Oscar Wilde, George Orwell and Nabokov all had views on the beautiful game. As we're idling through post Euro 2020 period, console yourself with the wit and wisdom of literature's parlour pundits.
'All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.' - Albert Camus
’Everything I know about the world, including what I have learned through science, I know through my own perspective, or from direct experience of the world, without which the symbols of science would be meaningless‘ – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
’After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA‘ – Albert Camus
Camus’ aphorism, often misquoted as ‘what I know most surely about morality…I learned from football’, is a favourite of high-brow fans of sport and t-shirt printers everywhere. It is, of course, a reference to his experiences playing in goal for the RUA, the Algiers Racing University football team, and the Montpensier Sports Club. He started playing for them at the age of fifteen and quickly made a good impression. Jonathan Wilson’s beautiful book on ‘keeping, The Outsider, the title of which is surely a conscious echo of Camus’ novel, describes in detail some of his recollections of playing. He was praised for his bravery and his abilities in goal, and was even once knocked out taking a powerful shot straight to the chest, a forewarning of the tuberculosis that would force him to hang up his gloves and, from that point on, only participate in football as a spectator.
Camus' passion for football is one of his best-known qualities and, perhaps, one of those that makes him more readily accessible as an author, a sign of communality with the rest of us, all too often lacking in literary greats. His work is sprinkled with references to football, to its constant power to engage and excite and its presence in the lives of the ordinary people who populate Camus' works.
'In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.'- Jean-Paul Sartre
It would seem unfair if we offered only Camus' take on football and leave out Sartre's. The leading figure in 20th century French philosophy sure has his existentialist stance shown in his opinion of football as well.
'Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God's. The sixth day is for football.' - Anthony Burgess
Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel.[3] In 1971, it was adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book.
Anthony Burgess visited West Germany in 1974 during the early part of that year’s World Cup. He did not visit any of the stadia, but appears characteristically to have watched a game from the restaurant of the Kempinski Hotel in West Berlin, which served ‘a World Cup cocktail — equal parts of curacao, vodka and orange juice — at 5½ Deutsche Mark a throw, or kick.’
His article on the tournament, ‘An Ancient Kickaround (Updated)’, was published in Time magazine on 8 July 1974. Burgess’s research for the piece is clearly somewhat limited, but is typically lively and engaging and contains a mixture of local colour (‘Frankfurt airport was a Brechtian fantasy of chauvinistic headgear and rosettes’) and speculative commentary on the meaning and importance of the game.
‘Soccer is traditionally crude, and attract roughs, drunks and roarers. It cannot be discussed in pubs without passion and obscenity. It is certainly not a gentleman’s game. Even its subtlety and skill have failed to recommend it … For those of us who are not gentlemen, the paradox of football delights and intrigues. Albert Camus played goal. Sir Frederick Ayer, the philosopher, is a fan, and there is a sense in which soccer is a fair subject for a logical positivist. It is, after all, a precise and yet various system of semiotics.’
'Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping… Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation.' - Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels in 2007;[6] Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list; and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed eighth on publisher Random House's list of the 20th century's greatest nonfiction. He was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Nabokov taught tennis and boxing in Berlin, but called football “the great love of my life.” He wrote affectingly about his time as a goalkeeper at Cambridge in Speak, Memory.
'And life is itself but a game at football.' - Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott liked football in the days before high tackles were outlawed by pesky rule-makers. He once reported on a match between Scottish teams Ettrick and Selkirk for the Edinburgh Journal, writing: 'Then strip lads, and to it, though sharp be the weather. And if, by mischance, you should happen to fall, There are worse things in life than a tumble on the heather. And life is itself a game of football.'
'Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.' - George Orwell
Clearly, this world-renowned writer of 1984 and Animal Farm has seen the dark side of our beloved game. He also wrote, 'International football is the continuation of war by other means.' and 'I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.'
'I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.' - Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
Nick Hornby is the author of the novels A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and the memoir Fever Pitch.
Fever Pitch, first published in 1992, is a memoir and Hornby's second book. It tells the story of the author's relationship with football, and with Arsenal Football Club in particular.[1] It consists of several chapters in chronological order, from the time the author first became a football fan as a child until his early thirties. Each chapter is about a football match that he remembers watching, most but not all at Arsenal Stadium, Highbury, and how it related to the events that were going on with his life. As well as recounting Arsenal's highs and lows, Hornby talks about other football clubs that play in London, and his interest in the contrasting surroundings of Cambridge United F.C. and Cambridge City F.C. whose matches he attends while at university.
Fever Pitch sold over a million copies in the United Kingdom. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1992 and was reprinted with a new cover and made available as part of the 2005–06 Arsenal F.C. membership pack as part of the "Final Salute" to Highbury Stadium. The book was made a Penguin Modern Classic in August 2012.
'Rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen. Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians.' - Oscar Wilde
As usual, Wilde never fails to surprise us with his witty sarcasm. On football, he also wrote,'Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.'
And there are some other writers who have chosen sides...
Such as children's book writer Michael Rosen:
And Sir Salman Rushdie:
It's not always jocks vs nerds. Sometimes book smart and street smart can go very well together. And we'll always have both to help us cope with difficulties in life and carry on.