I *love* the idea of paralleling sport fandom with the universal human experience. Unfortunately the mix of sport to life is all wrong here. What this book needs is a [needle scratch] REMIX!!! [air horn blares]

Good insight into the strange world of being obsessed with something you have zero control over. I'm as guilty as anyone. Slightly dated now but still entertaining.

I came to Fever Pitch in a slightly roundabout way. I'm seeing someone with a couple of Nick Hornby books on her shelf, and feeling I had read some rather poor books recently -- and that few of my ways to book recommendations were leading me to books I enjoyed of late -- I had been thinking of giving Hornby a go. I still procrastinated it for a while, but I was thinking fondly, recently, of my experience with Jonathan Tropper and I happened to see something online comparing the two.

So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.

The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it "soccer" and not "football," please don't bother. The English coined the term "soccer" in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use "football" elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)

Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.

So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis -- "I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession" -- and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.

Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as "a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes," I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.

On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.

I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.

Man-child bares all. There's an unsympathetic review for you. Really, I learned a lot from this book -- about England, about men of a certain age and time, about class and race, about mental health, about true fanatical football fandom; but more than anything about how frightening the terraces at Highbury or Stamford Bridge or Anfield would have been to me, a lover of football and hater of antisocial behaviour, and how they would likely be just as unappealing today. That Hornby doesn't shy away from any of that is admirable and makes for a much more interesting read than straight memoir would have. That he continues to forsake all other areas of life to maintain the deep relationship with Arsenal is less admirable. I'm not quite saying 'it's just a game', and clearly it isn't based on some of the societal ripples Hornby describes. Maybe, though, if everyone could acknowledge that it isn't life and death, the racist chants and domestic violence and financial crime that swirl around the game wouldn't be such an issue. What would I know, though, from so far away?

This book reminded me of my first football match in the mid-nineties when I was around 9 or 10. Retrospectively, this match was the beginning of increasing violence between the two opposing sides, but I was only mesmerized by the fact that I was actually being present and soaked up the atmosphere. I could understand why Hornby decided to include certain matches who weren't memorable for their results but meant something to him at that time, because I felt the same way back then.
I'm still interested in the game and keep on eye on the club, but in some ways I think my love of football in my early years was the start of a later obsession; a particular pop band. As long as they were in the industry, I kind of adjusted my year to their timetable. I loved Hornby's wit, and descriptions of the high's and low's of being a fan. I think that everyone who's ever felt passionate about anything, can recall a situation where other people simply didn't get your heartfelt dedication but had to live with it.
In my both my love of football and the kind of 'positive obsession' for something, Fever Pitch was an ideal read for me!

Ovaj tekst ne mogu drugačije da čitam nego kao autoironiju koja govori o jednoj čovjekovoj osobini – biti ovisan o gluposti. Ovdje se mogu primijeniti na djelu one Borgesove riječi „da je fudbal estetski ogavan“ odn. „da je to najveći zločin Engleske“, što u nizu primjera Hornby i ocrtava, ali ni u jednom momentu ne isključujući sebe iz cijele te priče, nego je, on, kao pripovjedač u prvom licu, sastavni dio svega toga: „Ali eto šta je fudbal učinio meni. Pretvorio sam se u nekog ko ne bi pomogao ni kada bi moja djevojka počela da se porađa u nemogućem trenutku (često sam se pitao šta bi se desilo ako bi trebalo da postanem otac onog dana kada Arsenal igra u finalu kupa); a tokom utakmice ja sam jedanaestogodišnjak. Kada sam opisao fudbal kao sredstvo za usporavanje razvoja, mislio sam upravo na to.“

I love this book more than I can express. I read it for the first time after a particularly painful baseball season (Mariners expelled from the playoffs by demonic Yankees) and I've probably read it every year since. I'm actually reading it again right now because I am painfully baseball deprived until spring training.

Now I realize that it is not actually about baseball specifically- and please, never speak to me about the Americanized movie starring Jimmy Fallon because I will cry and shriek- but sometimes it's the only thing that can make me feel like part of the universe again after my brain has been completely taken over by baseball fanaticism and I need to come down.

In a review of Moneyball, Nick Hornby said this:"I understood about one in four words of Moneyball, and it’s still the best and most engrossing sports book I’ve read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode." For me that completely applies to Fever Pitch, but substitute English football (or as I like to say, "soccer") for baseball. The ridiculous, futile, completely self-inflicted pain of being a sports fan is universal.

If you like this book at all, and even if you're a Red Sox fan- no, especially if you're a Red Sox fan, do not ever watch the American movie. There's a perfectly pleasant and enjoyable British movie that stars Colin Firth, and you can probably find it on Netflix. It's very satisfying, and it doesn't insult the entire world of sports by shoving Drew Barrymore and David Ortiz together.

I read this in memory of my dear friend - a 5 star person and more. Unfortunately I don't share his love of football...

First Hornby I've read--managed to avoid the brief college craze after High Fidelity came out...but now wish I hadn't.

My roommate lent me this book after it came up randomly in a conversation...as I approach 30 and sports fandom becomes more ridiculous proportional to my age, I find myself having to defend my enthusiasm for baseball more and more. Being in Europe probably has something to do with this too. In fact, discussing my love of baseball generally turns into an argument for/against the legitimacy/prominence of professional sports in our lives generally, and this inevitably leads, in my current context, to pointless self-righteous circle-jerks about football hooliganism. Suddenly I'm being handed a book about an English football fan.

At any rate, I find Fever Pitch to be cogent defense of passionate sports fandom, with all the sheepish acknowledgments of occasionally 'overdoing it' that this obviously requires. It is thoughtful, well-written and funny, and describes the windy path of a personal/professional life as it develops alongside and sometimes in direct relation to the game-to-game, season-to-season drama of FC Arsenal in London.

Now, I am nowhere near as crazy and obsessed a Twins fan as Hornby is an Arsenal fan, but to the extent that I nonetheless have to hear questions like 'can you go a day without talking about baseball?' fairly frequently, I feel personally identified with his sometimes indignant self-defense. Now instead of trying to explain in the same old tired ways what is so exciting about baseball (which is obviously barking up the wrong tree in the first place considering the glaze that appears in any interlocutor's eyes the moment you use the word 'strategy,' much less 'intense personal struggle'), I can just recommend this book and let the chips fall where they may.

You either understand it or you don't...

As an Arsenal and football (it's football okay? Not soccer!) fan, there's no way I wouldn't love this. Nick Hornby nails the thoughts, rituals and mindset of a football fanatic (and gooner) perfectly. I really enjoyed this book and Hornby's voice. I would really love to see a follow-up though. I'd love to know how he felt during the Invincibles and the following trophy drought. And what he thinks of Henry and Bergkamp and Ozil and Sanchez. Basically I want to know everything he thinks of Arsenal!

How does one begin to describe ‘Fever Pitch’ by Nick Hornby? It is popularly called a football memoir and it is that. It is also about obsessive football fandom, about Arsenal football club, about a fan’s relationship with club football and how it can affect and define his other relationships, and about a man’s life as it was affected by football and other things.

To someone who has never been a die-hard fan of any club, ‘Fever Pitch’ opened a door to understanding what it is all about, The emotion, the fear, the suspense and the heartbreak. For someone like me it awakens memories, memories of falling in love with Arsenal when Kanu Nwankwo played there with Thierry Henry and Patrick Vierra. With Manchester United because of David Beckham, Solskjær and Van Nistelrooy. Loving Real Maldrid and dreaming of marrying Raul Gonzalez, getting my heart broken every time Oliver Kahn of Bayern Munich made a save against any team I loved... I really hated that guy.

All that was about ten years ago, in those ten years I have grown away from football and aside from allowing the Nigerian team to play merry hell with my heart every four years and then break it without regret. I am hardly interested anymore. I still love the game, there’s no sport in which full grown men move in that skilful, graceful and almost dancelike way to get a ball past an opposing player, a goalie and into the net.

Every football fan should read ‘Fever Pitch’, more than that every Arsenal fan should read ‘Fever Pitch’ because Nick Hornby is not just a football fan he is an Arsenal fan who uses his book to provide an insight into many of the things we finds strange about Arsenal fans, the love for their club that never dies despite the series of disappointments amongst other things. After reading this book it no longer seems strange to me that someone would define his life by the football season, remember goals from years ago or relate every memory with what was happening in football at the time. How can it, Nick Hornby himself once ignored his girlfriend when she fainted during a match, allowing her friend take her to the hospital and waiting until the game was over to even think about her.

I particularly enjoyed the way Nick Hornby describes the game, an excerpt from the book, unarguably one of the best sections goes like this.

“Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, it’s lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that the best team does not necessarily win. And there’s the athleticism.... and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit”

One of the high points for me was when, after Arsenal’s victory over Liverpool in the ‘89 championship after 18 trophy-less years, he tries to compare that moment of victory with other significant things in life and everything else, childbirth, even sex, came up wanting. Hornby having lost hope that Arsenal would win didn’t bother to go to Anfield but watched the match at home. It was a dramatic win as Hornby himself describes below.

“… and suddenly, in the last minute of the last game of the season, Thomas was through, on his own, with a chance to win the Championship for Arsenal. “It’s up for grabs now!” Brian Moore yelled; and even then I found that I was reining myself in, learning from recent lapses in hardened scepticism, thinking, well, at least we came close at the end there, instead of thinking, please Michael, please Michael, please put it in, please God let him score. And then he was turning a somersault, and I was flat out on the floor, and everybody in the living room jumped on top of me. Eighteen years, all forgotten in a second.”

“What is the correct analogy for a moment like that? In Pete Davies’s brilliant book about the 1990 World Cup, All Played Out, he notices that the players use sexual imagery when trying to explain what it feels like to score a goal. I can see that sometimes, for some of the more workaday transcendent moments. Smith’s third goal in our 3-0 win against Liverpool in December 1990, for example, four days after we’d been beaten 6-2 at home by Manchester United – that felt pretty good, a perfect release to an hour of mounting excitement. And four or five years back, at Norwich, Arsenal scored four times in sixteen minutes after trailing for most of the game, a quarter of an hour which also had a kind of sexual otherworldliness to it.”

The trouble with the orgasm as metaphor here is that the orgasm, though obviously pleasurable, is familiar, repeatable (within a couple of hours if you’ve been eating your greens), and predictable, particularly for a man – if you’re having sex then you know what’s coming, as it were. Maybe if I hadn’t made love for eighteen years, and had given up hope of doing so for another eighteen, and then suddenly, out of the blue, an opportunity presented itself … maybe in these circumstances it would be possible to recreate an approximation of that Anfield moment. Even though there is no question that sex is a nicer activity than watching football (no nil-nil draws, no offside trap, no cup upsets, and you’re warm), in the normal run of things, the feelings it engenders are simply not as intense as those brought about by a once-in-a-lifetime last-minute Championship winner.”

“None of the moments that people describe as the best in their lives seem analogous to me. Childbirth must be extraordinarily moving, but it doesn’t really have the crucial surprise element, and in any case lasts too long; the fulfilment of personal ambition – promotions, awards, what have you – doesn’t have the last-minute time factor, nor the element of powerlessness that I felt that night. And what else is there that can possibly provide the suddenness? A huge pools win, maybe, but the gaining of large sums of money affects a different part of the psyche altogether, and has none of the communal ecstasy of football.”

“There is then, literally, nothing to describe it. I have exhausted all the available options. I can recall nothing else that I have coveted for two decades (what else is there that can reasonably be coveted for that long?), nor can I recall anything else that I have desired as both man and boy. So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”

Hornby never disappoints and that’s a fact. Fever Pitch is a wonderful book. Well written and beautiful as well as very entertaining and humorous. I’d totally recommend it.

És un relat autobiogràfic de la relació que te l’autor amb el futbol, i essencialment amb l’Arsenal, des dels 13 anys i durant més de 20 temporades. Una persona que viu pel futbol, esclau del calendari de partits, un maniàtic de les dades, que deixa d’anar a casaments o festes si coincideix que juga l’Arsenal. Narrat des del seu punt de vista, sincer i no mancat d’humor. Es conscient de la irracionalitat del seu comportament, però no pot evitar-ho. El gaudiran molt els aficionats del futbols i la resta també per que està molt ben escrit, entretingut i de pas entendran una mica el comportament a vegades poc racional dels que sí els agrada