SOCCER is upon us yet again. The proximity of the start of one season to the end of the previous one reduces summer to the dimensions of a half time break; English soccer has outgrown itself, metamorphosing from a game into an industry, processing stars and games and competitions as a relentless marketing exercise. As a sport, or more accurately as mass entertainment, soccer engages us as never before. As the century winds down the game is the opium of the masses, retailed through the air by an Australian media baron and cut to ridiculous levels of impurity by a chain of grasping sponsors.
As the audience has grown, however, the quality of soccer's contribution to the cultural bazaar has diminished. Alan Shearer may have been purchased for £15 million this summer but apart from a line of grey statistics concerning his scoring prowess and the fact that he is a human highlight film, there is little in the character of Alan Shearer that interests us. He has registered his own name as a patented trademark; he has mastered the art of the guarded, inconsequential interview; he is so obscenely rich that surely he can relate to the worshipping fans as little more than customers. Shearer is the perfect modern footballer, a product sold to us through tabloid back pages and satellite dishes.
No coincidence, then, that the game has been drawing its texture recently from other sources. Increasingly, both television and the written word trawl through soccer's past for the moments that will put some colour back into the face of football in particular, the quality of writing about the game has improved in almost direct ratio to the dwindling of the games innocence.
Nick Hazelwood describes himself on the flyleaf of his book about goalkeeping as "something of a sad bastard" - If that is, so, he has a nice niche in a burgeoning market crammed with similarly pathetic figures who will treasure this book. Hazelwood concerns himself with footballers of a different stripe. Goalkeepers down through the ages, from the portly. Lord Kinnaird who had a mistake he made in an FA Cup final officially blanked from the records, to Rene Higuita, whose involvement with a Colombian drugs cartel nearly got him similarly blanked out.
Hazelwood is to writing what Bruce Grobelaar is, to keeping: entertainingly efficient. He has hoovered up over a century's worth of anecdotal testimony concerning the life and times of the goalkeeper, though the meticulousness of his research is disguised slightly by the jauntiness of his style. He could quite easily have allowed his book to descend to the level of a bumper book of goalkeeping bloopers instead, as one reads through the thoughtfully arranged material, it becomes evident that the book's title, In the Way, works on another level. The game has become as sterilised as an operating theatre - eccentricity and colour are yesterday's novelty items. Football no longer tolerates either literally or metaphorically, figures like Bill Foulkes, whose imposing figure bent the crossbar at 28 stone.
Richard Adamson has produced a study which focuses on one man. Charlie Mitten could provide a terrific transfusion of colour to the entire modern game and not even, pale slightly at the loss. Mitten, who now lives in Stockport in quiet retirement after a lifetime of swashbuckling soccer adventure, raided down the left for Manchester United in the days when shorts were baggy and wages were minuscule.
Once, holed up in New York in 1950 while United toured America, Mitten - broke and out of contract with his club - decided he was fed up with football slavery. He jumped ship and headed to Bogota, Colombia, leaving behind his feudal £12 a week career to accept a signing on fee of £5,000 and a wage of £5,000 a year, plus bonuses.
Mitten's is a great story. The only footballer to represent three different nations, he played for Scotland, England and Colombia, returned to England after a year in South America and was shunned by the game he had graced; he was hauled before an FA disciplinary tribunal, and Manchester United ostracised him, fined him and transferred him.
This summer Manchester United lost out in the £15 million race for Alan Shearer, and Leeds United's best bit of business was signing Manchester United's commercial director away from the club. What wouldn't we give for the game to pulse once more with the colour and character that breathes life into these books?