Brian Glanville (1931-2025): The giant of British soccer journalism held affection for the USA

Among the myriad ways Brian Glanville was unique among sports journalists around the world — he believed in the USA as a 1994 World Cup host.

I first met Glanville at the 1990 World Cup. The USA won the bid to host in 1988. In the two years since, I’d grown accustomed to foreign journalists scoffing at the tournament heading to a nation they deemed not serious about soccer. And that wasn’t the only source of skepticism.

A German reporter pointed to his watch and told me, “How can you have a World Cup in four different time zones!” But Glanville conveyed his confidence in how the 1994 World Cup would fare in American hands.

“I knew when it came to sports, Americans don’t accept anything but top rate,” said Glanville, who had covered each World Cup since 1958. “The Americans told me I was their only friend.”

I had last spent time with Glanville in 2017 — by then he had covered 13 World Cups — when I visited his London home. He allowed me to marvel at his book shelves, and then we discussed the books he’d written. I had to scroll through his bibliography to count more than 60 books, because when I asked him how many, he joked, “Too many.”

His first soccer novel, “The Rise of Gerry Logan,” was published in 1963, after he’d penned six other novels. It was translated into several languages including German. In 1968, Franz Beckenbauer said it, “was the best book on soccer I have ever read.” That’s how I felt the first time I read Glanville’s “Goalkeepers are Different” — his 13th novel.

Glanville spent 33 years as The Sunday Times soccer correspondent. In the English press, he also served as columnist for the Sunday People, and he wrote for the Rome-based sports daily Corriere dello Sport (Glanville was fluent in Italian). His work appeared in countless other publications around the world.

His quadrennial editions of “The History of the World Cup” were invaluable resources in our Soccer America offices for many years and made research delightful.

American soccer fans may be most familiar with Glanville’s writing from his World Soccer columns. But back in the late 1960s, he covered the incarnation of U.S. pro soccer for The New York Times, which by then had regularly reviewed his non-soccer novels.

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“The Wolverhampton Wanderers, representing the Wolves of Los Angeles, survived an early goal today and beat Cerro of Montevideo, masquerading as the New York Skyliners, 2-1. It was an excellent United Soccer Association game, and the 7,064 fans in the huge, [Yankee] Stadium reacted with heartening enthusiasm.” — Glanville, New York Times (June 5, 1967)

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In 1969, The New York Times’ famous cultural critic Clive Barnes reviewed “Soccer: A History of the Game, Its Players and Its Strategy,” which Glanville penned to educate Americans about the sport.

Barnes wrote of soccer that the pleasures of watching it “can at their most intense be like the exciting yet contemplative pleasures of poetry.”

Barnes wrote of Glanville:

“It is curious that while Britain is sports-mad, it has, compared with the United States, produced curiously few even readable sports writers. Here, writing on sports represents some of the finest of contemporary journalism. In Britain, it is barely literate. Mr. Glanville is one of Britain’s exceptions to its rules. He writes on sport with love and knowledge, clear imagery and uncluttered prose.”

(Glanville’s “Footballers Don’t Cry: Selected Writings” includes a 1965 piece hailing American sports columnists, including Red Smith, Damon Runyon, AJ Liebling and Ring Lardner — “who can be read by intellectuals without shame and by working men without labor.”)

Glanville had come to the USA in the early 1960s to cover boxing, before spending most of 1967 in New York covering the NPSL and United Soccer Association’s first seasons, and their path to merging to become the NASL.

“Nowhere else in the world has a country tried to introduce soccer from ‘the top,’ and those who criticize the N.P.S.L and U.S.A for trying to do so might do well to reflect that it has obstinately refused to grow from the bottom,” Glanville wrote in 1967. “Building good teams, teams that the uncommitted sports fan would want to watch, is another matter. …

“Will it, the soccer experiment, succeed? I hear the question half-a-dozen times a day, and can only equivocate. There is a very long way to go, the beginning has been politically inauspicious, with its schisms and its wrangling, but the means are vast, and so is the human material.”

Among other Glanville appearances in The New York Times was a review of the 1966 World Cup movie, “Kicks in Camera’s Eye: New Soccer Film Has Fast Pace,” for which Glanville wrote the commentary. Glanville also wrote book reviews for The New York Times. One was of Hunter Davies‘ “The Glory Game,” which intimately reports on the off-the-field lives of English pro soccer players and is compared by Glanville to “Paper Lion” by George Plimpton. The 1974 review includes: 

“The grass roots of soccer in the United States are growing at a pace which suggests that in 20 years it could become a major national sport. For the moment, however, it’s the greedy giants of the gridiron, those opportunists in shoulder pads so chillingly presented to us by George Plimpton, who rule the roost.”

Glanville continued frequent trips to the USA and in New York City would stay in the apartment of Paul Gardner, the now retired Soccer America columnist who last Thursday celebrated his 95th birthday. Glanville and Gardner for decades both wrote monthly columns in World Soccer. In Glanville’s 1999 memoir, “Football Memories,” Glanville wrote, “Virgil to my Dante, in New York, was the English expatriate Paul Gardner.”

Glanville wrote for the Sunday Times through 2019. He died on May 16 at age 93. 

I was with Gardner when we heard the sad news.

“He wrote vividly and boisterously, and with humor,” Gardner said. “He was excellent with anecdotes. He had sympathy for the devotees of soccer. The human dimension always came through.

“He captured the heart of the sport.”