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Football Nation - Sixty Years of the Beautiful Game

Football Nation - Sixty Years of the Beautiful Game

by John Williams   and   Andrew Ward

 eBook, Published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC   (03 August 2009)

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Book description

Football is at the heart of British national identity, intrinsically linked to our social history. Through more than forty fascinating stories Football Nation reveals the hidden and not-so-hidden history of the game since 1945. From the mass audiences of austerity Britain and the introduction of floodlights at Accrington Stanley in the 1950s, through the escalating hooliganism of the 1970s and the arrival of the first all-seater stadium at Coventry in the 1980s, to the Hillsborough disaster and the coming of the Premiership, Andrew Ward and John Williams reveal the truth about the national game as it was once and is today in the age of satellite TV, celebrity lifestyle and extreme wealth.




Looking back at the days when footballers were amateurs who travelled to the match with the fans, right through to the present day where top-flight players command a higher weekly wage than the average spectator can earn in a year, Football Nation is informed, wryly amusing, often surprising and always vastly entertaining. It offers an entirely fresh perspective on the history of the beautiful game in Britain.
Andrew Ward is a freelance writer. His football books include Kicking and Screaming (with Rogan Taylor), Football Strangest Matches , Ward's Soccerpedia and Barnsley: A Study in Football, 1953-59 (with Ian Alister). He lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.







John Williams is an academic researcher and lecturer in the sociology of sport at the University of Leicester. He has pioneered football research since his studies of hooliganism in the late-1970s and has written twelve books on football and fan culture, the most recent being The Miracle of Istanbul (with Stephen Hopkins) and Groove Armada: Benitez, Anfield and the New Spanish Fury (with Ramon Llopis). He lives in Leicester.

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