Review

Books

Culture

Football

Sport

25 September 2024

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.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

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.

Explainer

Art

Culture

Identity

2 August 2024

5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”