Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7740 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 262 pages

Irvine Welsh
The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties.

Synopsis
With his first book, John King has written a cult classic for our times: telling, for once, the truth about soccer violence. Forget the armchair nostalgia of "Fever Pitch" of the transatlantic reportage of "Among the Thugs" - this is a book that gets inside. A collection of linked stories, "The Football Factory" centres on Vince Matthews, a seasoned Chelsea hooligan who represents a disaffected society operating by appalling rules. From first-hand experience, we are shown the usual mix of social degradation, unemployment, racism, excessive drink, bad sex and casual violence - the facts of life - but also how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Football violence has not been eradicated, it has simply been moved out of the grounds and beyond the cameras. Like the slaughter of Iraqi conscripts in the Gulf War, hooligans and what they do have been pushed under the carpet: out of sight, out of mind. This is what "The Football Factory" is about.

From the Publisher
`Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager. Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe - the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap. It is the story of a flight from fear by a group of Londoners who have seen the present and know it does not work...King writes powerfully with a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannot be ignored' Glasgow Herald

Customer Reviews

A silly little book but worth a quid from a charity shop.
... But, all in all, a pretty flawed enterprise.

Horrible blokes seek out fights with like minded retards; get drunk; shag birds; hate everybody except their staunch mates. All overlaid with some pretty cliched alienation stuff. Principal non-character / Narrator does 1990's Arthur Seaton meets Clockwork Orange number. Attempts to fit behaviour patterns into some sort of criminal moral framework - kill nonces, never run from a fight, stick by your mates etc.

It suffers from the fatal flaw of attributing outbreaks of middle class reflectiveness, class consciousness and flair for language to knuckle dragging, permanently pissed scumbags.

This means that you get a sub- Robert Elms apologia for white psycho culcha right down to the tedious and inevitable skins 'n' ska references. Also, the author bottles it and can't quite go the whole racist hog - so the scumbag main character plays chess with his Indian mates down in Southall - reflects on the British Empire etc.

Character development? Forget it.

And as for the violence King seeks to have it both ways. On the one hand he makes the correct point that violent deaths are rarely associated with (non-Heysel) hooliganism and that it's mainly drinking, running around shouting / throwing a few punches ank kicks. However, when you are writing violent porn to titillate fat, braindead, British couch potatoes you have to spice it up a bit.

I felt a bit grubby having read it

Two thumbs up!
I first watched the film, then got interested and ordered the book on their official website.
I must tell you the book is even more humorous and sarcastic than the movie, John King is a very talented writer who can think inside the mind of a Hooligan, a traveller or a pensioner. The sentences are long sometimes, but only to you find out something very funny to read. I´m a football supporter from Brasil into my 20's and it´s fantastic how our lifes aren´t that different from Tom Johnson and his mates. I´m into "England Away" now which I ordered from Amazon and I´m sure I´ll soon order "Chelsea Headhunters". I recommend you to buy the three, and watch the movie, even that I prefer the Tom from the book who have more personality than the one in the screen.

A little tale of nothing.
As another reviewer points out, this is not a novel. It is simply a series of events involving the narrator, who is a Chelsea hooligan. It is largely written in the first person, but the "story" of the narrator is unnecessarily interrupted by sporadic one-chapter tales of entirely unconnected characters.

What a mess.

Nothing actually happens - there is no change from beginning to end. The book opens with a home game against Coventry, and ends with a home game against Derby. In between, the narrator fights, drinks, takes drugs, and has sex. This is exactly what he was doing before the Coventry game, and it is what he will certainly be doing after the Derby game. Repetition is dull - had something fundamentally changed, this could have been a great story. The only interesting part is where we learn about the narrator's first experience of hooliganism, as this is the only part of the book that shows us a change in the life of the main character. The rest of the book is just repetition - a series of fights, nights and kickings. I skim-read two chapters, simply because I didn't empathise with the main character, so I didn't care what was happening at the time - a sign of a poor story.

It is also hard work to read. The author has chosen to avoid direct speech entirely, or at least in the conventional method. Some parts of the book are written in paragraph-long sentences - possibly to show the state of mind of the narrator - but even so, it is so irritating that I simply skipped to the next full stop. The random chapters about journalists, Mr Farrell etc serve no purpose whatsoever. I have not yet seen the film, but I would imagine that it ignores these unnecessary little tales of nothing.

In the book's defence, there are some redeeming features. Firstly, the writer does an excellent job of distancing hooliganism from football. We are told almost nothing of the matches themselves, save the occasional result. This is a very effective way of showing that hooliganism has nothing to do with football - a message made explicit towards the end of the book. (Journalists, take note.)

Secondly, this is not a glorification of hooliganism. The narrator is no hero, and is extremely honest - when he is scared, he says so, when he is acting like a coward, he acknowledges it etc.

Thirdly.... well actually, that is about it.

If you want a book about the hooligan underclass, then pick up a book that at least purports to be non-fiction (Soul Crew, Cass etc). If you want a gritty adult story involving violence, sex, drugs and prejudice, leave this well alone.