Beastly Fury

Love it or hate it, football is one of the most successful institutions ever spawned in these islands. The sheer speed with which a random blend of mud, testosterone and Anglo-Saxon eccentricity evolved into a world game, not to mention a multi-billion-pound industry, still has the power to set the pulse racing. It is a story that has been told many times, but Richard Sanders not only retells it with scholarly zeal, but gives it a new slant… His book is as much a social history as a sporting history, and all the better for it… Beastly Fury can be warmly recommended to anyone curious about the origins of the modern game – Max Davidson * Mail on Sunday *There is no shortage of football stories. It is one of the subtle triumphs of Richard Sanders’s book that he brings another tale gently into the light. Beastly Fury is a bright, breezy account of the beginnings of football. Sanders kicks off with a rush and his pace rarely slackens but something of substance emerges. The author has a keen eye for the personal anecdote whether it be the eccentric goalkeeper or the club secretary who is consumed by ambition. But the significance of Beastly Fury is that it lays bare just how football was born, nurtured and grew on the back of class movements… succint but acute… engaging but quietly serious – Hugh MacDonald * Glasgow Herald *Sanders’s meticulous research is persuasive… [an] original thesis, written with style, wit and authority – Simon Redfern * Independent on Sunday *Well written and thoughtful… extremely good indeed – Rod Liddle * Sunday Times *Smooth, pacey prose… fascinating – Alex Wade * Times Literary Supplement *A bold and vivid history of football’s disparate founding fathers – Peter Watts * Time Out *The football season hardly ends at all these days, but for literary (or at least literate) fans who miss it, there is Richard Sanders’s Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football, which traces a game now bedevilled by preening, overpaid cheats back to a public-school culture of “egregious selfishness”, and preening, unpaid cheats. Britain’s peculiar relationship to professional sport is acutely analysed by Sanders, who asks the winningly unpatriotic question “if we invented football, how come we are so bad at it?”, and finds the answer in our ignorance of foreign origins of the game, the cult of amateurishness, and a reluctance to accept the sport’s (re-)democratization in the twentieth century. – David Horspool * Times Literary Supplement *Both entertaining and informative, Beastly Fury is an impeccably researched book telling an enthralling story in an easily read fluent style * Colin Shindler, author of Manchester United Ruined My Life *Fascinating stuff * Football Punk *Shows that publishers continue to believe in a market for the thinking person’s football book… a good historical read – Matt Dickinson * The Times *

Richard Sanders is a writer and award-winning documentary maker. He is the author of If A Pirate I Must Be- The True Story of Bartholomew Roberts, King of the Caribbean.

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