Brian Glanville obituary

The Guardian

18-05-2025

Brian Glanville, who has died aged 93, was a football writer of unique stature and a figure of extraordinary industry in papers and publishing for nearly seven decades.
For 33 years he was the football correspondent of the Sunday Times, with whom he continued to work until he was 88. He produced thousands of match reports and features and was a pioneer in giving greater coverage to the international game, attending all World Cups from 1958 to 2006 and using his gift for languages – he spoke Italian almost perfectly, as well as French and Spanish — to write for other newspapers, magazines and agencies across the world. His fellow sports journalist Patrick Barclay once remarked that 'most football writers fall into two categories: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville and those who should have been'.
Aside from being a football journalist, however, Glanville was also a short-story writer, playwright, novelist, scriptwriter, literary adviser and amusing raconteur. Work gushed from his typewriter: anthologies; collected articles of journalism; nine volumes of short stories in 25 years; more than 20 novels; and just short of 30 football books.
Privately he regarded his sports writing as of secondary interest and importance to his fiction, and during the 1950s and 60s seemed poised to become an outstanding contemporary novelist. Yet he probably never gave his novels the depth of thought and reflection that were necessary. His short stories, in which he was able to sketch individuals with colourful perception, were more suited to his restless character and scattergun mode of working. The fact that he straddled both the London literary scene and sports journalism meant that he was regarded in both fields as a maverick. As he often said: 'Life is a party to which I feel I have never really been invited.'
Glanville was born into a family of Irish and Jewish descent in the London suburb of Hendon. His parents, James, a dentist, and Florence (nee Manches), sent him to Charterhouse school in Godalming, Surrey, where he became fascinated by football, an obsession that never left him.
The first professional game he saw was the wartime international in 1942 between England and Scotland, and later that year he watched his first club match, when Arsenal played Brighton. Arsenal remained his favourite club, although he was often savagely critical of their teams, once writing in the 60s that 'their half-back line wandered round the field like three well-intentioned dinosaurs'. He declined to go to Oxford University unless he got a scholarship, which he did not. His housemaster wrote in a report: 'I think he has a flair for something, but I am not sure what.' This was quickly to be revealed.
While working in a solicitor's office, Glanville launched himself into writing, impelled by immense chutzpah. During a holiday in Italy, he visited the offices of the sports paper Corriere dello Sport and persuaded the editor to pay for a regular column on English football.
Aged 19, he ghosted the autobiography of Cliff Bastin, the former Arsenal and England player, and three years later wrote his first novel, The Reluctant Dictator (1952), about a footballer who becomes a leader of a south American republic. His early career was hampered by tuberculosis, which required seven months in a nursing home. Partly for his health, he lived in Florence and Rome for three years, perfecting his Italian and building up a range of contacts.
Returning to Britain, Glanville turned his attention to the international game. He was asked to cover the 1958 World Cup for the Sunday Times, an assignment that led to his appointment as its football correspondent, which he combined with being a literary adviser to Bodley Head publishers.
Many of his football pieces were distinguished by a style that included the use of arcane words, Latin tags, Italian and French phrases, shrewd observations, recycled anecdotes and put-downs. These later included denouncing the English Premier League as 'the Greed is Good League', while rugby union was dismissed as 'the minor sport posing as a major one; the violent sport posing as the moral superior of soccer.'
He was particularly proud of his work when he briefly became an investigative journalist, alleging in the Sunday Times, from 1974 onwards, that several matches in the European Cup, the forerunner to the Champions League, had been fixed by the bribing of referees, in particular by Italian clubs.
Among those was a 1973 semi-final between Juventus and Derby County in which, during the first leg, the Italian side won 3-1 and two key Derby players, Roy McFarland and Archie Gemmill, were both controversially given yellow cards, meaning they were suspended for the second leg.
That return match was refereed by Francisco Marques Lobo of Portugal and it was his evidence that there had been attempts of bribery at European Cup fixtures that was the key to what Glanville called 'the Years of the Golden Fix'. Lobo revealed that he had been approached by a Hungarian intermediary, Dezso Solti, to help fix the second leg in favour of Juventus, and that he had made a clandestine recording of the conversation.
Working with Keith Botsford, another multilingual journalist and author, who interviewed Lobo, Glanville confirmed with the Milan telephone exchange that the call had indeed taken place. Although Solti was subsequently suspended from football for life, no Italian club was sanctioned and Lobo was ostracised. The failure of Uefa, European football's controlling body, to investigate the allegation in detail incensed Glanville, who would write and talk about the scandal for decades afterwards.
Glanville's football writing was just part of his literary output. By the age of 30 he had had six novels published, often with Italian or Jewish backgrounds. He was also one of the initial writers for the BBC TV satirical programme That Was the Week That Was, wrote the screen play for Goal!, the Bafta award-winning official film of the 1966 World Cup, and scripted European Centre-Forward, a 1963 television documentary that received the Silver Bear prize at the Berlin film festival.
He desired to be a standup comic and this interest brought him to write both a novel, The Comic (1974), and also the words for a musical, Underneath the Arches (1981), based on the Crazy Gang.
In 1992 he left the Sunday Times to work for the People, and in 1996 he became a sports writer for the Times before returning to the Sunday Times, for whom he was still working as late as 2020. Even a quadruple bypass operation, after a heart attack in 2009, did not stop him from restarting match reporting within three months, or from writing obituaries of footballers for the Guardian.
For 60 years he and his family lived in Holland Park, west London. It was a rather bohemian existence; his working room was a mass of papers, books, scripts, bills, magazines and letters, which were seldom sorted or discarded.
Until near the end he remained a revered, if eccentric, figure in the press box; sometimes, in a fit of self-deprecation, recalling how an Italian columnist had once described him in 1955 as 'l'ormai quasi celebre' (the now almost celebrated). They were words, he felt, that were appropriate for his epitaph.
His wife, Pam (de Boer, nee Manasse), whom he married in 1959, died in 2016. He is survived by their four children, Mark, twins Toby and Elizabeth, and Jo, and six grandchildren, Samuel, Bella (Isabel), Josh, Bella (Arabella), Cesca and Lyla.
Brian Lester Glanville, football writer and novelist, born 24 September 1931; died 16 May 2025