num_pages: 368
description: The Game of Our Lives is a masterly portrait of soccer and contemporary Britain. Soccer in the United Kingdom has evolved from a jaded working-class tradition to a sport at the heart of popular culture from an economic mess to a booming entertainment industry that has conquered the world. The changes in the game David Goldblatt shows uncannily mirror the evolution of British society.In the 1980s soccer was described as a slum game played by slum people in slum stadiums. Such was the transformation over the following twenty-five years that novelists politicians poets and bankers were all declaring their footballing loyalties. At one point the Palace let it be known that the queenlike her mother Prince Harry the chief rabbi and the archbishop of Canterburywas an Arsenal fan. Soccer permeated the national life like little else an atavistic survivor decked out in New Britain flash a social democratic game in a cutthroat profit-driven world.From the goals to the players to the managers to the money Goldblatt describes how the English Premier League (EPL) was forged in Margaret Thatcher's Britain by an alliance of the big clubsArsenal Liverpool Manchester United Chelsea Tottenham Hotspurthe Football Association and Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon traces the momentous economic social and political changes of post-Thatcherite Britain in a more illuminating manner than soccer and The Game of Our Lives provides the definitive social history of the EPLthe most popular soccer league in the world.
language: English
title: The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain
publisher: Nation Books