Great Football Books: The Football Grounds of England & Wales, by Simon Inglis

There was a time when football writing wasn't as expansive as it is nowadays.

You would be amazed at how different things used to be. These days, despite the common trope that print media is dying, each year brings more new football books. It feels, sometimes, as though there is no story too obscure, no obsession too daft, that it can’t be committed to a couple of hundred pages and 100,000 words. But things weren’t always like that. There was a time when both the inner workings and our inner feelings of football were out of reach. Something akin to a dirty little secret.

During my childhood, there were essentially four types of football book. For the children there was the annual, a hardback compilation for the Christmas market, usually based on a magazine or comic, and novels about plucky young upcomers. And for the adults there were huge, cigarette-sponsored telephone directory-sized compendiums of figures and tables, and ‘tell all’ autobiographies in which former pros–usually through the conduit of a tabloid journalist hustling on the side–settled old scores and replayed the tackles they’d never quite managed to make throughout their playing careers.

Two books more than any others changed that perception forever. The idea that the football supporter could only ever be of peripheral interest to readers was blown apart in 1992 by Nick Hornby with Fever Pitch, a book which told the story of the author’s life through the vehicle of the game itself. The other, meanwhile, addressed the nerdery of football and our obsession with its fixtures and fittings; The Football Grounds of England & Wales, by Simon Inglis.