Football matters, as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others. Football is inherent in the people. There is more eccentricity in deliberately disregarding it than in devoting a life to it. The way we play the game, organize it and reward it reflects the kind of community we are'

Written just two years after England's '66 triumph when the national game was at its zenith, Arthur Hopcraft's The Football Man is repeatedly quoted as the best book ever written about the sport. This definitive, magisterial study of football and society profiles includes interviews with...