As one might expect, this year having seen the European Championships played in Germany, there has not been a shortage of books about football published in 2024. Since Nick Hornby published his memoir Fever Pitch, about growing up as a devoted Arsenal fan, in 1992, the beautiful game has worked its way into the literary mainstream in a manner that would hitherto have been impossible to imagine. This year’s offerings include David Peace’s Munichs, a powerful personal historical perspective about the Manchester United air crash of 1958.

The book in question in this blog is a work of fiction (so, yes, it could have been a fiction blog). It’s called Godwin. Its author is an American called Joseph O’Neill, who attracted many plaudits for his 2008 book Netherland, about cricket in New York. The football elements of the book (it is somewhat multi-layered) concern the efforts of various people, mostly bad actors with various nefarious motives, seeking to exploit the talents of a young African footballer who goes by the eponymous name of Godwin.

The “15-year-old Norwegian” referenced in Godwin, Martin Odegaard, is now 25 and the Arsenal captain, seen here giving a pre-match pep-talk ahead of a Premier League game

At one point in the book we have the veteran French talent scout, Jean-Luc Lefebvre, explaining how good he thinks Godwin could be. He mentions that Real Madrid have recently signed “a 15-year-old Norwegian named Odegaard, who has already played for the Norway national team…it is Lefebvre’s expectation that Godwin will be at the level of Odegaard”. (Who, at the time of writing, and this is an obvious constant potential peril in football, can’t play due to an injury sustained while playing for Norway.)

Agents and their roles in football make for sports stories more frequently than used to be the case, perhaps not least because there is a lot of money in it. This book does a good job of illustrating the mendacity and utter unscrupulousness that can permeate life when business people and chancers spot an opportunity to make money from young talent. It is widely accepted that by the age of 20 a football player will have gone through about 90% of his development. It is therefore best to get them as teenagers. Chelsea, for example, have snapped up approaching 40 players by implementing this strategy. For sure they won’t all become world-beaters, although a 17-year-old Brazilian, Estevao Willian, has often been compared to Lionel Messi – and I don’t just mean by his parents. (The actual Messi is shown on the home page playing for Argentina in the 2022 World Cup Final.)

The fact that there is so much money swilling around in football in this country has now – some would suggest belatedly – excited the interest of HM Revenue & Customs. In August it was revealed that HMRC had opened investigations into 20 clubs, 83 players and 21 agents in the previous 18 months. It had recovered almost £70 million as a result of this activity. Agents routinely try to minimise their tax liabilities by claiming to work for both player and club but HMRC has decide to treat such claims with extreme scepticism – according to The Times: “The taxman believes that, in reality, the majority of agents work primarily for the player.” That is, for the meal tickets that are the Godwins of the real world.