This is a complicated book. On the one hand it is a highly personal look at the shortcomings of one man and (or should I say because of?) his obsession with a British football (soccer) team, seemingly so narrow in scope that I have a hard time thinking anyone but an Arsenal fan would enjoy it. On the other hand, it just might be the greatest sports book ever written, enabling those who don't "get" sports to understand how and why certain people they love can care so much about a bunch of grown men running around chasing after a ball. I want to recommend this book to everyone I know, but with the caveat that they will probably not enjoy it. "Hey you should read this - I think you'll hate it!"

Fever Pitch is Hornby relating his struggle as a die-hard sports fan (in his case soccer), and what an unmerciful, miserable, and ultimately inescapable experience it truly is. To love a sporting team is to know the constant, dull ache of suffering - at best punctuated by fleeting moments of triumph, at worst...endless, bottomless despair. The prevailing sentiment carries over well to other sports and it comforts me, when I find myself wondering why the (mis)fortunes of 11 or 9 or 22 strangers affect me so much, to know that someone out there shares and understands my pain.

In the end, it's not even a "sports" book, not really. Fever Pitch is about obsession - the ease with which we fall into it as well as its smothering intensity. Ostensibly a book about soccer, in reading it you can recognize the traits of that person in your life, perhaps yourself, who loves anything just a little too much.

A tale of addiction and obsession, albeit not one we'd readily think of. A very funny insight into the delusion that is being a football supporter... no, a football fanatic, where the author lays bare all his highs, lows and personal insights while following Arsenal FC. Arguably it's essential reading for anyone who knows a friend, family member or lover with a passion for sport & they just can't understand the rationale behind their compulsion. It's certainly a "warts and all" portrayal, as while the prose is often very witty and self-deprecating, you can see the underlining remorse (if that's not too strong a word to use) the author feels; that perhaps his obsession hasn't always been a positive in his life.

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.

I wanted to like this more. Nick Hornby has an excellent writing style, is very witty and explores an unusual addiction, that of an obsessed sports fan. However, I am not a soccer enthusiast and, until I picked up the book, I'd never even heard of Arsenal Football club. What interested me was the effect of his obsession on Nick's relationships: his parents, extended family, friends and girlfriends. Hornby showed glimpses of those and the interactions were intriguing, but then he'd go back to describing some goal, or a rained out game or some other trivial matter and I'd be bored.

"Fever Pitch" is an interesting look at an addiction. Most of the time, Nick doesn't even seem to enjoy watching Arsenal. The stadium is old, the crowd is often dangerous (there are several accounts of people getting crushed to death or trampled at these games), the tickets expensive, and the effects on his health are scary. Apparently, to be a soccer fan, you have to smoke, drink a lot and eat a lot of fatty food. He loses friends, breaks up with girls, and misses family events because he has to be at every single home Arsenal game. At one point, he finds a therapist which is not too surprising. Hitching your happiness to the sucdess or failure of someone else is never a good idea.

Recommended for a particular audience -- the sports nuts and addicts.

Just an okay book which is disappointing from this author. I expected more. There were hints of his usual entertaining writing style and at least having grown up in the same time frame in the UK I did know some of what he was talking about. However his descriptions of his obsession were actually very sad and he came across as a rather shallow and unlikeable individual. I think I would have liked to hear more about his life and less about who kicked which goal at which match whenever. I have to say his memory for all those unnecessary details was bordering on scary! Not his best book in my opinion.

I am always so conflicted when I rate a book that I needed to read for university and never would have picked up on my own. This book is exclusively about football and sadly, I could not care less about football. I will admit I enjoyed the parts where the author talked about what being a fan of a football club (Arsenal in this case) means, and how it can take over your entire life in both a good and a bad way.

Ho amato “Alta Fedeltà” e “Un ragazzo”, pertanto quando ho approcciato questo “Febbre a 90’” ero fiducioso e pensavo che niente sarebbe potuto andare storto… del resto anche il film tratto dal libro era leggero e scanzonato in pieno stile Hornby. Niente di tutto ciò: è un libro biografico (genere a me particolarmente indigesto) ed infarcito di aneddoti/riferimenti calcistici vintage di difficile comprensione per chi non mastica la Premier League a cavallo fra gli anni ‘60 e ‘80. Capisco possa avere lo status di cult, ma l’ho trovato di una noia mortale, faticosissimo da finire. Qualche spasmo di vita occasionale, ma per il resto calma piatta.

This book is about one thing only: the author‘s obsession with Arsenal football club. What impressed me is how much I was able to relive the experiences of a football fan in the 70/80s although I, apart from a bet that Havertz will score 15+ g/a this season, don’t give a flying fuck about that club. I still got those goosebumps everytime he mentioned arsenal, I needed the heimlich, throw that book to the side, yeah. 713. To the 21 yeah. North London is Red. So is my head after laying at the beach all day.

Also, book fits that Prada bag, but can’t give out the 5/5s that easily all the time.

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.

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.

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]

Hornby managed to describe with passion and grace a period in the Arsenal history when the team was not a valuable target for support. He listed point by point how it feels like to be supporting a mediocre team and keep loyalty to it waiting for a good day. The Hillsborough part is absolutely mind blowing. Every page is saturated with horror and pain of what football can bring apart from joy.

The book ends with a pessimistic note and the author did not not know that Arsenal would have its moments of fame later. However, today when it's 8 years since Arsenal won the last trophy, I feel the same.

Absolutely astonishing experience, must read if you are the Arsenal fan.