Review
Books
Culture
Football
Sport
5 min read

The book to help you fall back in love with football

Neil Atkinson’s Transformer isn’t the straightforward biography of Jurgen Klopp.
A fan holds an upside down football scrarf that reads 'Juergen is a red'.
Fan fervour, Anfield.
Lloyd Kearney on Unsplash.

Transformer is a fun book. I don’t mean to sound trite, or to damn with faint praise when I say that. I mean it. Transformer is a fun book, and frankly too many books I read aren’t fun.  

David Foster Wallace used to say something similar (yes, the same David Foster Wallace whose novel Infinite Jest is over a thousand pages and has actual honest-to-god endnotes): much of contemporary print media has lost its ability to be fun. And isn’t that what we’re in this for anyway? 

And that is, I think, why Transformer feels like such a relief, honestly. None of the trademark scouse humour and levity that has made The Anfield Wrap such a successful and appealing football podcast is lost in the transition to text. It is a funny book. It is a fun book. 

Of course, there’s a lot here that you might expect to find in a book about Klopp, too, like discussions of key games throughout Klopp’s time at Liverpool. There’s also lots of what Atkinson does best: insightful and thoughtful reflection on the nature of contemporary football. Whether this is the nature of tickets and ticket prices, the state of TV football punditry, or why Liverpool fans (generally) don’t sing the national anthem, there’s much here for football fans and non-football fans alike to mull over and learn from.  

But it’s also worth noting what’s not in the book. There’s no real prolonged deep dive into Klopp’s personality here. I don’t say that as a criticism, more as a matter of expectation-management for potential readers. This isn’t a biography or a character study, although there are elements of this, for example, in the chapter on Klopp’s ongoing footballing rivalry with Pep Guardiola.  

Whole pages, even chapters pass without Klopp being mentioned. If you’re going into Transformer hoping to learn about Klopp’s upbringing, his playing career, his faith, you’ll likely be disappointed. But that’s fine, because Transformer isn’t that book. 

So much of the book is awash with the warmth of friendship and humour and life. 

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Transformer is not a book about Jürgen Klopp. Obviously, ostensibly it is. Klopp’s tenure at Liverpool drives the book forward; provides its pulse. But this doesn’t explain why there is a whole chapter on the meaninglessness of football without Divock Origi. And it doesn’t explain the inclusion of sentences like the following: “27 November 2019: Knives Out is released, meaning Sadio Mané has competition for most flamboyant performance from a Liverpudlian in a calendar year.” 

But it’s not even really a book about Liverpool, or football in general. Or Benoit Blanc. It’s a book about fun. About joy. About life, why it matters, why it’s good, and why it’s better with others.  

It’s really a book about love. About loving a football club and loving and being loved by others in the midst of loving that football club.  

Atkinson states up front that this book is about the people he has known and loved during Klopp’s time at Liverpool. It’s his version of this story. But in being his version, he allows it to be my version, too, and yours. “I am going to refer to people and places you may not know and we may not always trouble ourselves with descriptions. You don’t need to worry. That’s because these people, they are your friends. They are you.” 

And this is why the book’s most emotionally fraught moments hit as hard as they do; because so much of the book is awash with the warmth of friendship and humour and life. When moments do stand out in stark relief from the very fun and love that Transformer is keen on have us believe in, they thereby make the case for their importance all the more clearly. 

An insistence of the fundamental unseriousness of football is an act of gleeful rebellion. It is to play a different game. 

Much has been said about Covid and football under Covid. Atkinson’s compassionate, understated treatment of it is genuinely beautiful at times. “People pass away, unmoored from time, separated from loves ones in the grimmest circumstances, and no one quite knows what to do.”  

When reading Atkinson’s memories of the inner turmoil of his last interview with Klopp – “It was hard because I wanted to talk to him. At him. With him. I just wanted to list all these things has been part of with us, but, of course, he is more interested in you, in your world” – it’s hard not to be transported back to the sheer shock of his abrupt leaving.  

In case it’s somehow not clear yet, let me state it here: I think Neil Atkinson is one the most compelling and insightful thinkers in and around modern football. This is in large part because of his insistence on what many forget: football is a game. It is supposed to be fun. It is supposed to be a fun game you enjoy with your mates.  

We are in a world of nation-states and quasi-nation-states acquiring football clubs for political purposes. One with relentless discourse about the minutiae of every refereeing decision. A world where there is a constant, low-level feeling that I am yet again being ripped-off and taken advantage of for having the audacity to want to watch a football match. So, an insistence of the fundamental unseriousness of football is an act of gleeful rebellion. It is to play a different game.  

“I don’t see anywhere near enough people writing about happiness in general, especially within the realm of football where grumpiness has become the order of the day.” Transformer is the apotheosis of modern footballing grumpiness. It is sincere, and earnest, and vulnerable. And I love it for this.  

If you are looking for a comprehensive biography of Klopp, this isn’t it. This is something better.  

When I spoke to him about Transformer, Atkinson said he wanted the book to show that football fans were normal, complex people. That they were accountants from Altringham, and theologians from Liverpool (if we can count theologians as ‘normal’ people). Transformer absolutely bristles with humanity. 

Humans were made for community, for mates, for each other, and for last-minute Divock Origi winners. Humans were made for football.  

If you want to remember why you fell in love with football – or if you want to understand why others fall in love with it – I can’t think of a better book to read than Transformer

Article
Books
Culture
Morality
5 min read

Never Let Me Go: 20 years on

Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is the perfect Frankenstein story for today.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

Four young people peer through a window.
Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in the 2010 film adaption.
Fox Searchlight Films.

This article contains spoilers. 

Human beings are creative. For good or for evil, making new things out of raw materials is something that we can’t help doing, whether that’s writing new books, creating new recipes, or building new houses. Why are we born this way? Christians would say it’s because of the imago Dei: because according to the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, we are made in the image of God. If God created the world and every one of us, and if we’re made in his image, then it follows that all of us have this creative impulse within us, too.  

But if creating is something natural to us, does it follow that it’s also core to our identity as human beings? In other words, is making something that we do, or something that we are? Are we different from all other living creatures in this world by being creators ourselves?  

Although he doesn’t call himself a Christian, these are precisely the kind of theological questions the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks time and time again in his books. And nowhere does he ask them more powerfully than in Never Let Me Go, which was published 20 years ago. 

Never Let Me Go starts off as the story of three children at a boarding school. Kathy, one of three friends, serves as our first-person narrator; it’s through her eyes that we slowly realise something sinister is taking place. As Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow into teenagers and then young adults, it’s finally revealed that they are clones, brought into being thanks to advancements in cloning technology in a dystopian post-World War II Britain. They are brought up for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Or, to put it more bluntly, they’ve been raised for slaughter.  

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have a happy childhood at their boarding school, Hailsham. Their future is hinted at by their teachers, but they’re largely shielded from the truth. All around the country, we later find out, clone children are being raised in horrific conditions. But Hailsham is different, because its Headteacher, Miss Emily, is part of a group that believes the clones deserve to be treated humanely – at least until someone needs a kidney transplant.  

But, though treated in a ‘humane’ way, society doesn’t see the Hailsham clones as ‘human’, and that’s precisely what Miss Emily is trying to prove: that they are not unlike real, normal people. So, she encourages the children to make art. ‘A lot of the time’, Kathy tells us, ‘how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating”’. The children don’t understand why they must always paint and draw, but they’re told that Madame Marie-Claude, a mysterious figure, will collect their best artworks for a seemingly important ‘gallery’.  

Years later, Tommy and Kathy have become a couple. Before dying – or ‘completing’, as they call it – after her second ‘donation’, Ruth tells them that she believes a deferral is possible for couples that are truly in love. Kathy and Tommy go to Miss Emily’s house, their former Headmistress, certain that, as children, they were encouraged to produce art precisely to be able to prove, one day, their true feelings.  

They are quickly disappointed. Miss Emily reveals that Hailsham has now closed down, but that while the school stood, it was meant as an experiment, aimed at convincing the public to improve living conditions for the clones: 

‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all…we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any human being.’ 

Equating creativity with human identity does make sense, to an extent at least. In The Mind of the Maker (1941), Christian novelist and critic Dorothy L. Sayers argued that the closest we can get to understanding God as our Creator is through engaging ourselves in creative acts: ‘the experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation’. In creative acts, from a Christian perspective, we partially grasp God’s creation of us.  

Ultimately, however, being creative in imitation of God, is not enough to get to the very core of what defines a human being. There are all kinds of factors, from old age to mental or physical disability, that make any form of traditionally creative act highly unlikely for some people. By that definition, someone in a coma or a newborn baby is not fully human. 

That’s exactly the definition of humanity that underpins the cruel society of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. We need a better definition, and Christianity provides a unique tradition to help us on the way. A Christian concept of the human person is one that looks both at why we were made, and what we were made for. Christians believe that God made us out of love, and for the purpose of being in communion with him. He made each one of us as a special and irreplaceable individual, and for each of us our telos – the end or aim of our life – is to join him in heaven.  

If we embrace this definition of what it means to be human, then the extent to which we are able to express our intelligence or creativity while on earth doesn’t really matter anymore. If we believe that merely to exist is good – not to exist and fulfil our potential through this or that accomplishment, but just to exist – then we can’t deny that each member of the human family is, in fact, a ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word.  

It is precisely this God-shaped hole that makes the concept of human dignity so fragile and slippery in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliant novel is, ultimately, the perfect Frankenstein story for the modern day. It warns us about the consequences of what might happen if we try to treat other human beings as things we have paid, but even more powerfully it shows us the danger of valuing human life for its creativity, instead of loving it as the creation of God. 

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