Description

The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned ‘Chelsea hooligan’ who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life – social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex – and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division.

Graphic and disturbing, sometimes very funny, and deeply affecting throughout, The Football Factory is a vertiginous rush of adrenaline – the most authentic book yet on the so-called English Disease.

Publisher Review

"The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now" * Irvine Welsh * "Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager. Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe - the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap." * Glasgow Herald * "Not only an outstanding read, but also an important social document... This book should be compulsory reading for all those who believe in the existence, or even attainability, of a classless society" * Sunday Tribune * "Powerfully written and tells you more about the mentality of those who disrupt football matches than all the theses of the sociologist academics put together" * Daily Mail * "Bleak, thought-provoking and brutal... Has all the hallmarks of a cult novel" * Literary Review *