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Growing up in Belgium, soccer was Jean-Philippe Touissant’s life, a passion not shared by his bookish family. Now an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and filmmaker, he reflects upon his lifelong love for the game with an intellectual’s keen mind and a sports fan’s heart. What, he ponders, has a lifetime of soccer fandom taught him about life and the passage of time itself.
Soccer takes readers on an idiosyncratic journey that delves deep into the author’s childhood memories, but also transports us to World Cup matches in Japan, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil. Along the way, it kicks around such provocative questions as: How does soccer fandom both support and transcend nationalism? How are our memories of soccer matches both collective and distinctly personal? And how can a game this beautiful and this ephemeral be adequately captured in words?
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part philosophical essay, Soccer is entirely unique, a thrilling departure from the usual clichés of sports writing. Even readers with little knowledge of the game will be enthralled by Touissant’s profound musings and lyrical prose.
Soccer takes readers on an idiosyncratic journey that delves deep into the author’s childhood memories, but also transports us to World Cup matches in Japan, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil. Along the way, it kicks around such provocative questions as: How does soccer fandom both support and transcend nationalism? How are our memories of soccer matches both collective and distinctly personal? And how can a game this beautiful and this ephemeral be adequately captured in words?
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part philosophical essay, Soccer is entirely unique, a thrilling departure from the usual clichés of sports writing. Even readers with little knowledge of the game will be enthralled by Touissant’s profound musings and lyrical prose.
92 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
5 people are currently reading
189 people want to read
About the author
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
65 books185 followersJean-Philippe Toussaint (born 29 November, 1957, Brussels) is a Belgian prose writer and filmmaker. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and he has had his photographs displayed in Brussels and Japan. Toussaint won the Prix Médicis in 2005 for his novel Fuir. The 2006 book La mélancolie de Zidane (Paris: Minuit, 2006) is a lyrical essay on the headbutt administered by the French football player Zinedine Zidane to the Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin. An English translation was published in 2007 in the British journal New Formations. His 2009 novel La Vérité sur Marie won the prestigious Prix Décembre.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 20, 2016
A nostalgic tour through a football (soccer) fan’s highlights. Over the years Toussaint has realized some of the things he loves about the sport: its seasonality (the World Cup “comes round every four years with the regularity of a leap-year seasonal fruit”) and the rituals of attending a match. On the other hand, he recognizes downsides, such as temporary permission given to chauvinism and the fact that it doesn’t age well – it’s an instant thing; one doesn’t tend to watch repeats. My favorite chapter, the one set in 2014, is less about sports and more about a hard time in the author’s personal life: he had recently lost his father and finished a ten-year sequence of novels, leaving him unsure of what to do next. I enjoyed his introspective passages about the writing life and the sense of purpose it gives his struggles. I was not the ideal reader, given my general antipathy to sports and my unfamiliarity with the author. All the same, I can see how this would appeal to fans of Fever Pitch.
See my full review at Nudge.
See my full review at Nudge.
September 9, 2024
Je ne comprends pas pourquoi certaines personnes se sentent obligées d'écrire et de publier des bouquins alors qu'elles pourraient simplement tenir un journal intime.
Cet auteur a réussi à rendre le football - le sport le plus populaire au monde - le moins relatable possible. C'est fou de se regarder autant le nombril sur un sujet aussi universel.
En plus, le mec est un beauf à l'infini (top les clichés sur les supporters de foot Jean-Philippe) parce que les seules références aux femmes sont extrêmement sexualisantes.
Quelques extraits :
"Il ne peut rien nous arriver pendant qu'on regarde un match de football : comme dans la proximité bénéfique et frontale d'un sexe de femme dans certaines positions de l'acte amoureux, qui fait se dissiper instantanément l'angoisse de la mort, qui l'anesthésie et la fait fondre dans l'humidité et la douceur de l'étreinte, le football, pendant qu'on le regarde, nous tient radicalement à distance de la mort." Hein?? Quoi????
"Les Suédoises avec un petit drapeau tatoué sur les joues, sur le front, les épaules, les avant-bras, les mollets (ailleurs aussi, j'imagine, mais je n'ai pas eu le loisir d'aller le vérifier)." UN DÉTRAQUÉ le type
Ça servait à rien de se rassurer en commençant le bouquin par "Voici un livre qui ne plaira à personne, ni aux intellectuels, qui ne s'intéressent pas au football, ni aux amateurs de football qui le trouveront trop intellectuel."
On s'en fout juste de connaitre tes réflexions nauséabondes.
Bref, à vomir
0/5
Cet auteur a réussi à rendre le football - le sport le plus populaire au monde - le moins relatable possible. C'est fou de se regarder autant le nombril sur un sujet aussi universel.
En plus, le mec est un beauf à l'infini (top les clichés sur les supporters de foot Jean-Philippe) parce que les seules références aux femmes sont extrêmement sexualisantes.
Quelques extraits :
"Il ne peut rien nous arriver pendant qu'on regarde un match de football : comme dans la proximité bénéfique et frontale d'un sexe de femme dans certaines positions de l'acte amoureux, qui fait se dissiper instantanément l'angoisse de la mort, qui l'anesthésie et la fait fondre dans l'humidité et la douceur de l'étreinte, le football, pendant qu'on le regarde, nous tient radicalement à distance de la mort." Hein?? Quoi????
"Les Suédoises avec un petit drapeau tatoué sur les joues, sur le front, les épaules, les avant-bras, les mollets (ailleurs aussi, j'imagine, mais je n'ai pas eu le loisir d'aller le vérifier)." UN DÉTRAQUÉ le type
Ça servait à rien de se rassurer en commençant le bouquin par "Voici un livre qui ne plaira à personne, ni aux intellectuels, qui ne s'intéressent pas au football, ni aux amateurs de football qui le trouveront trop intellectuel."
On s'en fout juste de connaitre tes réflexions nauséabondes.
Bref, à vomir
0/5
May 25, 2020
The publisher’s classification of this beautiful book labels it as sport, as memoir, and as world history – which I suppose it is, but most of all I see this as a meditative, philosophical reflection on aesthetics and experience. Many people’s experience of sport is visceral, is deep rooted and inexplicable, and certainly not something we can easily put into words; the same may be said for art, for music, or for many other practices where engagement is emotional and affective. As an historian dealing with sport and especially with sport’s place in political activism – also a place of intense affective engagement – that intense visceral feeling is hard to get hold of let alone put into words, I suspect in large part because it is an experience that is largely beyond consciousness. It is precisely this status that Toussaint deals with in his own ways of being with football. Hence, the philosophy: Toussaint explores how and why sport, in this case soccer/football, matters.
He opens with an epigram, noting that neither intellectuals nor football fans will like the book, and I can see why fans might dislike it – too reflective, too meditative, too abstract – but I suspect Toussaint misreads the growing intellectual/scholarly engagement with sport as a trivial phenomenon that matters.
The book has three principal parts. The opening chapter (around 1/3 of the total text) deals with Toussaint’s childhood, his playing of football and his family’s general lack of engagement with the game in 1960s and early 1970s Brussels. As much as anything, however, this is an exploration of what it means to write, to draw into an experience by ‘putting it into words’. This comes to a head when, on p21 he writes:
I can, of course, see why some might struggle with this – but I read this as not being about football, but as being about how we write about and explain why the subject of emotional engagement matters, and how the language of the poetic engages with the seemingly inexplicable to account for its mattering.
In this opening section, framed by his thinking about the 1998 Men’s World Cup, he explores childhood engagement and practice rather than attendance at the spectacles of global football, of the seriousness of child’s/play and distraction of the playfulness of adulthood. There is a magic to these musings, as if we’ve stepped in Toussaint’s childhood magic circle, but it is a magic that is largely missing from the majority of the text (50 of the 80 pages) that are centred around the various World Cups for men from 2002 to 2014, whether or not he actually attended games. In key places here we get the sense of football as drawing Toussaint away.
Although in 2002 he went to Japan to go to the World Cup, he also arranged a series of lectures and other work while there, so there is a constant tension between his reason for being (in Japan) and being drawn to matches, either to stadia or to the television. Conversely, in 2014 he retreats to write in the wake of his father’s death and the end of a cycle of novels, only to find himself drawn into the tournament as a virtual follower. Here the tension between football as distraction and as raison d’etre is profoundly drawn. All through these 50 pages Toussaint wrangles with language to explore how this meaning matters – note that is how, not the more common why; it is this how that makes this such a rich philosophical piece of writing.
The final section, the last 6 pages only, was initially published separately as an essay on Zidane’s last game, on the head butt, on the problem of how to end, on melancholia. It is a beautiful piece of cultural analysis, of reflection, of empathy, and should, I suspect, be treated as separate from the rest of the work.
In a sense, Toussaint was right with his epigram – I’d expect most to be disappointed by this book, in part because it comes from a place of disappointment, a word that recurs and seems to frame Toussaint’s engagement with and view of the world. He doesn’t find solace in football – pleasure and enjoyment perhaps but not solace, or at least not unbridled, all-encompassing solace (although he does find catharsis), and in this explores how that happens. So, for fans he suffers from not being a fan; for others, he risks being seen as elevating the trivial when he should be dealing with things that are much more serious).
For me, he has grappled with that fundamental philosophical question about how something matters, and turned to an elegant, poetic, elegiac aesthetics to find an answer. He may not have found one, but he’s had a good go at it and given me much to muse on in the articulation of sport and systems of meaning making in the everyday.
He opens with an epigram, noting that neither intellectuals nor football fans will like the book, and I can see why fans might dislike it – too reflective, too meditative, too abstract – but I suspect Toussaint misreads the growing intellectual/scholarly engagement with sport as a trivial phenomenon that matters.
The book has three principal parts. The opening chapter (around 1/3 of the total text) deals with Toussaint’s childhood, his playing of football and his family’s general lack of engagement with the game in 1960s and early 1970s Brussels. As much as anything, however, this is an exploration of what it means to write, to draw into an experience by ‘putting it into words’. This comes to a head when, on p21 he writes:
Words, perhaps, have the power to reactivate the magic of football – not the words of the press articles which will relate the episodes of the previous day’s match, texts that go out of fashion as quickly as the matches they describe, but words of poetry, or literature, which come to brush against football, gasp its movement, caress its colours, stroke its charms, flatter its enchantments, taking football as a motif, talking about its fluidity and the elasticity of the ebb and flow of the offensive and defensive waves which we observe from above, from the overhanging stands.
I can, of course, see why some might struggle with this – but I read this as not being about football, but as being about how we write about and explain why the subject of emotional engagement matters, and how the language of the poetic engages with the seemingly inexplicable to account for its mattering.
In this opening section, framed by his thinking about the 1998 Men’s World Cup, he explores childhood engagement and practice rather than attendance at the spectacles of global football, of the seriousness of child’s/play and distraction of the playfulness of adulthood. There is a magic to these musings, as if we’ve stepped in Toussaint’s childhood magic circle, but it is a magic that is largely missing from the majority of the text (50 of the 80 pages) that are centred around the various World Cups for men from 2002 to 2014, whether or not he actually attended games. In key places here we get the sense of football as drawing Toussaint away.
Although in 2002 he went to Japan to go to the World Cup, he also arranged a series of lectures and other work while there, so there is a constant tension between his reason for being (in Japan) and being drawn to matches, either to stadia or to the television. Conversely, in 2014 he retreats to write in the wake of his father’s death and the end of a cycle of novels, only to find himself drawn into the tournament as a virtual follower. Here the tension between football as distraction and as raison d’etre is profoundly drawn. All through these 50 pages Toussaint wrangles with language to explore how this meaning matters – note that is how, not the more common why; it is this how that makes this such a rich philosophical piece of writing.
The final section, the last 6 pages only, was initially published separately as an essay on Zidane’s last game, on the head butt, on the problem of how to end, on melancholia. It is a beautiful piece of cultural analysis, of reflection, of empathy, and should, I suspect, be treated as separate from the rest of the work.
In a sense, Toussaint was right with his epigram – I’d expect most to be disappointed by this book, in part because it comes from a place of disappointment, a word that recurs and seems to frame Toussaint’s engagement with and view of the world. He doesn’t find solace in football – pleasure and enjoyment perhaps but not solace, or at least not unbridled, all-encompassing solace (although he does find catharsis), and in this explores how that happens. So, for fans he suffers from not being a fan; for others, he risks being seen as elevating the trivial when he should be dealing with things that are much more serious).
For me, he has grappled with that fundamental philosophical question about how something matters, and turned to an elegant, poetic, elegiac aesthetics to find an answer. He may not have found one, but he’s had a good go at it and given me much to muse on in the articulation of sport and systems of meaning making in the everyday.
July 16, 2025
“I cannot dissociate football from dreams and childhood,” Jean-Philippe Toussaint writes in Football. And we, as readers, can be thankful for this. Across eighty-five pages of evocative writing, Toussaint treats us to a selection of lingering vignettes across a life of following football. Framing most of his writing across five World Cups (1998-2014), Toussaint is the aging, harried, and thoughtful everyman who shuffles and scuffs along and against the passing of time.
Football begins in 1998, with Toussaint at forty years of age. The year, “though still intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history…had accidently sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century, and inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past.” In experiencing this transition into middle age, Toussaint recounts early footballing memories. He introduces a recurring motif of the lag and mismatch with time, first in a description of players at the 1970 World Cup, colourised on TV for the first time, leaving their “physical envelope behind and now pursued [their] moves in black and white, leaving behind him the colour of his jersey, which followed him in slight delay.” Despite such vivid memories, he feels a growing detachment with football (realised through his inability to name more than one player of the Belgian national team at the 1998 World Cup). This detachment hints at his general melancholy with life.
One third of Football is dedicated to Toussaint describing his experiences watching the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Japan is clearly a place that he is comfortable describing in equally rich colour and gloomy substance. Through the neon signs of Shibuya, rain dripping from the ribs of transparent umbrellas, and the convenience culture of 7-Elevens and Family Marts on every other corner, Toussaint effortlessly portrays the buttoned-down culture and colourful, waterlogged kitsch of Japan. The striking scene of a torrential downpour in Yokohama following the end of the World Cup final, where overcautious and polite stewards herd fans with fluorescent truncheons into the Yokohama Metro, is particularly memorable for what it represents: the clashing and melding of cultures at a time when the term ‘globalisation’ was still an unfamiliar concept to many. The 2002 World Cup ushered in an exciting new age for football, represented by Senegal defeating France in the opening match; co-hosts South Korea narrowly missing out on overall third place; European teams flattering to deceive; the raucous partisan Japanese crowds reminding the European and American markets of the UTC+9 time zone…
Like Toussaint does, I must also beg my readers to forgive me for wandering off and dawdling here, for I’m getting to my central point. The 2002 World Cup was a formative footballing moment for many of us, that “perfect concordance of times” that in memory becomes melancholic and slightly discordant. And this is the take-away from Football: that where there was once colour will soon fade and become monotone. As Toussaint tells us plainly, “I am pretending to write about football, but I am writing, as always, about the passing of time.”
Throughout less-than-satisfying experiences attending and watching subsequent World Cups, Toussaint wrestles with his disaffection until difficult times in 2014 force him to face another concordance—that of professional crisis and the absence of existential meaning. The passage where Toussaint struggles with the buffer and lag in a paid stream of the Argentina v Netherlands semi-final in the 2014 World Cup illustrates him as a man also discordant with technology, and with technology being a gauge of progress, he becomes further displaced in modern times. Another storm and downpour frames this closing to Football, providing a form of cleansing and reconciliation to finding some contentment in his existential lag.
Toussaint’s claim that everything contained within Football will appeal to nobody is somehow appealing and endearing. The terse title may already put off pontificating intellectuals and raging tribalists (who both think they don’t need to be told about football) who may not commonly seek the middle ground with the each other. Toussaint appeals to those who are fed up, overindulged, and out of time with football, and those who recognise that football is a middle ground, sitting in light and shadow, that we merely dip in and out of as one means to live, rather than an end to live.
Yet don’t misunderstand—Football is a work of philosophic literature from Toussaint, an established literary intellectual of the nouveau nouveau roman (‘new new novel’) school that pushes narrative experimentation and fragmentation in prose writing. As such, Football can be analysed for what underlies the words beyond their surface meaning (and there will be times when Toussaint’s flair for expression will prompt you to consult a dictionary). Toussaint’s writing style of parataxis and cumulative build-up befits his melancholic recollection and a harried search for a place in time (a shoutout is due here to Shaun Whiteside for his sublime translation). Yet despite Football’s intellectual bent, a familiarity with literature isn’t needed for us to understand what Toussaint is telling us.
For although the experiential knowledge gained with the privilege of attending one World Cup, let alone three, is beyond the means of most of us, the spiritual journey of falling in and out with the world game as fortune and time dictates, is familiar. It is above literary pretensions. One of the many things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that sport is inextricably linked with culture and society, and acts as an identity-forming crutch for so many who are marginalised and ignored by society at large. The belaying rope snaps hard against our falling out, but we are inevitably pulled back toward the safety of midweek and weekend fixtures in due time. We keenly know the disenfranchisement of being ‘apart from the main’, and existing in that space where the lack of colour means a lack of meaning. Yet when we do return from that emptiness, we are forever trying to chase back the time lost.
Toussaint offers this ‘passing of time’ in Football, but in 2025 we can recognise not just the passing of time, but the compression of time with jam-packed fixtures and never-ending content instantly vying for our attention, resulting in the acceleration of time making games, moments, and player careers highly perishable and easily forgettable. Would Toussaint consider his struggles with technology quaint in current times, when we continue to pay top dollar for subscriptions and streams that still buffer and lag despite greater bandwidth to deliver gigabytes of content on-demand? Despite the distortion of our time so that we may more readily consume the increasingly inconsequential, we, like Toussaint, fall into that melancholic middle ground where it takes all of our attention and energy to keep up, only to remain perpetually off the pace.
So, along with Toussaint, we drift back to our memories and to that ‘perfect concordance of times’ to give us spiritual relief. A wisp of Toussaint’s concordance lies in the common denominator between Roberto Carlos, Shinji Ono, Carsten Jancker, and Pierluigi Collina. Such subtle renderings of time and place make Football sparkle. We desire our own “perfect concordance of times” again, like the return of a cleansing storm. Football is Toussaint’s connective tissue with the world. In a football context, what could be more relatable?
Football as a means to ‘life sketch’ is an acclaimed substratum of writing, the brilliance of which is shown in works such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Gary Imlach’s My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes. The rich base of reporting and storytelling constantly broadens and deepens. Toussaint’s Football can be added to this. And when ninety minutes seems such a long time to do anything nowadays, you won’t regret the ninety minutes spent reading Football. So, embrace the lag, throw yourself into shadow, silence, and solitude as Toussaint does, and let the time pass without raging against it.
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A hidden work of football literary brilliance that in warning off the wilfully scornful, warms to discerning and disaffected fans.
FULL-TIME SCORE: When the majority of the crowd have left the stadium to beat the traffic before the closing of an uneventful 0-0 draw, the unknown substitute comes on to provide a dazzling cameo, long remembered by those who stayed behind.
RELATED READING: Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (1992)
See more of my reviews at fromrowz.com
“This is a book that no one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.” (pg. 7)
Football begins in 1998, with Toussaint at forty years of age. The year, “though still intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history…had accidently sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century, and inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past.” In experiencing this transition into middle age, Toussaint recounts early footballing memories. He introduces a recurring motif of the lag and mismatch with time, first in a description of players at the 1970 World Cup, colourised on TV for the first time, leaving their “physical envelope behind and now pursued [their] moves in black and white, leaving behind him the colour of his jersey, which followed him in slight delay.” Despite such vivid memories, he feels a growing detachment with football (realised through his inability to name more than one player of the Belgian national team at the 1998 World Cup). This detachment hints at his general melancholy with life.
“Never have I, as I did in Japan in 2002, sensed such a perfect concordance of times, in which the time of football, reassuring and abstract had, for a month, not substituted but slid, merged into the most enormous gangue of real time, and had made me feel the passing of time like a long protective caress, beneficiary, tutelary, apotropaic.” (pg. 27)
One third of Football is dedicated to Toussaint describing his experiences watching the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Japan is clearly a place that he is comfortable describing in equally rich colour and gloomy substance. Through the neon signs of Shibuya, rain dripping from the ribs of transparent umbrellas, and the convenience culture of 7-Elevens and Family Marts on every other corner, Toussaint effortlessly portrays the buttoned-down culture and colourful, waterlogged kitsch of Japan. The striking scene of a torrential downpour in Yokohama following the end of the World Cup final, where overcautious and polite stewards herd fans with fluorescent truncheons into the Yokohama Metro, is particularly memorable for what it represents: the clashing and melding of cultures at a time when the term ‘globalisation’ was still an unfamiliar concept to many. The 2002 World Cup ushered in an exciting new age for football, represented by Senegal defeating France in the opening match; co-hosts South Korea narrowly missing out on overall third place; European teams flattering to deceive; the raucous partisan Japanese crowds reminding the European and American markets of the UTC+9 time zone…
Like Toussaint does, I must also beg my readers to forgive me for wandering off and dawdling here, for I’m getting to my central point. The 2002 World Cup was a formative footballing moment for many of us, that “perfect concordance of times” that in memory becomes melancholic and slightly discordant. And this is the take-away from Football: that where there was once colour will soon fade and become monotone. As Toussaint tells us plainly, “I am pretending to write about football, but I am writing, as always, about the passing of time.”
Throughout less-than-satisfying experiences attending and watching subsequent World Cups, Toussaint wrestles with his disaffection until difficult times in 2014 force him to face another concordance—that of professional crisis and the absence of existential meaning. The passage where Toussaint struggles with the buffer and lag in a paid stream of the Argentina v Netherlands semi-final in the 2014 World Cup illustrates him as a man also discordant with technology, and with technology being a gauge of progress, he becomes further displaced in modern times. Another storm and downpour frames this closing to Football, providing a form of cleansing and reconciliation to finding some contentment in his existential lag.
“A cycle was coming to an end, leaving me empty and lost. I experienced a crisis, a fleeting moment of doubt, uncertainty and dejection, which lead me to inquire into the meaning of my life and my commitment to literature” (pg. 63)
Toussaint’s claim that everything contained within Football will appeal to nobody is somehow appealing and endearing. The terse title may already put off pontificating intellectuals and raging tribalists (who both think they don’t need to be told about football) who may not commonly seek the middle ground with the each other. Toussaint appeals to those who are fed up, overindulged, and out of time with football, and those who recognise that football is a middle ground, sitting in light and shadow, that we merely dip in and out of as one means to live, rather than an end to live.
Yet don’t misunderstand—Football is a work of philosophic literature from Toussaint, an established literary intellectual of the nouveau nouveau roman (‘new new novel’) school that pushes narrative experimentation and fragmentation in prose writing. As such, Football can be analysed for what underlies the words beyond their surface meaning (and there will be times when Toussaint’s flair for expression will prompt you to consult a dictionary). Toussaint’s writing style of parataxis and cumulative build-up befits his melancholic recollection and a harried search for a place in time (a shoutout is due here to Shaun Whiteside for his sublime translation). Yet despite Football’s intellectual bent, a familiarity with literature isn’t needed for us to understand what Toussaint is telling us.
For although the experiential knowledge gained with the privilege of attending one World Cup, let alone three, is beyond the means of most of us, the spiritual journey of falling in and out with the world game as fortune and time dictates, is familiar. It is above literary pretensions. One of the many things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that sport is inextricably linked with culture and society, and acts as an identity-forming crutch for so many who are marginalised and ignored by society at large. The belaying rope snaps hard against our falling out, but we are inevitably pulled back toward the safety of midweek and weekend fixtures in due time. We keenly know the disenfranchisement of being ‘apart from the main’, and existing in that space where the lack of colour means a lack of meaning. Yet when we do return from that emptiness, we are forever trying to chase back the time lost.
“At every hour of the day, whether I am walking on the beach or strolling up the path through the scrubland to the old tower, whether I’m swimming in the sea or reading in the little garden, when I’m sleeping, a tireless process of ripening is still at work.” (pg. 67)
Toussaint offers this ‘passing of time’ in Football, but in 2025 we can recognise not just the passing of time, but the compression of time with jam-packed fixtures and never-ending content instantly vying for our attention, resulting in the acceleration of time making games, moments, and player careers highly perishable and easily forgettable. Would Toussaint consider his struggles with technology quaint in current times, when we continue to pay top dollar for subscriptions and streams that still buffer and lag despite greater bandwidth to deliver gigabytes of content on-demand? Despite the distortion of our time so that we may more readily consume the increasingly inconsequential, we, like Toussaint, fall into that melancholic middle ground where it takes all of our attention and energy to keep up, only to remain perpetually off the pace.
So, along with Toussaint, we drift back to our memories and to that ‘perfect concordance of times’ to give us spiritual relief. A wisp of Toussaint’s concordance lies in the common denominator between Roberto Carlos, Shinji Ono, Carsten Jancker, and Pierluigi Collina. Such subtle renderings of time and place make Football sparkle. We desire our own “perfect concordance of times” again, like the return of a cleansing storm. Football is Toussaint’s connective tissue with the world. In a football context, what could be more relatable?
“Football does not age well, it is a diamond that only shines brightly today.” (p. 24)
Football as a means to ‘life sketch’ is an acclaimed substratum of writing, the brilliance of which is shown in works such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Gary Imlach’s My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes. The rich base of reporting and storytelling constantly broadens and deepens. Toussaint’s Football can be added to this. And when ninety minutes seems such a long time to do anything nowadays, you won’t regret the ninety minutes spent reading Football. So, embrace the lag, throw yourself into shadow, silence, and solitude as Toussaint does, and let the time pass without raging against it.
STARS: 4.5/5
UNDER 20: A hidden work of football literary brilliance that in warning off the wilfully scornful, warms to discerning and disaffected fans.
FULL-TIME SCORE: When the majority of the crowd have left the stadium to beat the traffic before the closing of an uneventful 0-0 draw, the unknown substitute comes on to provide a dazzling cameo, long remembered by those who stayed behind.
RELATED READING: Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (1992)
See more of my reviews at fromrowz.com
April 1, 2021
פנינה ספרותית.
ספר קטן אך עם לב כל כך רחב ושפה כה עשירה.
ספר קטן אך עם לב כל כך רחב ושפה כה עשירה.
June 2, 2024
This book made me like football less
April 15, 2020
About the kindest thing I can say about this is that maybe the translation didn't do it justice. Just aimless thoughts that didn't lead anywhere, only the bit about Japan perked me up a bit and I found myself having to re-read parts because my attention was lost elsewhere.
August 14, 2017
This guy. My word. 2.9
February 18, 2018
Lovely book, proving that you can step out of cliches about football and still write a book of essays about it.
Read
December 31, 2020Pretentious ponderings.
June 11, 2024
Reflekteret og anekdotisk, men også lidt sludrevoren bog om at være fidboldfan
March 12, 2022
Belgian novelist, photographer and film-maker, Jean-Philippe Toussaint has written a short novella about his relationship with football that in his words, “no one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual”. I think he’s right: there isn’t enough football to satisfy a football fan, and too much football to please an intellectual. Loosely based around the World Cups since 1998 Football is Toussaint’s excuse to post vignettes on memory, childhood, time, art, travel, experience, writing etc - all the topics you’d expect from a Belgian intellectual. My personality leans towards introspection and am naturally drawn to writers with a healthy appetite for self-examination (see Knausgaard, Bechdel), so I expect I may have more patience for this sort of thing than most. Toussaint’s idea of using football as a vehicle to explore one’s thoughts and feelings of a particular time and place appeals to me. However to properly appreciate Toussaint’s book one needs to be at least as interested in what’s going on in Toussaint’s head than the game of football itself.
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March 24, 2016"Jean-Philippe Toussaint introduces his new book on a very saturnine note, suggesting that it will please nobody, neither intellectuals, who are indifferent to soccer, nor soccer fans, who will find the book too intellectual. Were he writing about soccer and nothing else, Football would be far less intriguing. But many other things occupy Toussaint here: how the phenomenal world is often less attractive than the world conjured in our imagination; how melancholy serves both to sharpen and to blunt our perception of things; how a deliberately naïve, childlike approach to experience can help deflect our fear of dying; how the past escapes from us despite our best efforts to recapture it." - Warren Motte
This book was reviewed in the March 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the March 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
July 1, 2016
Short non-fiction book by Jean-Philippe Toussaint who I know and love better from his short distinctive novels. About football and writing, but inevitable much more, as we track his writing life at the staging points of 4-year-separated world cup finals, as football comes and goes in his life. It is very personal, but also shows up the historic flow of time as technology, politics and globalisation affect our relationship with sport and world events. The author's involvement with football swings from full immersion in 2002, to almost sulkily ignoring the whole thing after failing to get tickets in 2006.
Like his fiction, there is something distinctively Toussaint about the writing which I find it impossible to pin down, but which I've become very fond of. This is fully captured in Shaun Whiteside's translation into English. A brief delight.
Like his fiction, there is something distinctively Toussaint about the writing which I find it impossible to pin down, but which I've become very fond of. This is fully captured in Shaun Whiteside's translation into English. A brief delight.
September 14, 2023
Fuller RTC later. Touissant's writing is quite impressive, but if you're looking for something slightly better (but in the same genre/vein), I'd recommend Football in Sun and Shadow (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback Galeano, Eduardo and 모든 것은 기본에서 시작한다 (the latter is kind of mind-blowing, but no English translation available (yet); manifesting a Smoking Tigers translation, please).
April 29, 2019
More of a personal meditation of his relationship with soccer over the ocurse of four world cups than a focus on soccer itself, but but was interesting to see a literary take on a similar change I've seen in my life.
June 29, 2019
An interesting autobiographical book about the author's relationship with soccer and the world cup. Some of the chapters are quick and feel a little empty, I imagine that's the point. The last section about Zidane and melancholy is great though.
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