These Sporting Lives: Football Autobiographies 1945-1980

The football autobiography, often dismissed as a formulaic source whose poor quality and uncertain provenance renders it peripheral, should be recognized as one of the main types of evidence for the study of representations of the footballer's image. This examines the problems inherent in the use of these autobiographies as historical sources and proposes strategies for reading them. The emergence of the British professional footballer's autobiography after 1945 is placed in the wider context of the autobiographical tradition in order to understand its narrative forms and concerns. It is argued that these autobiographies construct the dominant consensual ideal of masculinity, but that they also reveal the emergence of alternative masculine constructions that are part of wider cultural shifts.