The Beautiful Game by David Conn

While football clubs were small mutual societies run by their boards on a largely voluntary basis, this Heath Robinson approach hardly mattered. But the arrival of satellite and cable television revolutionised football finance, and the sums of money that can now be extracted from the game by unscrupulous chairmen, managers and agents have escalated. To its credit, Tony Blair’s Government understood the problem. David Mellor was asked to produce recommendations on how the game should be regulated. His task force produced a number of imaginative suggestions, including the creation of a Football Audit Commission, almost none of which were accepted by the FA Politburo, and the Government — though not Mellor — seem to have given up.

In his Independent column David Conn has chronicled these shenanigans, and in The Beautiful Game? he reflects on the way that the game has changed, and also on the catastrophes that have hit very small clubs.

The thesis is straightforward. The arrival of the Premiership has created opportunities for serious enrichment of those who manage clubs. On the other hand, it has created dramatic inequalities, so that the resources available to 95 per cent of professional clubs are now very small. The vitality of the grass roots of the British game is therefore under serious threat.

Conn’s analysis of how the new money has been distributed is hard-hitting. It is safe to say that he won’t be on David Dein of Arsenal’s Christmas card list this year. But the added value of The Beautiful Game lies rather in the effort to understand what is happening to the minnows, not the sharks. Conn suffers from an acute nostalgia for February evenings in the rain on an open terrace watching Bury lose 4-0 to York City. This gives him a competitive edge. It means he can understand the mindset of those who begin each season thinking that this could be Notts County’s year, in spite of a century of disappointment. The stories he tells are scandalous, touching and encouraging, at the same time. The puzzle is that even tiny, broke clubs attract so many chancers, fraudsters and downright bad hats. This is a world in which people spend each other’s money and sell each other’s assets with gay abandon.

I doubt whether Jimmy Burns has been to York City or Bury. His territory is the leatherette airline business class- style seating at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, home of Real Madrid. In real life, Burns is a political journalist from the Financial Times, but he has a profitable authorial sideline. Two of his previous books, on Argentina after the Falklands conflict, and on the life of Diego Maradona, are minor masterpieces: meticulously researched and elegantly written.

When Beckham went to Spain is neither of these things. Eighty per cent of it is a rather lazy and self-indulgent review of Real and Spanish football. This is topped and tailed with a couple of chapters about David and Victoria Beckham. He has not interviewed the Beckhams, and has nothing interesting to say about them at all.

So the book, and especially its title, is a cynical marketing exercise which deserves to fail. Any bookshop unwise enough to sell it to young Posh and Becks fans will deserve a queue of angry parents asking for their money back.