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A review by edgwareviabank
Fear and Loathing in La Liga by Sid Lowe
informative
relaxing
medium-paced
5.0
Fear and Loathing in La Liga has been on my read list since I first made a read list on the ColorNotes app of an old phone, and by this time, I lost count of how long ago that was.
The main reason why it took so long to get to it was that I had trouble finding it at the library. Getting a copy took a few years, recreating my list on three different phones (feeling lucky I have it saved on The StoryGraph now) a house move, and waiting out several lockdowns to be able to borrow physical books again.
There's another reason, though: part of me was concerned I may not like it. While I enjoy reading about football, I also expected it to read somehow like a history book, and that was never my strongest subject. Even with my school years long gone, I associate history to hours of sitting at a desk listening to a teacher talking at a thoroughly uninterested class, and just as many hours locked in my childhood bedroom, trying to cram names and dates in my head before the next day's test, so as not to get in trouble with a low mark. Give me a chunky book that begins with events from almost 100 years ago, and you bet I'll be worried that it'll be slow-paced and dry. Not this one, though. This one, I thoroughly enjoyed from the first page to the last.
Fear and Loathing in La Liga is very well written, with a good balance of interesting stories and reflections on how football, politics and society intersect. It's more than a history book, and more than a book about sports. It's true that, on balance, the author spends longer covering events that took place between the 1930s and '60s than more recent years. The coverage of the importance and (for want of a better word) personality the two teams assumed over that period is powerful and detailed, reminding readers at every turn that nothing is as simple as it sounds: there are layers and complexity even to the most strongly held opinions, such as the belief that Real Madrid , and Barcelona the expression of freedom and independence. Because of how engaging the narration is, I ended up learning a thing or two about Spanish history and the years of the Franco dictatorship, which no amount of history lessons back in school managed to get into my head.
All this while diving into one of the topics I find most entertaining to read in nonfiction: football anecdotes! Even with the author's initial caveat that a lot of darlings had to be killed (damn it, and can we please have a while book of them?), there are plenty of stories to make Fear and Loathing in La Liga a very rewarding read for the fans. The names and dates to remember are too many to claim I'd be able to win at a "Barcelona vs. Real Madrid" pub quiz round, if there ever was one, but Spanish football ended up being a very fascinating subject to learn about. I loved getting to know the teams' great players of the past, whose names I'd only heard in passing before (sometimes, not even that: I had no idea who László Kubala was, and yet his personal story is almost worth an entire novel). I also got an understanding of what football means to Spanish fans, and what it means to be a fan of a Spanish club, that no amount of watching Champions League games on TV could ever have given me. If a book like this existed for every major football rivalry, I'd read every single one.
The main reason why it took so long to get to it was that I had trouble finding it at the library. Getting a copy took a few years, recreating my list on three different phones (feeling lucky I have it saved on The StoryGraph now) a house move, and waiting out several lockdowns to be able to borrow physical books again.
There's another reason, though: part of me was concerned I may not like it. While I enjoy reading about football, I also expected it to read somehow like a history book, and that was never my strongest subject. Even with my school years long gone, I associate history to hours of sitting at a desk listening to a teacher talking at a thoroughly uninterested class, and just as many hours locked in my childhood bedroom, trying to cram names and dates in my head before the next day's test, so as not to get in trouble with a low mark. Give me a chunky book that begins with events from almost 100 years ago, and you bet I'll be worried that it'll be slow-paced and dry. Not this one, though. This one, I thoroughly enjoyed from the first page to the last.
Fear and Loathing in La Liga is very well written, with a good balance of interesting stories and reflections on how football, politics and society intersect. It's more than a history book, and more than a book about sports. It's true that, on balance, the author spends longer covering events that took place between the 1930s and '60s than more recent years. The coverage of the importance and (for want of a better word) personality the two teams assumed over that period is powerful and detailed, reminding readers at every turn that nothing is as simple as it sounds: there are layers and complexity even to the most strongly held opinions, such as the belief that Real Madrid , and Barcelona the expression of freedom and independence. Because of how engaging the narration is, I ended up learning a thing or two about Spanish history and the years of the Franco dictatorship, which no amount of history lessons back in school managed to get into my head.
All this while diving into one of the topics I find most entertaining to read in nonfiction: football anecdotes! Even with the author's initial caveat that a lot of darlings had to be killed (damn it, and can we please have a while book of them?), there are plenty of stories to make Fear and Loathing in La Liga a very rewarding read for the fans. The names and dates to remember are too many to claim I'd be able to win at a "Barcelona vs. Real Madrid" pub quiz round, if there ever was one, but Spanish football ended up being a very fascinating subject to learn about. I loved getting to know the teams' great players of the past, whose names I'd only heard in passing before (sometimes, not even that: I had no idea who László Kubala was, and yet his personal story is almost worth an entire novel). I also got an understanding of what football means to Spanish fans, and what it means to be a fan of a Spanish club, that no amount of watching Champions League games on TV could ever have given me. If a book like this existed for every major football rivalry, I'd read every single one.