A fantastic book! It's been a long time since I considered myself a fan of football, but Hornby does a wonderful job of relating his experiences to the reader in an appealing and satirical way. I loved reading about all of his football escapades; if you are even slightly interested in football, I would highly recommend.

I just finished reading this book for the second time. The first time I read it, I probably would have given it five stars; something about the glimpse into Hornby's world enthralled me, but then I wasn't quite as familiar with the lifestyle of being a Premiership fan as I am now.

Set up as a series of essays, Fever Pitch depicts the life of a man who is much, much more than a casual Arsenal fan, while much less than a "hooligan." It caters to everyone who finds themselves in between those two descriptions. As I was reading, I found myself at times nodding in affirmation as he described his emotional state during key moments in his lifetime. At other times, though, his experiences and observations were foreign to me; since I am an American, for example, it is difficult for me to understand a lot the nuances between fan bases for different clubs which seemed second nature to him. As a result, I felt Hornby came off unintentionally judgmental during certain portions of the book, though I got the feeling that someone who has been an fan of footy in Europe for longer than I have could confirm some of the perceptions (and, to an extent, stereotypes) that he portrayed.

The book is very introspective. Hornby is the main, and really the only character, though it is his relationship with his dad which drives the story in the beginning and his relationship with his girlfriend which drives it toward the end. In a sense, Hornby is discovering the depths of his own passion as you go along. There is a great self-awareness at play here, and at some points I felt like Hornby was describing me instead of himself.

I tried to read it! I enjoyed the bits about him personally, but the soccer details were too much.
Maybe I'll read it again someday, but not now.

Growing up, I had quite a few Arsenal supporters in my family, including my dad, brother, uncles and cousins, and while I do like football and have a soft spot for Arsenal it's nothing compared to the passion shown by them, and even more here in this memoir, of which is pretty much an out and out obession for the Gunners. The avid Arsenal fan writes about how he fell in love with football and how it flowed through his veins from that moment on. Hornby,in 1968 as an 11 year old, went with his father to his first ever game at Highbury and felt a big connection towards the North London club, and through his teens and 20s he even disliked them for creating an addiction he just couldn't drop. The chapters in the book headline a different Arsenal match, and is as much a history of the club’s fortunes as it is the writer's own life around this time outside of the beautiful game. I could really identify with the emotional pull of not just the Arsenal fan but with supporters and fans of any team and how that sense of euphoria and bitter disappointment is really felt deep down to the core. Then, later on, he covers the day I won't ever forget, May 26, 1989, with most of my family glued to the TV for Arsenal's breathtaking match at Liverpool and the last minute goal to win the league title. One of the most dramatic finales in British sport ever, and probably the noisiest my old family home ever was. So yes, reading this book now no doubt gave me a warm and nostalgic feeling. Another thing to touch on reading this now, is just how much the game has changed. Not always pretty to watch, and with more mud than the nice green grass we see today. And there there is the problem of hooliganism, the stadiums and facilities that weren't in best of conditions for fans. Obvoiusly, today the money and materialistic side of the game is just unbelievable. A great book for any Arsenal fan but I'd like to believe there is something in here too for those non-football fans to identify with. I really enjoyed it. A book with a great heart and soul.

Bene. Finalmente ce l'ho fatta. Una faticaccia.
Da appassionato di calcio e da sportivo e da curioso in generale ho voluto fortemente acquistare e iniziare questo libro (prima volta con N. Hornby) straconsigliato da tante persone. Data la indiscutibile e sottile scrittura di Hornby e la mole del volume, il contenuto non è stato di mio gradimento. Questo perché il periodo di calcio narrato è completamente diverso e sconosciuto alla mia cultura calcistica (anni 70-90). Pertanto mi sono annoiato a morte e nel frattempo ho iniziato e finito un altro libro.
Non me ne vogliate ma per me il primo approccio con Hornby non è stato dei migliori. Vedremo in futuro eventualmente con altre sue opere.

Nick Hornby... what can you say about this guy? He's really a brilliant narrator. Sometimes he's talking nonsense and you don't agree at all, but you still enjoy reading it. The way he sees things is just so funny!

I'll be honest and let you know that A Long Way Down and High Fidelity were much better. Fever Pitch is a very good book nevertheless.

n  GIOCARE – AMICI/ALTRI AMICI tutti i mercoledì sera...n
«Non sono bravo a giocare a calcio, è inutile dirlo, ma fortunatamente questo è vero anche per gli amici con cui gioco. Siamo bravi quel tanto che basta perché valga la pena di giocare: ogni settimana c’è qualcuno che segna un gol eclatante, un potente tiro al volo di destro o un tiro angolato che corona una funambolica discesa attraverso una difesa avversaria disorientata, e in segreto e con un senso di colpa ci pensiamo fino alla volta successiva (non su questo dovrebbero fantasticare degli uomini adulti).»
Mi piace guardare il calcio, mi piace giocarci. Lo faccio da oltre cinquant’anni e se questa epidemia non dovesse farmi lo sgambetto, ho intenzione di riprendere, e presto. Certo, a proposito di quel che affermava un Cavaliere dei Draghi, ormai ‘il mio corpo tradisce la mia volontà’, ma fino a quando il maledetto ginocchio non mi abbandonerà del tutto, ho intenzione di continuare a correre dietro ad un pallone.
Non sono mai riuscito ad essere invece un “tifoso”, ma Hornby ha avuto il merito di raccontare della sua “febbre”, delle sue angosce (molte) e dei momenti esaltanti (pochi) come tifoso dell’Arsenal in maniera divertente, con una vena di autoironia, accompagnata da riflessioni alle volte profonde e dolorose. Hillsborough su tutte.

I've only recently discovered Nick Hornby and I'm really enjoying his books, very readable.

Three stars.

Nick Hornby escribe de maravilla y leer sus novelas, para mí, es siempre un placer y una garantía de disfrute lector. Pero ojo con este libro. Yo le he puesto cinco estrellas porque me encanta el tema, pero creo que es muy muy difícil que lo disfrute (incluso que lo entienda) alguien que no sea, o haya sido, un auténtico fanático del fútbol. Además, el libro tiene ya bastantes años e incluso para mí, que conozco bien esa "fiebre en las gradas" de la que habla el autor, en muchos momentos me perdí un poco en anécdotas de los años 70 y 80. Pero bueno... para mí son 5 estrellas sin duda, aunque me pensaría mucho recomendárselo a alguien ajeno al mundo del fútbol.

Fever Pitch is laugh out loud funny. I found myself laughing aloud in my living room, on the train, waiting for public transportation. It is a story not only about soccer (football, sorry), but about fandom, passion, and the relationships that go with it.

Nick Hornby details his relationship to the English football team Arsenal F.C. and yes, it's helpful if you know a little about the sport, otherwise you'd be a bit lost. However, his obsession with the team and sport is applicable to other obsessions as well; if you (or anyone you know) has ever been a fan of something and moods have been affected, then you will know perfectly well what he means. Arsenal is really a part of Hornby's life, becoming almost a character, and he details how he has to plan his social life around attending games, how his highs and lows correspond to the team's, etc.

I had had a great quote picked out that applied to universal obsessions, but somehow the dogear became undone. I guess I'll have to re-read the book sometime.

I first discovered 'Fever Pitch' when I first discovered Nick Hornby years back - we read one of his novels for book club. I got it at that time and have been waiting for the right time to read it. Last week when I was thinking of which book to read next, 'Fever Pitch' leapt at me. I thought it was the perfect time to read it, with the World Cup on.

'Fever Pitch' is Nick Hornby's account of his life as a football fan. In the book, he talks about how his father took him to his first football match when he was around eleven years old and how by the end of the evening he had fallen in love with the game. The football team he fell in love with was Arsenal and in most of the rest of the book he talks about Arsenal's ups and downs over the next twenty five years, how he was part of it as a fan, how his life as an Arsenal fan was entwined with his life outside football and how during this same period he became a teenager, graduated from high school, went to college, had a girlfriend for the first time, how football affected his relationship with his mother, father, stepmother and half brother. He also talks about what it means to be a loyal obsessive fan of a particular team. Hornby also explores the changes that have occurred in football from the time he started watching the game till the time he wrote this book. He also talks about many of Arsenal's important matches and some matches involving other English clubs. The whole book is structured as a compilation of accounts of a series of matches through which Hornby explores the above themes.

I loved 'Fever Pitch'. It is Nick Hornby's love letter to football, and his love for the game shines through in every page. There are beautiful lines and passages in every page which delight and warm one's heart. My highlighting pen didn't stop working. Football is not my favourite sport - cricket and tennis are. I follow football only during the quadrennial World Cup. But while reading this book, I almost wished I was a football fan, an obsessive one. Though Hornby mostly talks about players that I haven't heard about (the only known names I encountered were Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst, George Best, Paul Gascoigne, Gary Linekar, Pele, Johann Cruyff) - as the book covers mostly English club football from 1968 to 1992 - the descriptions of those times, the players and the matches was so beautiful and vivid, that they transported me to those times and made me feel that I was watching the scenes that Hornby was describing. When Hornby gushes about Liam Broady, I felt that I was there in the Highbury stadium watching Broady playing for Arsenal, making beautiful moves in an important match. Hornby's humour shines through in every page and there were many passages which made me smile and laugh. I wish I had read this book when I was younger. I would have become a lifelong football fan.

'Fever Pitch' is fan's beautiful ode to football. It is the most charming, passionate book in football that I have ever read. Maybe, not even football. It is probably one of the most passionate accounts of any sport ever written by a fan. It is a book I will be reading again. If you are a football fan, this is a must-read.

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.



"Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal really haven't had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us : passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflated bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football's prettiest accessory (a good player could pass to a team-mate we hadn't seen, or find an angle we wouldn't have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefore stopped bothering to produce any players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths."

"Like everyone, I have lamented long and loud the deficiencies of the English game, and the permanently depressing ugliness of the football that our national team plays, but really, deep down, this is pub-speak, and not much more. Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear : it misses the point somehow, and this is what Alan Durban understood : that football is an alternative universe, as serious and as stressful as work, with the same worries and hopes and disappointments and occasional elations. I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don't go for entertainment, and when I look around me on a Saturday and see those panicky, glum faces, I see that others feel the same. For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle : you presume it happens, but you are not in a position to appreciate it. Sports journalists and armchair Corinthians are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do - but in another way they know much, much less."

"One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this : it is not a vicarious pleasure, despite all appearances to the contrary, and those who say that they would rather do than watch are miss the point. Football is a context where watching becomes doing - not in the aerobic sense, because watching a game, smoking your head off while doing so, drinking after it has finished and eating chips on the way home is unlikely to do you a whole lot of Jane Fonda good, in the way that chuffing up and down a pitch is supposed to. But when there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of the terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team's fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps of Wembley stadium to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like that is not a celebration of others' good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity, and anyone who wishes to understand how football is consumed must realize this above all things. The players are merely our representatives, chosen by the manager rather than elected by us, but our representatives nevertheless, and sometimes if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together, and the handles at the side that enable us to move them. I am a part of the club, just as the club is a part of me; and I say this fully aware that the club exploits me, disregards my views, and treats me shoddily on occasions, so my feeling of organic connection is not built on a muddle-headed and sentimental misunderstanding of how professional football works. This Wembley win belonged to me as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham, and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it."



Have you read 'Fever Pitch'? What do you think about it?

Even though this book is about a football-club I like (Arsenal), Hornby describes the years 1968 till 1991. In those years Arsenal had not the name and fame it has now.

Hornby, a big "Gunners"-fan visited as child his first Arsenal-game and never skipped a game since.

Hornby describes all the highlights en disappointments through the years.
While reading you start to understand his love for Arsenal.

I think the first 100 pages are kind of boring and the second part is better, but this book is serious. Nothing like his other works.