"Football is a fascination of the devil and a twin sister of the drink system", an Anglican vicar declared in 1893. The authors of this useful monograph concede that he was half right: football, and sport more generally, has always enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship with drinking. There was never a time when the two activities existed entirely separately. Most sporting trophies are, after all, cups the original idea of which was to facilitate the alcoholic celebrations of the victor.

In Britain, pubs and publicans were central to the early development of sport just as today sport is central to the marketing strategies of many of the major drinks companies. By the C16th the ale house was already well established as the main arena for staging skittles, quoits, bowls, wrestling, tennis, cricket and a large number of events involving animals, such as cock-fighting. To attract the crowds, the publican became the main promoter of sports, arranging matches, providing the prize money and being the bookmaker.

No sports had closer associations with the pub than prizefighting and cricket. Publicans were the principal promoters, stagers and administrators of prizefighting, and many fighters were publicans in waiting, taking up a tenancy of a pub when they retired. As the authors point out, if the violence of the sport did not do for them, alcoholism often did.

The origins of cricket, too, were inseparable from drinking places. The first known publication of the laws of the game was the 1755 `New Articles of the Game of Cricket', sub-titled `Particularly that of the Star and Garter in Pall Mall'. The support of the old brewing families for cricket and horse racing in the C19th was a precursor of modern alcohol sports sponsorship.

In view of their special importance to the marketing strategies of contemporary alcohol companies, - as the authors conclude, sport, football in particular, offers a unique avenue for the drinks industry to reach its most lucrative target audience of young males - it is perhaps an oddity that unlike many other sports, soccer and rugby were not children of the drinking house, originating in the public schools.
Thus, rather than football being an adjunct of the pub, the pub almost became an adjunct of football. In the earliest days of the modern, professional game, licensees and breweries provided frequent updates of matches in progress to ensure that football would attract customers rather than by providing an alternative pursuit, taking them away – an approach even more evident now than it was then.

Sport's importance to the marketing of alcohol, beer in particular, was shown most strikingly by the role played by the brewers in financing the 'football boom' of the 1890s and early 1900s. The huge growth in crowds spurred by the formation of the Football League in 1888 meant that many clubs needed substantial capital investment to improve their grounds. The financial support of the breweries was crucial. Aston Villa, Barnsley, Watford, Liverpool, Manchester United, West Bromwich Albion, Oldham Athletic, Wolverhampton Wanderers are all examples of clubs which depended on backing from the local brewer to finance their expansion during this period, and later, during the depression of the 1930s, to stay afloat. Hard economic calculation no doubt played its part, but brewers could also act from sentiment, being supporters in the sense of fans as well as bankers.

Of course, temperance campaigners opposed the many connections between alcohol and sport. They tried to develop non-alcoholic sporting alternatives, and objected to drinking by athletes and also to alcohol advertising which fostered the idea that alcohol improved sporting performance. Ironically, in view of the deep, mutually supportive relationship that developed between alcohol and football, both William MacGregor, the founder of the Football League, and C.E. Sutcliffe, its first Secretary, were committed teetotallers. Other teetotallers included Charles Clegg, Sheffield Wednesday's chairman and Arnold Hills, who created a works team that later became West Ham United. Hills once offered to clear the club's debts if it picked only teetotallers in the team. Under Clegg the Sheffield Wednesday board took a dim view of any player whose drinking or visits to pubs were deemed inappropriate, and there was a pretty restricted view of what was appropriate.. But generally, temperance and non-temperance people achieved a kind of peaceful co-existence for the good of the game.

The book also examines the influence of alcohol on the fans and on sportsmen. The chapter on alcohol and sports practitioners includes some history of their attitudes towards alcohol and the drinking practices of sportsmen, some information on modern scientific findings on the impact of alcohol on sporting performance and a discussion of drinking problems in sportsmen, particularly footballers.

As far as drinking by fans is concerned, the authors are keen to debunk the notion that alcohol is a cause of football violence and hooliganism. Leaning mainly on a research report produced for the alcohol industry, they conclude that alcohol was never more than a scapegoat. They are particularly offended by the double standard whereby drinking, they say, is less likely to be subject to draconian restrictions at sports events popular with the middle rather than the working classes. They complain that the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act of 1985 was misnamed as it was directed entirely at working class soccer and made no reference to any other sport. The authors' argument here is not altogether consistent. They may be right in saying that professional darts proves that the consumption of even vast quantities of alcohol does not necessarily result in crowd violence, but these crowds, whose drinking is on their own account unrestricted, are hardly drawn from the middle classes.

But then consistency is not the authors' strong point. They assert that the real cause of English football hooliganism was political rather than alcoholic. They invent an entity called `the English Empire' and suggest that its decline from the mid-1950s caused an upsurge of chauvinism and racism which took expression on the football terrace. Alcohol was no more than a useful pretext for the Thatcher government which, despite sharing the nationalistic and xenophobic world-view of the football hooligans, was determined to repress them because they were working class.

It is a shame that this convoluted and politically inspired rubbish, unworthy of a serious academic study, discredits a book which would otherwise have been a perfectly good introduction to the subject.