Book Review: The Football Factory

There are a lot of reasons not to read John King’s The Football Factory:

The content: I don’t consider myself someone easily embarrassed, but at times, this book’s cursing and the things being suggested by the main characters (especially when it comes to women) made me nearly blush reading it in public, even though I was totally cognisant of the fact that no one knew what I was reading.

The style: For two different chapters, King streams a character’s consciousness in sentences that appear to last a page or longer. Sentences that last a page. I’ve been known to push the conceivable boundaries of the run-on myself, but a page was never on my radar.

The dialect: At times, it’s nearly impossible to identify the English slang used, even for someone who’s lived in the UK for over a year and a half, and for a year of that in Scotland, where the word “murder” can often sound like the person speaking has forgotten there are vowels in it, and has lost control of his tongue rolls (think “mrrrrrrrrrrr-drrrrrrrrrrrrr” being said as though the extended rolled r’s are causing a whirlpool effect with all of the saliva in the person’s mouth).

The violence: Movie violence can make you cringe, but without sound, it actually tends to seem comical. Reading about a violent act, especially when described in deranged detail, makes you cringe, shiver, and squirm all at once. This book will do that to you on a regular basis.

My reading of The Football Factory, therefore, became a very on-again, off-again affair. Then I moved to Denver and began riding public transit into work every day, and I brought it along to pass the time. Reading through the book in ten-minute to half-hour pieces – sometimes getting through just a couple of pages – changed its complexion and removed some of the difficulty from the equation of reading it. And what I found was that the people who couldn’t initially stomach the book, for the reasons laid out above and probably more, missed out. What John King did with this novel, originally published in 1996, was nothing short of amazing – he was able to plainly explain the deep-seated motivations of the UK’s football firm culture. It has fascinated and dumbfounded people the world over in attempting to understand why it is people would get together on the day of a soccer game, travel for miles to see their favorite team, have as couple of drinks before the match – and proceed to beat the holy hell out of a group of fans of the opposing squad, knowing full well that they could die at any time in the fray.

Needless to say, the mentality of Tom Johnson, the main character and a well-respected (if inconsequential) member of Chelsea firm, is complicated. Typically, when your main character is violent and womanizing by nature, and seemingly picks and chooses the direction of his moral compass, an author will hope to endear the figure to the reader to eventually reveal the character’s humanity in hopes of evoking empathy. But what John King accomplishes is something completely refreshing. When something inevitably terrible happens to Tom, I am more or less unmoved. Where I am used to feeling empathy (or sickness at the writer’s attempt to evoke it), I instead feel pity. Nothing else. I, for one, think that this is by design.

Though the book focuses on Tom Johnson, and the majority of the book is told through his eyes (at least in the chapters unambiguously titled by each match that he is attending, just in case you weren’t sure what his life revolved around), it’s salted (not peppered) in between Tom’s chapters with singular stories about other people representing the societal pressures of British culture – the elements that produce the most peculiar aspects of it. One of my favorites of these (although they are always a welcome diversion from Tom’s base existence) is Mr. Farrell, an elderly man who fought in World War II for the Queen and spends his days interacting with the ghost of his dead wife, unable to separate his former life as a soldier from his current life as a civilian without her presence. When he does remove the safety blanket to venture out and visit a war memorial in remembrance of his fallen friends, a trip which he admittedly has never been able to complete, he turns violent on two trouble-making Pakistani boys on his train, unable to let their antics (petty theft) go unpunished. These sub-stories never intertwine, save for one important exception, suggesting that their purpose is merely to serve as an explanatory tool – something that would render Tom’s story less authentic. King makes sure of its authenticity in very inventive ways. His talent for assuming the schizophrenic differences between characters in juxtaposed chapters is impressive, and the fact that the reader subconsciously understands what they mean in the context of Tom’s story is a stellar achievement.

During my time in Scotland, I rode with a busload of Celtic fans from Dundee to Glasgow for a match. It was arranged by the father of a friend of mine from the University of St Andrews. I don’t know if they were part of a firm or not, but I am sure that if something would have “gone off” at the pub we had rounds at before the match, not a single one of them would have backed down. I didn’t get a glimpse of the violence (I got that in 2005 when on the way back from a Man U away match, we had a brick lobbed at our bus that just missed crashing through a window), but I did gain firsthand knowledge of the camaraderie. Without knowing me, but knowing I was American, they cared only that I was there to support The Hoops (Celtic FC), that I had a pint of lager when we got there, and a few more cans on the ride home. I was offered to watch all away matches at their select pub in Dundee for the rest of my stay and a ride into home matches on the coach anytime I wanted. The man I sat next to on the ride in gave me his cell phone number to call in case something happened, and when I was lost finding my way back to the pub after the match had ended, left and made the walk back to the grounds to find me – even though he was risking missing the bus himself by doing so.

Naturally, having had this limited experience, I get a lot of questions from people who see news reports about football violence and have watched Green Street Hooligans about what the difference is between soccer in the UK and the NFL in the USA that makes it seem like a reactive chemical has been introduced, turning fans from staunch supporters to rabid, physically confrontational animals.

Now, when people ask me how grown men could fight and kill each other over sports, I finally know exactly what I’ll say.

“Read The Football Factory.”