football. (I’ll come back to the case for this controversial ‘Anyone but England’ stance, in the assurance that I’m not alone.)

Absorbed as I was by Argentina 1978, I admit the 7-year-old me really failed to understand that a despicable military junta had lately come to power in Buenos Aires. Instead, I just remember those Finals as a riot of drama, and colour – the powder-blue-and-white Argentina of Kempes and Luque, the amber-orange Holland of Neeskens and Rensenbrink, even the golden-yellow (if unusually subdued) Brazil, starring the young Zico. Moreover, thanks to Scotland’s extraordinary existential torments at the tournament, I learned that football was also played quite well in Iran and in Peru, and that a chap called Teofilio Cubillas could make a net bulge with his cannon-like shot (even if it was only a Scots goalkeeper he had to beat.)

Eventually, yes, I came to appreciate that Argentina’s World Cup was one of the most utterly disreputable Finals in the game’s history. (David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, tells the story authoritatively here.) But the reason my memory remains so highly coloured is thanks to a marvellous illustrated book about those Finals which my parents subsequently bought me: the sort of expansive souvenir publishing that football should always inspire, and possibly does less so in these days of the near-instantaneous commemorative DVD. I’d still prefer to have a book, though – knowing that all the goals will end up on YouTube anyway (as above.) That tome devoted to Argentina 1978 (and here’s where memory fails, for I simply can’t recall the title or the authors) was a genuine keep-save (which makes it all the harder for me to confess that I wound up losing it…) In frozen moments and thoughtful prose, a tournament that had, in truth, been fairly lousy on pure footballing terms came alive again both as a dramatic spectacle and a historical ‘moment’ worthy of extended consideration.

Any World Cup year sees a boom in football publishing, and with the shelves getting re-stacked as I write, let me attempt a short and quite unscientific taxonomy of non-fictional books about the world’s great ‘sport of the people’:

1. You’ve got (cf. the foregoing) your classic souvenir item, the full-colour-illustrated account of a season or a major tournament or a club’s glorious history. Such books have a clear utility as Christmas/birthday gifts, but you may have to be 7 years old, or else a fan of some godforsaken club like Chelsea, to want to read them all the way through.

2. Then you’ve got your fascinating-facts almanac or statistical list-book, designed for argument-settling down the pub or perusal while seated on the porcelain throne of one’s ‘littlest room.’ Bill Borrows’ Talksport Book of World Cup Banter is the latest bidder in this market.

3. There is the player’s true-life story, usually ‘as told to’ and fastidiously picked clean of anything thoughtful or surprising. That said, as a boy reading up on such heroes as Jackie Milburn or Kenny Dalglish, I do believe I learned things about the real places from which these great players emerged, and how and why they did what they did. In the last 20 years, the era of Sky’s obnoxious Premiership, it’s been the more candid memoirs of less heralded players (e.g. Tony Cascarino’s Full Time, ‘as told to’ Paul Kimmage) that have revived interest in this form. The star-led publications (Gerrard, Totally Frank, etc.) are clearly and routinely devoid of self-awareness, more an expensively-bound version of a training-ground tabloid exclusive secured over a pint, or whatever players drink these days…

4. Then we have The Fan’s Tale, which can range from a pensive attempt to place the significance of football in one’s emotional life (cf. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Jason Cowley’s The Last Game, which serve proof that Arsenal fans do a lot of hard thinking) to the don’t-mess hooligan memoirs of Cass Pennant and his kind (which serve proof that West Ham’s Boleyn Ground was, in the mid-seventies, a little trip to Hell.) For some football fans country comes before club, and Mark Perryman’s much-admired Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation is being reissued in time for South Africa – though, as you may have guessed, I’ll not be packing it.

5. Let’s not ignore the technical/theoretical appreciation/analysis of the game as fine art. Bookgeeks has previously noted Why England Lose, and Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, and Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, which explains why the classic old school 2-3-5 formation (in which I, as a boy scout, learned to play inside right) was inverted by AC Milan in the early 1990s to extraordinary success. I would also recommend Richard Williams’ The Perfect Ten, a paean to the great wearers of that shirt from Pele to Zidane: ‘artists and inventors, men who see space and time and angles where we see only confusion.’

6. Less excitable types may take their football as a study in political economy, preferring the likes of Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football – a compendious Panorama-style excoriation of the money-grubbing Premiership era, marred mainly by Bower’s customary dislike of his subject. But the book to beat in this line for South Africa 2010 is Steve Bloomfield’s Africa United: How Football Explains Africa, a study of how the continent’s teams reflect the special struggles of their nations, thus a perfect fit for a tournament where you can currently get 12-1 on Ivory Coast reaching the final.

7. And saving what I see as the best for last… there is the writerly observational monograph that expresses an author’s learned fascination with and passion for a player or players. I can think of no finer book about English football and what became of it than the late Gordon Burn’s Best and Edwards, a work that is incisive and witty but shot through by melancholy. Similar virtues are on display, though the laughs come more easily, in Ian Hamilton’s Gazza Italia, in which the late poet and critic celebrated the tubby Geordie virtuoso, then of FC Lazio and England, in the wake of his red-faced and red-eyed endeavours at the 1990 World Cup.

I must say – coming back to where I came in – that I’m relieved to have Hamilton at least partly on my side when it comes to this club-versus-country business. Personally I have no interest in a national team comprised of players I dislike from club sides I usually despise. So my interest in England has always been contingent on how many Geordies and/or players of Newcastle United feature in the squad. (Thus in 1990 – Gascoigne, Beardsley, Waddle – my cup ran over.) Hamilton takes an approximately similar position, only substituting his beloved Tottenham Hotspur and his particular hero, Glenn Hoddle:

When England played well without Hoddle, I took a diminished pleasure in their triumph. What it chiefly signified to me, and my co-worshippers, was that Glenn would not be in the team next time. On the other hand, if Glenn had played, had made the winning goal, our patriotic joy would have been boundless…

This year England boss Fabio Capello has not looked to Newcastle for any solutions to his selection problems. But I’m pleased to say that United’s mercurial left-winger Jonas Gutierrez has impressed his own national coach sufficiently as to make it into the squad. So enjoy your World Cup, you England fans, and may it bring you happiness. I’ll be shouting for Argentina.

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