#AHA Reads 2023: The Illustrated History of Football by David Squires

One of the tasks I selected from the 2023 AHA Summer Reading Challenge was to read a graphic history. After searching my local library's catalogue, I selected cartoonist David Squires' The Illustrated History of Football, for the reasons that, 1) there were few options to choose from and 2) I know very little about sports history.

#AHAReads Bingo Card

The Illustrated History of Football is a book by a football fan for football fans. The book focuses on major games, tournaments, and players, with just enough cartoons covering the state of the sport to give an overall sense of narrative. An example:

The British Empire stretched to all corners of the globe, generously freeing foreign lands of their natural resources and introducing native people to order, genocide, and a ruddy good dose of fair play. The British also gave the gift of football to the world. The world showed its gratitude by becoming really good at it and ritually humiliating them on the international stage every couple of years or so. It wasn't just jackbooted imperialists who were spreading the game though. Britain's wealthy industrialists were setting up global operations too, taking with them workers who enjoyed nothing more than a lunchtime kickabout. Teachers, bankers, engineers, dock workers, sailors, miners; all of them plying their profession overseas, all of them displaying the famed British work ethic of wiling away the working hours until they could piss about with their friends. (16)

I'm writing this post as the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup begins. You wouldn't learn that women watch, let alone play, football from The Illustrated History of Football. The one mention of women in the entire book is a joke about English football managers resisting the inclusion of women's toilets in stadiums, a single panel in a cartoon about the renovation of stadiums and skyrocketing of ticket prices in the 1990s (123). There's also joke about a female television anchor being a football fan in a later panel of the same cartoon. 

To be fair to Squires, it's meant to be a funny book and the harassment and abuse experienced by female football fans is anything but amusing. While a 2021 survey by the Football Supporters Association shows that fans' disapproval of sexist and misogynist behaviour has increased since 2014, recent reporting by The Athletic shows that the sport still has a long way to go. (I read the latter piece after it was recommended in the Longreads weekly newsletter earlier this year.) Kick It Out's statistics for the 2022-2023 season show a massive increase in reporting of sexist and misogynistic abuse, especially online.

While we're on the subject of discrimination in football, a few comics in the book do highlight the long history of racism in football, especially in the 1990s, with the media response to Cameroon at the 1990 World Cup (118) and Jean-Marie Le Pen's bigotry towards France's 1998 World Cup team (141) held up as examples. The last cartoon in the book is from 2016, so more recent events, such as the 2020 European Championship are not covered.

While the experiences of female football fans might be hard to highlight in a cartoon history, the complete lack of mention of female footballers is surprising. Given that Squires wrote his football cartoons for the Guardian, this is baffling, but it also seems like a missed opportunity for poking fun at the outrageous, unjust or just plain ridiculous, something that Squires does elsewhere in the book. The British Ladies football association was founded in the 1890s, and the reporting about early women's football matches is unhinged. Jokes about newspaper reporting on early women footballers practically write themselves. Consider, however, fact that the largest crowd ever gathered in the UK for a women's football match was 53,000 people, and the match in question occurred in 1920. A year later, the Football Association banned women's football, a ban that was not lifted until 1971. The first women's World Cup took place in 1991--Squires' recent comic shows some of the highlights up to the present day.

These are all facts I learned from reading I did while writing this post; things I learned from The Illustrated History of Football itself include:

• that football fanzines exist
• an outline history of 1976 and 1978 World Cups
• that Steve McMahon and Bruce Grobbelar had a "hip-hop battle [sic]", the "Anfield Rap," one of the worst sports songs even made 
• that Columbian footballer Andrés Escobar was murdered after the 1994 World Cup 
• that the US Department of Justice indicted multiple senior of officials of FIFA (Fédération internationale de Football Association) on corruption charges in 2015
• that footballer Luis Suárez has bitten opponents, repeatedly, making him a gift to football cartoonists everywhere

In sum, this is book isn't an introduction to the history of football and isn't designed to be. If you have a father, brother, cousin, partner, or friend who is mad about football, this book might make a good present. I suspect that comics included have been selected make the book saleable to people who don't read the Guardian. While it did make me laugh in places, I'll keep looking for a book on the history of football the covers the larger social and cultural context that makes sports interesting to me.