A Quote From .. Archive

The Beautiful Game

"Football? It's the beautiful game" said the Brazilian footballer, Pele, and over the years other voices have supported his view. Not that the press has been entirely favourable; Thomas Elyot, writing in the 16th century, gives an account which some would recognize today:

Football, wherein is nothing but beastly fury, and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded.

Returning to the 20th century, the writer J. B. Priestley in his novel The Good Companions (1929) offers a considered view of what the game of football offers to its fans (the "football crazy" people of Jimmy McGregor's 1960 song):

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.

Priestley would probably have agreed with Scottish footballer Bill Shankly's, "Some people think football is a matter of life and death...I can assure them it is much more serious than that", and perhaps even with the simple summary of cookery expert Delia Smith on being appointed a director of Norwich City Football Club in 1997, "Football and cookery are the two most important subjects in the country."

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