BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Travels in Eastern European Football
by Jonathan Wilson
Orion Books £16.99, 360 pages

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” said the replicant in Blade Runner. After the FT sports writer Jonathan Wilson’s epic journey through the stricken football landscape of eastern Europe for Behind the Curtain, he is entitled to make a similar claim. Everywhere he goes - from the remains of the Nep Stadium in Budapest to the corruption-raddled fields of Armenia, Georgia and Romania - he finds a tale of lost heroes, broken teams, corruption, egotism and decay. Yet it is, at heart, a work of love.

Steeped in memories of childhood holidays in the old Yugoslavia, and inspired by the clammy glamour of spy stories by Graham Greene and John Le Carre, Wilson developed a sense of connection with lands once ruled by communism. Later, as a journalist for onefootball.com, he travelled through the region and found that writing football articles involving “match-fixing, prostitutes and assassination” was more interesting than banal transfer speculation.

More football books are published in the UK than in the rest of the world together. Yet Wilson must be the only British reporter to find such allure in a fixture such as Shakhtar Donetsk Reserves v Chornomorets Odessa Reserves. His book’s stated aim is to use football to show how capitalism changed eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Communist-era football was marred by match-rigging and rigid control. But it was solidly organised, state-funded and occasionally produced great teams. The free market has tended to leave the game in chaos and often at the mercy of crooks. “Whatever else has changed for the better, football - with the possible exception of Russia - has grown immeasurably worse,” Wilson writes.

Not every country quite proves his thesis. The market may have aggravated the decline, but Hungarian football has been dying of melancholy and mismanagement since the afternoon of July 4 1954 - the day the “golden team” of Puskas and Hidegkuti let slip a 2-0 lead and lost the World Cup final to West Germany. Having promoted them as exemplars of “socialist football”, the government turned on the team. The public was scarcely more generous. Within hours of the final whistle, disappointed fans were rioting in Budapest in what became a dress rehearsal for the Uprising of 1956.

Yet even in places of blight football can move and delight. Slovenia, for example unexpectedly produced an effective national team and a star player, Zlatko Zahovic. Impressive performances in Euro 2000 helped the country to define itself.

The book’s key story is that of Eduard Streltsov, a sort of 1950s Soviet version of George Best: gorgeous, original and adored. Broken by a dubious rape charge, the golden boy was sent to the Gulag and written out of history until the fall of communism. Streltsov, who died of cancer at 53, is, for Wilson, “the flawed but eternal martyr” standing aloof from the general mire.

Wilson writes captivatingly with humour, although he doesn’t always remember to set the scene sufficiently for the reader to share his passion for club politics. But anyone with an interest in eastern European sport will be consulting this book for years to come.

David Winner is the author of “Those Feet: An Intimate History of English Football”.