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Nick Hornby

Fever Pitch Paperback – April 12 2005

by Nick Hornby (Author)

771 ratings

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Nick Hornby has been a soccer fan since the moment he was conceived. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom—its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men's coming of age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Riverhead Trade
Publication date

April 12 2005
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

12.7 x 1.73 x 20.07 cm
ISBN-10

1573226882
ISBN-13

978-1573226882
Lexile measure

1340L
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Product description

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In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.

Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."

Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger

Review

“Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby’s obsession and the state of the game.” —GQ

"Hornby has established himself... as a maestro of the male confessional. [His] books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity; the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams." —The New Yorker

"Utterly hilarious." —Elle

"Fever Pitch transcends the mundane and the sporty to say something about the way we live." —The Observer

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Trade (April 12 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1573226882
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1573226882
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 204 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.73 x 20.07 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #76,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Soccer Sport Biographies
- #63 in Soccer Biographies
- #132 in Soccer (Books)

Customer Reviews:
771 ratings

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Nick Hornby

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Nick Hornby was born in 1957, and is the author of six novels, High Fidelity, About a Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down (shortlisted for the Whitbread Award)Slam and Juliet, Naked. He is also the author of Fever Pitch, a book on his life as a devoted supporter of Arsenal Football Club, and has edited the collection of short stories Speaking with the Angel. He has written a book about his favourite songs, 31 Songs, and his reading habits,The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. In 2009 he wrote the screenplay for the film An Education. Nick Hornby lives and works in Highbury, north London.

Customer reviews

5 star		58%
4 star		25%
3 star		12%
2 star		4%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Cliomedia

Engaging account about fandom, family, and friendship

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 10, 2016

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A vivid and sometimes poignant story of a London boy, who comes to be an ardent fan of Arsenal Football Club. He recalls in detail his impressions of attending Arsenal matches from the late-1960s to early 1990s. It's also a story about coming to terms with his father's divorce, friendship, and romance. The book was first published in 1992 and was very appealing to blokes of a certain age, who followed English football (soccer) in these years. But the book still has lots of value and the author has added a thoughtful 5 page Afterwood that was written in 2012. Applause for Penguin for republishing this as a Penguin Modern Classic.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Miss Susan

For UK football fans only; not for commoners

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 11, 2018

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Where to begin? I based my selection on rave reviews here and on-line, citing Fever Pitch as "brilliant" and "funny and true". Six months later, I'm still trying to slog my way through this account of his extreme obsession with football. I have read two other books in between reading this one because, although it is wonderfully written, which is as I expected from Mr. Hornby, I honestly do not get it. Why did I waste money on this? I really don't give a rat's ass about the details, statistics, names, scores, occurrences, penalty kicks, etc., etc.. What I wanted was a "brilliant", "funny and true" novel about relationships, not football. I would not recommend this book, and I cannot even believe it has been adapted into TWO movies! HARD PASS.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 7, 2020

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Well told story of growing up with professional sports

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 19, 2015

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Brilliant

Helpful

Judge Knott

black and white and read all over

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 15, 2003

This is a cool book, and a very good book, but a tiny little "je ne sais quoi" keeps me from giving it that last and final fifth star.
To summarize the book superficially in a sentence, it's an autobiographical retelling, in a very witty first-person voice, of the author's (London journalist Nick Hornby) lifelong love of soccer and his passion for the English pro soccer team Arsenal (which plays in London). Thrown in are side stories about his boyhood, his relationship with his parents, and his posse of friends, love interests, and workmates who either do or don't share his love of the sport.
One problem for North Americans is that this is a truly English book, in that it contains tons of references to little villages in England, little UK customs, judgments and descriptions of London neighborhoods, etc., that left me feeling like a Yankee hick who'd never left the trailer park. Indeed, that is my problem and not the author's, but North Americans who don't know English culture well will feel lost at times.
Another problem is that the book, like the TV show "Seinfeld," isn't really about anything. Sure, there's a lot of chatter about soccer, but not in any sort of methodical or educative way. It's basically a willfully disorganized diary about 20 years in the life of a clever, witty Englishman (from about age 10 to about age 30) who allows soccer to dominate his worldview and, alas, his whole life. It comes down to the amusing musings of a 30-something Londoner, which makes the book fascinating but not monumental.
The obsession with soccer is the strength and the weakness of the work. If you want to learn about English pro soccer, you will be disappointed. If you want to learn first-hand, from a very imaginative and clever soul, about what it was like for one particular person to grow up soccer-mad in southeastern England the 1970's and 1980's and how it impacted the rest of his life, then this is the book for you.
I'm a big fan of Nick Hornby, and a better book of his, and a better "starter book" for him, is "High Fidelity."

Helpful

David V. Bresson

Oi! A Confessional of Passion and Frenzy by Hornby

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 14, 2005

FEVER PITCH is basically a tribute to English football. Hornby (as a real-life Arsenal fan) has a unique talent here in weaving a story out of autobiographical moments with a slight narrative where the glory and obsessive nature of football is eeked out on every page. Within this you can quickly deduce that the thing always and forever on a football fan's mind is HIS fixture list and everything else (friends, family, love and moments) is second best. Each year, each month, each season of the narrator's life can be calculated and described by footballing moments - such is the craze, the frenzy, the desperation for his team and the beautiful game.
For those who may feel too 'footballed-out' by this review -you can always try the film version. This little ditty, starring the wonderful Colin Firth, is a far more sensitive football-account than the book. Firth plays a football-crazed yet vulnerable man who even seems troubled by his obsession.The film also mingles in an aspect of love (something that is not heavily referenced in the book) and loss where a girlfriend becomes an outsider on match day - thus appealing to women probably the world over who ultimately always stand on the periphery of the game.
I would recommend the book to anybody. Although completely devoted to football it's still a great account and shows some great (autobiographical) work by Hornby. He did the same for music in HIGH FIDELITY -- read that one as well rather than see the film. In addition to FEVER PITCH, I need to mention another little book called THE LOSERS' CLUB: COMPLETE RESTORED EDITION by Richard Perez (which bears more than a passing resemblance to HIGH FIDELITY -- spontaneity and passion (not to mention HUMOR) count for a lot and these books have it spades.

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Top reviews from other countries

Luke Dennison

Fun, astute, bonkers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 29, 2022

Verified Purchase

This very personal account of Nick Hornby's love affair (or just obsession) with Arsenal has no right to be so on the money. I loved and breathed football until I was 16 and despite going reasonably regularly (I had a season ticket for a couple of years) I have never had Hornby's obsession.

However, it is relatable, funny, unbelievable and occasionally bonkers. It is also surprisingly insightful, thoughtful and serious at times and does cover why we might get obsessed with something, and why football lends it self to obsession.

Overall, despite being a tad dated (we do have out of town all seats stadiums and football is shown on tv, all the time, all around the world) this is still relevant and highly entertaining.

Jonathan Nicholas - Author

A great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

If you only ever read one book about English football make sure it's this one, you don't need another. This explains all the emotions and hang-ups related to being a fanatical football follower, along with the supreme highs and dreadful lows. There are superstitions, like not wanting to do anything differently on a match day in case it upsets the natural routine and thereby causes your team to lose, there's the guilt of arranging one's life around match days, or not, depending if they are home or away, or still in the cup, or not, and trying to explain the addiction - because that's what it is - to non-football people. This book reminded me of Luke Rhinehart's book 'The Dice Man' where the character lives his life as dictated by a roll of the dice. Much of football is chance, and so a life lived like this is similar to one lived at the whim of a dice.
This is a great book to help explain the attraction of football, how you can be drawn in, and the unforgiving nature of it all. It's the tribalism, the togetherness, the oneness, the mutual understanding and then the hatred of anyone not part of your group: "I hadn't ever come across opposing fans before, and I loathed them in a way I had never before loathed strangers."
Its a great read. Whether you follow football or not, by reading this it will help you to understand it. Recommended.

3 people found this helpful

D. J. Gribbin

Scored the Winner

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is a great read by the brilliant writer Nick Hornby.
It's not just about football but about life's in general with examples of growing up woven in and out of an underlying passion about Arsenal F.C.
An entertaining book full of humour and probably one of the very best on the wide subject of football but so much more interesting than most of the autobiographies from the actual players - Peter Crouch included!

One person found this helpful

C. Russell

Best football book ever

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 11, 2022

Verified Purchase

This isn’t just a football book. Yes. It’s the story of a football obsessive but it is so much more of a reflection of life. Although it does have to be said it resonates particularly with anyone subjected to football fan obsession pre-Hillsborough.

Ben Warden

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 7, 2021

Verified Purchase

Yes I'm an Arsenal fan, but I think all football fans would love this book. A very honest and funny account of a lifelong fan going through the turmoils of watching their beloved team and the strife that brings, as well as the glory, both on and off the pitch.

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