The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Gamechanger

by Robert McCrum

A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor.“Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” —Gary Lineker Football, in the 1880s, was a rough and often dangerous game. As a result, William McCrum, the heir to a linen fortune and a keen amateur goalkeeper in Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, proposed a new and drastic a penalty kick that would admonish anyone—and their team—for not following the rules.At first the International Football Board resisted “the Irishman’s Motion” as a restriction that would curb the players’ freedom of expression, but the Penalty Kick was adopted in 1891 to almost immediate acclaim among fans and players. For about a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon has not only regulated the conduct of football, but has also inspired game theorists and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature.An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty The Story of a Game-Changer looks at the history and meaning of an extraordinary phenomenon while examining the Penalty Kick’s psychological—even philosophical grip—on our imaginations, with its distillation of risk and chance into an all-or-nothing moment.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports

208 pages, Hardcover

Published October 8, 2024

About the author

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He was born and educated in Cambridge. For nearly 20 years he was editor-in-chief of the publishers Faber & Faber. He is the co-author of The Story of English (1986), and has written six novels. He was the literary editor of the Observer from 1996 to 2008, and has been a regular contributor to the Guardian since 1990

Reviews

[kaiah❣️]

this book isn’t for everyone, but it’s for a lot more people than you’d expect it to be for! i’ve grown up with football and i’ve grown up the daughter of two parents with quite undiscovered lineages, and i found a lot of heart and empathy at the core of robert mccrums most recent novel. in fact, i interviewed him today for one of my college classes, and this heart could not be more apparent. he was not only an intellectual, stimulating, and witty man, he was honest, kind, and compassionate. to hear him talk about his journey with the book, honestly aids in the rating i give…i don’t know if you could hear him talk about any subject he cares about, whether it’s his work or family or william shakespeare, and not view the subject in a brighter light!

[Graham]

Of course the professional game is played in two halves, but growing up playing soccer as a youngster, we did it the good ol' fashioned American way and divided the game into four quarters. Which is how I'll review this book because its sections actually lay out nicely in this way. (I'll also call it soccer, because I'm a heathen.)

First quarter: Solid start. The author controls the game early on, explaining the geopolitical situation in Northern Ireland, and highlighting in particular the rough and tumble nature of soccer and its desperate desire for reform. Enter the author's great-grandfather, Willie, the gadabout son of a linen magnate who is tired of having the shit beat out of him playing goalkeeper and proposes the idea of a penalty kick for fouls committed in the box. The penalty kick is a moment of high tension, where the keeper defends a cavernous goal from a striker kicking the ball from 12 yards away, and is seen as anathema by the authorities. Of particular note are the racial tensions at work; the English soccer authorities are hesitant to endorse a plan proposed by an Irishman. Nonetheless, the penalty kick goes through, and gradually gains respect.

Second quarter: The team loses steam quickly, and the prose needs fresh legs and maybe an early substitution. With the story of the penalty kick established, the author tells us more about his family's life. It's not particularly interesting, unless you are somebody who thinks stories about grandfathers in the navy and wives cheating on their husbands are inherently interesting. I do not; I don't really know these people, and in the 25+ pages I've met them in, I don't have enough embedded interest in their lives to care about the gossip they got into while being stationed in Malta. None of this is about penalty kicks, even tangentially, and it screams "I did a lot of family archive research and need someplace to put it."

At halftime the team is trailing.

Third quarter: We come out of the break with vigor! With all the family members dead, the author resumes focus on the penalty kick, examining how his grandfather's idea evolved into the shootout, which becomes the new (and controversial) way to end games that are tied. He does a great job unpacking how ending a game on penalty kicks changes the dynamics of the sport, how penalty kick shootouts are tied to the rise of televised games, and examines the commodification of the sport more broadly. This part is really good! The irony of the penalty kick, designed explicitly to make the game more amateurishly "gentlemanly" in that old school way, now being a way to make the game more professional and monetized and "ungentlemanly" is really interesting! It also recounts England's historic failures at penalty kicks in major tournaments; given that it was the Irish who invented the PK, I like to think of it as a legacy curse by the Emerald Isle on their colonial overlords. Suck it Chris Waddle!

Fourth quarter: Unfortunately the team is gassed. We really only had a game plan for a two-part New Yorker article, but this conceit needed to be stretched out into a book, so we end up analyzing a soccer coach's diversity and inclusion manifesto at the end. The spectators are confused at what's happening on the field. As a BBC commentator would say, "They've lost the plot entirely out there!" Game over, crushing defeat.

[Paul Kirkwood]

This book should be titled My Family Story. That's what occupies the first part and two-thirds of this slim volume with just a passing reference to McCrum's great grandfather suggesting the penalty kick to the FA. It seems there's not much more to be said about that detail. McCrum asks lots of questions which he wasn't able to find answers to. You may as well just google Milford/penalty kick. Centered on Northern Ireland, the family history is moderately interesting but not what we came for.

The final third provides a quick canter through the history of England's penalty taking (which we're all very familiar with), a schoolboy-type analysis of Gareth Southgate's Dear England open letter (why?) and, finally, a brief account of McCrum's visit to Milford. He now waxes lyrical. "The penalty kick is like a Victorian novel, replete with 'story' but stronger in mood than storyline." He adds: "The penalty kick's place in the psychology of the fairytale yields a panoply of fantastic archetypes." What?!

McCrum acknowledges three books he's drawn on: He always puts it to the right; On Penalties; and Twelve yards: the art and psychology of the perfect penalty. These, I suspect, are far better places to start if you really want to find about the story of penalty kicks.

[Nuno Mendonça]

O Pénalti, edição Zigurate Portugal, parte de uma premissa interessante — olhar para o penalty como gesto técnico, psicológico e quase ritual — mas a execução nem sempre acompanha essa promessa. McCrum tenta construir uma espécie de “arqueologia familiar” para explicar a relação inglesa com este momento de tensão, mas essa parte acabou por ser, para mim, a mais monótona do livro. A história da família é longa, densa e, honestamente, pouco envolvente.

O livro tem momentos bons, sobretudo quando se concentra no próprio penalty: a carga emocional, o simbolismo, o medo e o impulso. Aí sim, McCrum escreve com clareza e alguma força. Mas sempre que regressa às digressões familiares, o ritmo quebra e a leitura perde foco.

No fim, fica um livro que tinha potencial, mas que se dispersa. Vale pela reflexão sobre o gesto e pelo toque ensaístico, mas não me conquistou. Uma leitura mediana, com alguns pontos de interesse, mas sem faísca suficiente.

[Ben]

Unbelievably tedious to read, a rosy eyed family history that is overwritten and groan inducing in equal parts. Casually sexist for good measure as well.

Also, his little snark about Americans calling football soccer should have been a tip off to the kind of imperialist navel gazing he had in store. Newsflash dickhead, soccer is a term of English origin. Far be it from me to defend the United States, but that kind of unnecessary jab that is just factually inaccurate drives me up a wall. Yes, Americans adopted the term - but those who follow Association Football (or...soccer as it is abbreviated as) do understand that a book about the penalty kick is not referring to American football when you write football.

Only giving two stars because I learned a few things but 100% not worth the read.

[Caleb]

I've now read two books on penalty kicks since Christmas. This is a distant second. The author's ancestor first suggested a penalty kick and got it passed into the rules in the 1890s. That factoid doesn't quite justify the book that follows that covers family history but then does it in an incomplete manner. It eventually morphs into talking about shootouts, but acknowledges that other books (including Ben Lyttleton's which I read) handle this more thoroughly, begging the question why one is reading this.

[Nelson Goncalves]

An interesting story that combines the personal drama of the penalty's inventor, and his family, with the game itself. It is quite relatable not because it speaks about the game, but because it does it in such a personal manner.

[aliya]

I don’t like football idk

[Melody]

2.5. Loved the parts about the penalty kick itself, but I got really bogged down in all of the family story. It seemed like the author was just trying to add length.