Football, history and the state of the nation – and why it matters

In 2014, David Goldblatt published The Game of Our Lives, an exhaustive and critically-acclaimed ‘state of the nation’ account of the UK told through the prism of football. A William Hill Award-winner, the book was described by historian David Kynaston as ‘enlightening, enriching and exceptional’, and Goldblatt was consequently heralded by Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times as possibly the greatest football historian there has ever been.

Fast forward 10 years and Goldblatt returns with a new state of the nation book that examines British society and culture through football at perhaps the most perilous time in modern history. Split into three parts, Injury Time explores Brexit, Covid and the ‘polycrisis’ of today (a tanking economy, European wars, political uncertainty and climate change) through the prism of football and posits the game as the most illuminating guide to the state of the nation today.

Goldblatt’s thesis is that each of these seismic events has its own football corollary, be it the unstoppable dynamic of inequality in the professional game, the threadbare state of grassroots finances and pitches, the disaster capitalism of the European Super League, or the rise and fall of Russian club ownership; or indeed the steady rise in the number of football pitches and matches lost to extreme weather. Simultaneously football’s participants and their words and actions have become central to the country’s public conversations, from Marcus Rashford’s campaign against child hunger at the height of the Covid pandemic to the extraordinary reactions on both sides of the debate to Gary Lineker’s tweet in March 2023 about the government’s anti-migrant rhetoric. Football, in short, is the ultimate bellwether for society – a mirror that reflects back British culture’s attributes and myriad ills.