23-05-2025
HT Kick Off: Why Brian Glanville is football's man of letters
Anyone who has written or read a word on football in English owes a debt of gratitude to Brian Glanville, who died on Friday aged 93. The late Patrick Barclay, an excellent writer on the beautiful game and an even better raconteur, as I found out on a cold, sunny afternoon in Munich in 2011, was speaking for his tribe when he wrote: 'Most football writers fall into two categories: those who have been influenced by Brian Glanville, and those who should have been.' This is in my copy of the 2010 edition of Glanville's opus, 'The Story of the World Cup.'
Glanville had been to 13 of those but it was in 1973 that he had decided to chronicle in a book what is now the most watched sporting event on the planet. For technical and tactical insight, background information and summary of each edition, it remains a must-have. You can also read it for its wonderful, if occasionally pungent, prose. Here's a nugget: 'Overall, despite the abominable conditions, the 1970 World Cup had been a marvellous triumph of the positive over the negative, the creative over the destructive. The Final itself took on the dimensions almost of an allegory.'
Glanville was a prolific writer whose oeuvre included short stories, novels, plays, musicals and the screenplay for Goal!, the film on the 1966 World Cup that went on to win a Bafta. But it was the world of football writing that Glanville, an Arsenal supporter, straddled for over 50 years. Be it the fiercely opinionated columns in World Soccer, obituaries in The Guardian (it has been compiled as a book), match reports, books or investigative pieces. Brian understood football, Pat Jennings has said.
Proof of the respect he had among managers came in an anecdote shared by my colleague N. Ananthanarayanan. Ananth, as the HT sports team calls him, was at the press conference after a Chelsea-Blackburn game when Mark Hughes was explaining to the media how they had shackled Frank Lampard. 'Brian had a long notebook, like the ones used by accountants of yesteryear, and no sooner had Mark said this, we heard the rustling of pages,' he said. 'As per my notes', Glanville began, and immediately Hughes said, 'Brian, I am not saying Lampard had played badly'.'
No one loved football like him but Glanville's acerbic wit spared none either. England had beaten Germany in Berlin in 2008, a first in 35 years, but after due tribute to the team and their head coach Fabio Capello, with whom Glanville went back a long way, Glanville wrote that the Italian had gambled on three players (Stewart Downing, Matthew Upson and Scott Carson), 'won his bet on two of them (Downing and Upson) and lost embarrassingly on the other.'
In an earlier issue of World Soccer, he wrote: 'Andorra apart, England's form under the wretched Steve McClaren was such that almost any opponent could be a menace.' Gareth Southgate was described as 'a one-paced centre-back' and Vladimir Putin as 'draconian, virtual Tsar of new Russia.'
The suits at FIFA Glanville didn't like and he made it known in no uncertain terms. 'Yes, we all know about the corruption of FIFA, inevitable from the moment Joao Havelange unseated Stanley Rous as president in 1974, initiating an appalling 24 years of chicanery. It remined one of the saying from 18th-century English philosopher Edmund Burke that 'for evil to triumph, it is enough for good men to do nothing.' (World Soccer, January 2015). After Andrew Jennings's exposé on corruption in high places in FIFA, Glanville described its executive committee as one that included reprobates. In his mind, there was no doubt that Qatar had 'plainly bought' the 2022 World Cup.
It was with 'shameless pomposity,' Glanville said, that an FA chief executive had said that no Englishman met the requirements of the England head coach's job. This was before Capello's appointment. For him, the Premier League was a 'Greed in Good League', one whose ownership rules were so 'fatuously lax' that Hitler or Mao could have owned clubs because neither had a criminal conviction.
Equally, there was fulsome praise for players. Bruno Fernandes would be a good investment for Manchester United, Glanville had presciently said. Even at 17, Pele was 'superbly muscled goal scorer par excellence, gymnastically agile and resilient, a tantalising juggler of the ball' with a fine right foot and extraordinary temperament (The Story Of The World Cup). Patrick Vieira, at his 'dynamic, athletic, long-legged best' , Glanville wrote for World Soccer, would be a hard act to follow for Arsenal. Paul Gascoigne had the 'attention span of a gnat' off the pitch, Glanville wrote, but 'was he a great player? I would emphatically say yes.'
My first World Cup assignment was also his last. It was Ratul Ghosh, the former sports editor of the Bangla daily Bartaman, who did the introductions in the cafeteria at the media centre in Gelsenkirchen. Portugal-Mexico was about to kick-off so Glanville, then a sprightly 76, did the several flights of stairs to the media tribune with us. He paused, not to catch his breath, but to state that accuracy of his deliveries and free-kicks notwithstanding, David Beckham was a one-trick pony.
