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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
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
We've lost our supernova: farewell to Patrick Barclay, one of the very best
There wasn't so much a twinkle in his eye as a bursting supernova of mischief and uncertain possibilities. Patrick Barclay has left us, at 77, and, as Hamlet said of his father, we shall not look upon his like again. Or, if we do, we will be gladly entertained. When Paddy's death was confirmed on Friday, the sad news not only inspired the attention of more than two million pairs of eyeballs on various chattering sites – irredeemably lachrymose, no doubt – it was among the 10 most-read articles on the Guardian's website, testimony to the stature of one of the industry's charismatic football sages. What might have amused the enthusiastic gourmand about his Guardian listing was the fact he was sandwiched between the review of an apparently dreadful restaurant across the river from his home in south London and a story about James Bond. The son of an actor (the Hungarian-born Guy Deghy, who appeared in 60s TV staples such as The Saint and Danger Man, as well as the film Where Eagles Dare), Paddy would not have looked out of place as 007 – but decidedly uncomfortable in a substandard eating house. Born in London, he gazed on occasional postwar British acting celebrities as a small boy, before the family moved to Scotland, where his grandfather imbued him with a love of Dundee FC and a peculiarly Scottish addiction to football. He grew into a natural teller of tales and glory and loved nothing better than an anecdote, new, old or vaguely believable. A couple of long-time colleagues, Jon Henderson and Mike Collett, Paddy and myself met last Monday at his club near London's Trafalgar Square, a fashionably shabby hideaway where retired rascals can swap as many myths as time will allow. It was one of our regular lunches and we recycled some tired jokes, raged at pet foibles, generally behaving as if the world and football would stop spinning without us. Now we've lost our supernova. As Joni Mitchell sang, you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. That sense of loss is felt most deeply by Paddy's family, of course, and that is where our sympathies must surely reside. There will be grieving, too, among the scores of his long-time friends, inside and outside the business, where he moved with panache and authority. A good style of a man, as an earlier generation used to say, Paddy was not without ego, and he blushed when I observed once that his neatly trimmed sideburns had been shaped at a rakish 45 degrees. He kept them that way for some time … even when his hair began to thin beyond redemption. It was in the press box where Paddy left his most indelible impressions, as he settled down alongside the pack at internationals and big domestic matches, with no preconceptions and some strongly held views. In the early days, for instance, he did not see the need for a foreign manager of the England team, although he mellowed. He was hardly ever wrong – but there were moments. I remember (and he liked to forget) the time on Quiz Bowl (Channel 4, Friday nights, when many of the sports media big hitters put their egos on the line), as he failed to recognise Dundee FC as a correct answer. It was a rare lapse, because his football knowledge was encyclopaedic. While his professionalism dictated that he would not appear wildly partisan (unlike some of his contemporaries), two fellow Scots hovered above most others in his estimation: Hugh McIlvanney and Alex Ferguson. He toiled, starry-eyed, alongside the former (for three of his five years at the Observer) and wrote a fine book on the latter. For all that he wrote for most of the nation's best newspapers at one time or another – as well as inheriting some of his father's actorly elan on television and, latterly, explored the jungle of social media – the Guardian was his spiritual home. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion From its old base in Manchester, it was his first 'big paper' after he'd learned his early craft on the Dundee Evening Telegraph. I like to think the Observer was in a fond second place; others might have different rankings. Whatever, we shared space in these pages, as well as many adventures, and nobody could have wished for a finer companion. Paddy could be quirky. When rung at home once to confirm a detail in his copy, the timing was awkward, apparently. 'Jesus Christ!' he exclaimed, 'I'm in the middle of my cheese on toast sandwich.' Extraneous noises in public could disturb his otherwise shiny demeanour. An enduring memory is Paddy remonstrating with a nearby diner for the loud chatter on his mobile phone. The poor man finished his call and left. It wasn't just his Caledonian charm and natural effervescence that made Paddy a joy to be with, although that could be as intoxicating as his favourite red wine. It was his modulated and lightly worn expertise on the sport he loved that lit up any conversation, whatever the setting. While Dens Park inspired his early enthusiasm, Craven Cottage became his London venue of choice. Otherwise, the world was his footballing oyster. He was his own toughest critic, too, not always logically so. 'I'm putting too many 'indeeds' in my copy,' he complained once. Well take them out, we said. 'Easy for you to say,' he replied. Not many could match Paddy for stories stretching back to the 60s, but he never lost touch with contemporary issues. Among his latter projects was the splendid look-back podcast, Football Ruined My Life. Friday's edition, his 80th, was withdrawn out of respect for his passing. We are left, meanwhile, with a body of work that few in his time could match for insight and wit. Raise a glass to Patrick Barclay, one of the very best.
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Patrick Barclay, talented and respected football journalist, dies aged 77
Patrick Barclay, the much talented and widely respected football journalist, has died at the age of 77. Barclay began his career at the Guardian and went on to work for a host of this country's other quality titles – the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph and the Times. Barclay was also a prolific writer of football books as well as an engaging and charismatic voice on the sport for various radio and television shows, most notably Sky Sports' Sunday Supplement. 'It is with the greatest sadness that we must announce the death of our dear Patrick Barclay,' read a statement from Barclay's family. 'A celebration of Patrick's life will be held at a later date. Meanwhile, we hope that the family's wish for privacy is respected'. Born and raised in Dundee, Barclay joined the Guardian in the 1970s before becoming The Independent's first football correspondent following its launch in 1986. He moved to the Observer in 1991 and five years later became football correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, a post he held until 2008. A year later Barclay became The Times's chief football commentator and remained in that role until December 2011. A year later he began writing for the Evening Standard, the last newspaper he worked for. Overall, Barclay covered seven World Cups, eight European Championships and four Africa Cup of Nations, as well as serving as chairman of the Football Writers' Association. Barclay's most acclaimed book was probably his 2005 profile of José Mourinho, Anatomy of a Winner. His other titles include Bloody Hell!: The Biography of Alex Ferguson, The Life and Times of Herbert Chapman and Sir Matt Busby: The Man Who Made a Football Club. The latter was shortlisted for the Cross Football Book of the Year at the Sports Book of the Year awards in 2017. 'Such awful news. Paddy Barclay has died,' wrote football journalist Philippe Auclair on Bluesky. 'A super writer, a magnificent man, a friend of thirty years. How we will miss that smile'. Paying his own tribute, the Guardian's chief sports writer, Barney Ronay, wrote: 'So sad. He was very nice to me as a new person the beat many years ago. Always remembered that. And always just so funny.' Manchester United also paid tribute to Barclay. 'Paddy will always be held in great esteem by everyone at Manchester United and we send our sympathies to his loved ones at this time,' read a statement by the club.
