BOOKS

In the Buff

Saved by Gianluigi Buffon

Gianluigi Buffon’s 28-year playing career spans three clubs: Parma, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain, while his 176 appearances for the Italian national team make him the most-capped keeper of all time. He made his debut for Parma (who just pipped Milan to signing him as a prodigious teenager) aged 17 in 1995, winning the UEFA Cup with i Crociati four years later. In 2001, he signed for Juventus, where he won nine league titles (spread over two spells) and in 2006 won the World Cup with Italy.

Saved isn’t the biggest of books, barely 200 pages, and is basically a monologue, akin to listening to Buffon putting the world to rights while perched on a barstool. Presumably most readers will already be fans, so probably rather like that idea, but a lack of context, bar the very occasional bracketed interjection, isn’t going to attract many beyond the committed calciophile.

It also adds to the impression of a man used to pontificating at length without interruption or challenge. Granted, this can be quite endearing (especially when he addresses struggles with stress and how discovering the paintings of Marc Chagall helped him find solace), but there’s a frustrating tendency to shrug things off when it comes to other crucial aspects of his story.

An apparent flirtation with far-right politics that surfaced at Parma in 2000 was “a misunderstanding”: he wore a T-shirt bearing the legend “Boi chi molla” , blissfully unaware that it was a much-loved slogan of Mussolini’s fascists (meaning whoever gives up the struggle betrays their fellow combatants) and requested 88 as his shirt number because it looked like four balls, rather than for its symbolic resonance for neo-Nazis (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet, hence 88 is seen as standing for HH, “Heil Hitler”). The following year, Renzo Ulivieri, Parma coach and a member of the Italian Communist Party, tells him that he’s a man of the left, not a fascist, offering his advice while standing next to a bust of Vladimir Lenin.

And then there’s calciopoli, the corruption scandal in 2006 that saw Juventus stripped of titles and relegated after club directors were found guilty of attempts to influence match officials. Anyone hoping for insight into the events that cast such a shadow over his remarkable achievements in Turin will be disappointed. There’s no anger, no seething sense of injustice. Despite the club being set on cashing in on one of their star assets, Buffon opts to play in Serie B after Juve are demoted as part of their punishment. We don’t get a huge amount of detail, just a few general brushstrokes about bumpy pitches and the enthusiasm of fans in Italy’s second division.

The best parts of the book are when he edges closer to middle age and retirement, finding himself increasingly out of step with the globalised game and the power of individual players, trusted to look after their dietary and fitness needs away from the training ground. Sitting in the Juventus dressing room, he looks over at Cristiano Ronaldo and realises how much everything has changed. It’s a near-perfect representation of the ongoing woes and increased marginalisation of the Italian game. Matthew Barker

Spanish steps

Once Upon A Time in La Liga Spanish football’s forgotten tales by Brendan Madden

Among reasons for lamenting the early death of Michael Robinson, the former Preston, Brighton, Liverpool and Ireland striker who rose to the heights of Spain’s football media, is that he did not live to connect with Brendan Madden or this book. While legend attributes Robinson’s success as a TV presenter to his idiomatic Blackpool-accented Spanish, Madden points to his true, sustaining stock in trade as traditional journalistic curiosity, with staff researchers asked to “tell me a story”. many

He would surely have asked how Madden, a London-based Luton fan, both finds stories and tells them so well. The sub- title “Spanish Football’s Forgotten Tales” is no publisher overclaim, but reflects a rich mix of 18 vividly-recounted histories – Robinson’s among them – new to all but the most committed British aficionado.

He amply fulfils Sid Lowe’s foreword assertion that “Nothing provides a better portrait of Spain than football”. Narratives which are mostly football are mixed astutely with others of wider, often grimmer, resonance. We learn of Johan Cruyff’s time at Levante, “involving the Spanish Federation, Leicester City and Helenio Herrera’s underpants”, how Carlos Valderrama came to play the Paul Gascoigne role in Spain’s version of Vinnie Jones’ infamous ball-handling, and of Andrés Montes, the broadcaster who coined tiki-taka .

Broader tales tell how Juan Lecube, flying winger of La Liga’s earliest years, became a Nazi spy and why lower-division player Saturnino Navazo reckoned football kept him and the Jewish boy he adopted alive in Mauthausen concentration camp. There are Barcelona striker Quini’s astonishing generosity, amid acute political tension, to kidnappers apparently drawn from an Ealing comedy, and the hideous, still unexplained hotel fire which in 1979 nearly consumed much of Spain’s military establishment, and did destroy Real Zaragoza starlet José Ramón Badiola, who escaped but never recovered psychologically.

Madden ranges across Spain’s regions and numerous decades. Real Madrid and Barcelona have their place, but do not monopolise attention. He is perhaps at his best on the Basque Country, and the tense transition following military dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. This shows in retelling how shared Franco-era oppression made Real Sociedad v Athletic Club a rivalry defying “the typical derby- day impulse towards spite and anarchy”, most famously in 1976 when the captains jointly displayed the (still illegal) Basque flag. But Madden has few illusions about the paramilitaries of ETA, with a compelling account of Sociedad-supporting businessman Juan Alcorta’s public defiance of their extortion.

Every story merits its place and there is ample scope for a sequel, which would benefit from two additions. Grouching about Pitch’s aversion to indexes feels as futile as protesting ersatz “Premier League records”, the Guardian ’s Arsenal fixation or VAR, but a listing mixing film director Sergio Leone, pre-Franco dictator Primo de Rivera and spy Kim Philby with more familiar football names would further have enhanced a fine book. And a bibliography would doubtless take seekers for further knowledge to chroniclers like Paul Preston who, as both leading historian of modern Spain and devout Evertonian, underlines Madden’s fundamental theme, that football and history are indivisible here, there, and everywhere. Huw Richards

Closed book

The Mbappé Project Making a superstar by Philippe Auclair

Somewhere in here is a brilliant book about the changing relationship between elite footballers and journalists. Philippe Auclair was close to the pre-Instagram era greats, yet he can’t get near Kylian Mbappé. Auclair suggests this doesn’t matter, as the real story concerns how Mbappé has constructed his public image, building barriers to keep out all but the trusted few. But half a generation ago, Auclair would have been one of the trusted few. And now he isn’t. In this telling of the Mbappé tale, it’s an ever-present sub-plot.

The story of Mbappé’s rise is well known: receiving his first Nike contract at seven, he has been guided from childhood by his family and a small group of advisers, choosing sponsors as carefully as career moves. The striker’s vast social media following isn’t as important as his World Cup winner’s medal, but it matters.

Auclair’s book struggles for a place in this world. A discursive introductory chapter, built around a quote from Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, isn’t pitched at Generation TikTok. A more academic analysis wouldn’t contain so many opinions. Those coming for a takedown of Mbappé will be disappointed by Auclair’s even-handedness. But because none of the forward’s inner circle would co-operate, there’s little behind-the-scenes insight here either.

Auclair gets an off-the-record phone chat with Mbappé’s lawyer, but the player’s words are all second hand: a documentary here, a press conference there, a tranche of L’Équipe interviews and, perhaps most gallingly, a podcast hosted by two French influencers who don’t even have surnames.

Nonetheless, a portrait is fashioned, of a driven talent with a significant ego and political nous: Auclair recounts how Mbappé spoke eloquently against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party when they threatened victory in the 2024 French elections, and how he fought the country’s football association to get a better image rights deal for his France team-mates.

It’s a shame there is some sloppy writing: misspellings of Villarreal, Mohamed Salah and Michele Kang might have been caught by a more rigorous proofread, but it’s hard to excuse the paragraph in which Auclair gets wrong both the year of the 1996 Olympics and the score in the 1998 World Cup final.

The sub-plot moves front and centre in the final chapter, when discussing the Ballon d’Or that Mbappé craves: Auclair was involved in the award process for nearly 20 years through his role with France Football magazine. He recalls wistfully a visit to Cristiano Ronaldo’s Cheshire home in 2008. Auclair doesn’t have such access now: Mbappé’s decision to leave PSG was revealed instead to the Athletic ’s David Ornstein, who has built a reputation for breaking transfer stories in an absurdly competitive environment.

Auclair doesn’t explain how Ornstein did it. Yet in understanding how the Mbappé universe works, following the information trail – who gets told what first, and how – is as important as counting the trophies, the endorsements and the Instagram followers. Mike Whalley