Latest news with #BrianGlanville
Straits Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
In praise of Brian Glanville and those who taught us to love sport
Sportswriters have heroes, too, and some of them are fellow scribes who write about flawed heroes. PHOTO: REUTERS Every World Cup it was tugged from the bookshelf, a coffee stain on one page, pen markings on another, a book as dishevelled as an old companion. Into its learned chapters we dived and invariably emerged sounding smarter. The man who wrote The Story of The World Cup (published 1993) was born a year after the first Cup in 1930. Once it was impossible to know football and not him. Now Brian Glanville, the writer, is gone, up there in some celestial field, keeping notes on Maradona's cunning. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Spectator
24-05-2025
- Sport
- Spectator
Great football writers are different
Brian Glanville, who died this week at the age of 93, was a unique voice in the crowded and often hysterical field of football writing and a uniquely important one. His historical reach was unparalleled. He published his first book (a ghosted autobiography of Arenal striker Cliff Bastin) at the age of 16 and attended 13 World Cups, starting with the 1958 tournament in Sweden. His lean, elegant, novelistic style, informed by his parallel career as a fiction writer, could be found nowhere else in the UK. As Patrick Barclay put it, 'most football writers fall into two categories: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville and those who should have been'. Glanville was simply different. For one thing, he was, to not put too fine a point on it, a 'toff'. In an industry dominated by tough, plain-speaking and working-class journalists, that stuck out like a top hat at a miner's gala. This was important for me, as a rather serious and sensitive (opera loving!) middle class teenager in the gritty urban environment of the west of Scotland. Football culture, dominated by Celtic and Rangers, tended to be on the rough side and it was tempting to head to the genteel environs of the cricket or rugby club. Perhaps
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Brian Glanville obituary
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'. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brian Glanville obituary
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
Time of India
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Who was Brian Glanville? Legendary football writer and novelist dies at 93
Image Source: Getty Aged 93, Brian Glanville , possibly the best ever football writer , died on 16 May 2025. In a career that lasted more than seven decades, Glanville applied intellectual rigor and forensic analysis to his coverage of football, notably during a long association with The Sunday Times . A pioneering voice in football journalism Born on 24 September 1931 in Hendon, Middlesex, Australia, Glanville was just 19 when he took his first steps into journalism, co-writing a biography of Arsenal legend Cliff Bastin. He became a prodigious journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, writing for the Sunday Times for 30 years and World Soccer magazine for more than 50. His work reached outside the United Kingdom, and his work garnered international praise, including from Sports Illustrated's Paul Zimmerman, who hailed him as 'the greatest football writer of all time.' Glanville has written several influential football books, including the definitive 'The Story of the World Cup' and 'The Puffin Book of Football.' He also wrote and scripted the 1967 World Cup documentary 'Goal!' and even had plays and a musical put on. In his novel 'The Dying of the Light,' he examined the post-retirement difficulties faced by a former football player, demonstrating an insight into the game's effects on the lives of those who play it. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Things Just Aren't The Same Between William And Kate And Now We Know Why Daily Sport X Undo A legacy of insight and integrity left by Brian Glanville Glanville, who never minced his words and had harsh words for several England managers, including Sir Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson, still counted players from both England and other countries, including Bobby Moore, as friends. His criticism darted from a place of such deep love for the game and such a commitment to journalistic purity. He was also an early proponent of studying systems of play, such as catenaccio, and introduced British readers to modern European trends in soccer long before they were adopted as mainstream concepts. Glanville's impact was not confined to his own writing. He was part of the jury that votes on the Ballon d'Or each year and was known for his generosity and approachability, treating young journalists and people he barely knew with warmth and respect. Also Read: Samuel Eto'o pays tribute to late Cameroonian football legend Emmanuel Kunde With the passing away of Brian Glanville, a curtain has fallen on an era of football journalism. His unmatched expertise, insightful analysis, and tireless devotion have helped him to make an indelible mark on the world of football. He is also survived by his four children: Mark, Toby, Elizabeth, and Josephine. Get IPL 2025 match schedules , squads , points table , and live scores for CSK , MI , RCB , KKR , SRH , LSG , DC , GT , PBKS , and RR . Check the latest IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap standings.
