When Brazil and Croatia kick off the World Cup on Thursday, the English speaking literary giants will be absent. It isn't until England plays Italy on Saturday that the writers Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard will make their first appearance. Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard have each published autobiographies in recent years that, unfortunately, deserve to be tossed on the mountain of worthless books written about the game.
Luckily, there are several books about soccer that go against the grain and stand up to the ultimate test of any literary work: they are worth reading more than once. Unlike the books written by the lads which come out of the same food mixer (ingredients: hard-scrabble background; childhood spent gnawing on sparrows' bones; declaration of lifelong affection for club; tales of practical jokes played on teammates; declaration of familial love; badinage about teammates' nicknames; declaration of lifelong loyalty to second club; declaration of love for first wife; bouts of food poisoning before vital games; declaration of lifelong dream to play for third club) – the best works place soccer in perspective.
Here are six, a selection hopelessly biased towards those written in English, that may be more interesting than many of the 64 games that will be played in Brazil. I was steered towards two of these by a pair of the world's best soccer writers, Simon Kuper of the Financial Times and Rob Hughes of the International Herald Tribune.