Although Wilson can be sometimes open to criticism that his columns in The Guardian are prone to over-thinking, they are always well-written and worth your time in reading them. Wilson describes the Argentine national character, which like many is built upon its own myths and legends and how this is manifested within the development of the national game.

Wilson has several excellent books which I guess sit on the shelves of those whose interest in the game expands beyond ranting about the latest poor result etc. In the later chapters Wilson traces the sad decline of the domestic game, its parlous financial state, endemic violence and the reduction of even the grandes to the role of feeder clubs which develop and then export talent to Europe and other emerging parts of the world.

Indeed, trainwreck always follows him wherever he goes, but yet he still get chance after chance into good footballing positions as a player and as a manager, and he’s so loved by many and elevated into a status of “God. I started reading this book four days after watching Argentina beat Brazil in the Copa America final at the iconic Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, ending a 28 year trophy drought as Messi finally captured his first international title.

El panorama cultural es tan amplio que requiere recapitular la historia, hablar de literatura, de tácticas, de sociología, de globalización, de economía, de atletismo y de identidad. Took me a year to finish this, partly because it’s big and I am lazy, but also partly because there’s a lot of stuff to digest in the book that I wasn’t totally into. Along with the World Cups there is, of course, Peron, Maradona, the Falklands, Messi and all those great Argentinian clubs like Boca, River Plate, Indipendiente (king of the cups), Racing, San Lorenzo (Pope Francis is a fan) and Estudiantes. The publication in 2008 of Inverting the Pyramid, his history of tactics, foreshadowed a boom in tactical analysis, and the rise in popularity of a more cerebral approach to understanding the game can be seen in the success of The Blizzard, the quarterly football magazine Wilson founded and continues to edit.British engineers brought the game to the ‘Land of Silver’ in the late nineteenth century leaving their mark in the team names: Newell’s Old Boys, Banfield, River Plate, All Boys. There has always been a love/hate relationship for me when it comes to players from this region – coloured by my repulsion of Barcelona with the figurehead of Messi as they denied my club two Champions League titles in early 21st century. It’s estimated as many as 500 babies were taken from dissident parents and adopted by military families. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is the definitive history of a great footballing nation and its many paradoxes.

This book offers a great deal of insight into the development of Argentinian domestic football, which was originally started off by English and Italians, as well as that of the national side. But the rich, volatile history of Argentinian football is made up of both the sublime and the ruthlessly pragmatic. I read Angels With Dirty Faces in one sitting, mesmerized by what Walidah Imarisha has accomplished: a daring dive into the real deal about why prisons don’t work, filled with love for hustlers, rebels. This is an excellent book, which offers a potted social and political history of Argentina as well as of its football.The greatest intrigue lies at the heart of the country, as you come to understand not just the frailties and triumphs of the national team – but also of the fragmented club structure and the battles of amateurism and professionalism. Argentina is a volatile country and football violence has been part of the game, from the very earliest days up the emergence of the barras bravas. And, as the early sections of the book make clear, football was integral to the early myth-making of a country still trying to form an identity having only gained independence in the 19th Century. The contretemps between Diego Simeone and David Beckham in Saint-Étienne in 1998 seemed just one more example of an eternal conflict between Argentinian wiles and English naivety. Everyone already knows the fact that Argentinians (weather we like it or not), have given us the greatest soccer players of all times with the likes of Maradona, Batistuta, Kempes, Pasarella, Gallego, Ortega, Riquelme, Crespo, Delgado, and of course d10s Messi the G.

It is still full of incident and interest, especially for readers like me, who know only the barest outline of the South American game. I picked this book up a few years ago and it has sat on my shelf unopened and that’s more a reflection on the time I’ve wasted flitting between news snippets on the internet which has compromised my ability to sit and concentrate on something not work-related or presented via a screen rather than anything about the book itself. He came to any new club as a hero and leave like a president who just got toppled by yet another military coup in the country. Wilson, as you would expect from the author of several important books on football history and tactics, goes far deeper than the stereotype .

She is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Argentina in short has always had excellent players but never an excellent team – a conundrum that coaches and managers from the entire expanse of their history have been unable to solve. Although dense, certain sections of the book are compelling, namely the more contemporary chapters; the fury of Argentina‘s World Cup victory on home soil in 1978, the enigma and addiction of El Diego, the journey of Marcelo Bielsa, and of course, the rise of Leo Messi and his seismic impact on modern football from the mid-2000s. There are also some quirks every now and then, such as the way Boca Juniors ended up wearing their iconic jersey colour due to losing a bet in a match and had to adopt the colour of the first ship they saw entering the harbour (which happened to be a Swedish vessel), or how River Plate got its name from the name of a container that the local guys supposed to move (but they played football instead). Indeed, it’s hard to escape the darkness of the history of Argentina, even in football where violence, rape cases, drug abuse, even murder became part of its horrifying past.