If Olympic sport was the GDR's perfect child, football was its unruly but ever popular sibling. In this extensively researched, stylishly written and highly accessible survey, McDougall has provided an English-speaking audience with its first full-scale account of the people's game in East Germany. The result is an excellent and essential contribution to our understanding of GDR society and the peculiarities of football in the wider transnational context of Cold War sport.' urn:lcp:peoplesgamehisto0000walv:epub:d10f42bf-3647-4797-b7b1-5d40786374e5 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier peoplesgamehisto0000walv Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2wvqc465s8 Invoice 1652 Isbn 1840183225 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-01-20 21:06:58 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40333921 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

The People's Game is [Gary's] call to mend football, harmed by the greed and selfishness of bigger clubs and associations.' Radio Times Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000526 Openlibrary_edition A passionate and personal account of how football has lost its soul by former player and leading pundit, Gary Neville. Gary Neville usually talks a lot of sense, and writes it too . . . Neville's words are timely.' Henry Winter, The TimesSummary: As a keen football fan outside the United Kingdom and Europe, Gary Neville’s book has served as an easy gateway to understanding The Game beyond the pitch alone. As I've grown older following the Premier League, the issues surrounding the game have appeared more significant and this discussion raised many pertinent questions and answers. Gary Neville has never been shy to air his views as a pundit on Sky Sports or the Overlap, so this book and his view on the state of the English Game comes as no surprise. The beautiful game is under threat. The greed and selfishness of the biggest clubs is harming the game—leaving other clubs struggling for financial survival and supporters behind. The People's Game is [Gary's] call to mend football, harmed by the greed and selfishness of bigger clubs and associations. ' Radio Times The match signalled the end of the old public school reign. Kinnaird was unable to perform his trademark handstand celebration before the pavilion, and during the trophy presentation the Olympic players were met with three quiet cheers and ‘somewhat reluctant applause’. The Chronicle ended their match report with a prediction: “Old Etonians will probably gain revenge next year”, but they nor any public school team would never again reach the cup final. The following season a new competition was introduced, the Amateur Cup, and in 1895 the FA legalised professionalism. It was 18 years before the FA Cup returned to London. represents an excellent example of research using football to illustrate the colourful ambiguities of everyday life in the GDR.'

The big downside of the book is that it doesn't look as if it has been proof read or edited. Lots of typos, grammatical errors, incomplete sentences. There is also a lot of repetition: it is as though each chapter has been written in isolation so the same context setting is repeated. Football is the people's game. A sport accessible to everyone and enjoyed by millions around the world. I find that the book has an overarching theme of the sociology of sport, and how sport (and the investment in sport) can help to uplift society, both in terms of jobs creation and also in terms of infrastructure (like how Manchester City’s owners have improved parts of Manchester, thereby also improving the social situation in some aspects such as having people gainfully employed and not engaging in illicit activity such as drug abuse in previously-afflicted parts of the City). Gary Neville has had a front-row seat in football for over 30 years, witnessing the sport at every level—as a player, a coach, a pundit and an owner. Most of all, he's a fan. The beautiful game is under threat. The greed and selfishness of the biggest clubs is harming the sport, with smaller clubs struggling for financial survival and supporters being left behind.Football may have played little part in making East Germany a European sporting superpower but as Alan McDougall explains in this splendid new book there was a voluntarist ethos to the game that made it dynamic at both regional and national levels. Football mattered because it was popular and it was popular because it mattered. This is the best account of football behind the Iron Curtain since Robert Edelman, written with clarity, style and wit.’ DR 5 (Staatliches Komitee für Körperkultur und Sport bzw. Staatssekretariat für Körperkultur und Sport)