Own Goal!: How Egotism and Greed Are Destroying Football

The revelations that football is succumbing to greed aren't exactly earth-shattering and have been far better expressed elsewhere. I'm baffled as to the point of this book, which trudges over already well trodden ground adding absolutely nothing to the debate.

And it's an amazing coincidence that all the five star reviews below were posted within a few days of each other, some on the same day. Now a cynic might proffer the theory that the author's got his mates to wax lyrical on his behalf, but such a proud defender of the virtues of football wouldn't stoop so low I'm sure.

What further astonishing revelations can we expect from Simon Freeman in the future? Hitler wasn't very nice? Boy bands are artificially manufactured? Wrestling is fixed? I can't wait. Yawn.


Brighton Score Shock   August 30, 2000
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

...but this is an utterly brilliant book. At last someone has the guts to tear into the overpaid prima donnas and grasping media moguls who are destroying football. The best bit is Freeman's own heartbreaking memories of having a trial for Brighton then having a promising career ended by injury. His dreams are all our dreams, but the nightmare future he sees for the beautiful game is all too real.


superb   August 29, 2000
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

If you want to know how football has become show business then you should read this book. Unlike many so-called books on football, written by players and managers, this is searingly honest and perceptive. I recommend it unreservedly.


At last! The bitter truth behind the biggest con in town.   August 29, 2000
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

I have been a football fan for as long as I can remember. As the players' wages have grown and the pressure to placate tv moguls has reached obscene levels, no one seems to have noticed the increasing irrelevance of the fan on the terraces. Simon Freeman's inspired new book. Own Goal, does a lot to redress this grotesque imbalance. He is clearly a fan through and through, yet with his journalist's training and keen intelligence, he cuts through the crap like Sol Campbell on a wet Wednesday February evening in Bradford. He has no time for the big-time entrepreneurs who have poisoned our national game, and even less (that is to say, negative time) for the ego-maniacs on the field who think it is their God-given right to earn $60,000 a week and still not have to pay the insurance on their company BMWs. Freemen is unsparing in his analysis of the sickness that pervades the modern game - a sickness brought on by greed and stupidity - and now threatens to turn it into a digital-only experience, having no connection with the world in which oridnary fans actually live. Alex Ferguson, who seems to WANT to pay his players whatever they ask for should read this book and learn something. He might even begin to reconnect with the game he used to love. - Despairing Chelsea fan