Cherrypicker
The Wonderful World of Popular Sport

Frank Goosen and Thomas Brussig write about what is supposedly the world’s most wonderful pastime. No, not sex; it’s more complicated.

By Holger Moos

Spiel ab! (Play ball!) is the title of Frank Goosen’s latest novel. Anyone who’s ever played football will be familiar with the call that’s actually a reproach. It’s directed at ball-loving teammates who get so carried away with their own dribbling that they lose track of the match.

The cabaret artist and novelist comes from the Ruhr region, more precisely from Bochum, a particularly football-crazed part of Germany. Spiel ab! is his third novel after Förster, mein Förster (2016) and Kein Wunder (2019) about Goosen’s alter ego Roland Förster, a rather untalented football novelist, and his two pals Fränge and Brocki.

Fränge runs the Café Dahlbusch more or less poorly, has fallen out with his ex, and his son Alex doesn’t speak fondly of him either. He comes up with the idea of coaching his son’s youth team not only to save them from relegation but also to mend his relationship with Alex. He asks Förster for help, and shortly afterwards, of course, his teacher friend Brocki is on the pitch in a green and white training jacket.

A beard’s not the solution

The trio grows with the challenges, and even if everything doesn’t go well, it’s an eventful season. The coach and his two co-trainers have taken on a pretty colourful squad. The dialogues between Mirkan and Adnan, Giampiero and Justin, Mostafa and Marvin are among the highlights of this charming, enjoyable football novel. Here’s a sample before a match against a seemingly superior opponent:

“Hey, have you seen them? They’re huge! ...
ALIM: One of them has a beard!
MOSTAFA: My brother has a beard too, but he can’t play football!
MIRKAN: And what about your mother, you wuss?
ALIM: She can’t play football either!
MIRKAN: But she has a beard.”

According to Jens Buchholz of the Frankfurter Rundschau, there is (almost) no such thing as a bad Frank Goosen book; for the Förster series, in any case, Spiel ab! “is certainly its high point so far.” It also deals with fundamental issues: What’s so special about football? Why did someone invent a game in which you play a ball with your feet when it’s much easier to play with your hands? And Goosen finds an answer to that, too: Football may be just as illogical and superfluous as playing hide-and-seek, that’s not what it’s about, but, “It’s a problem that you build into life in order to be happy with the solution.” Anyone who wants to hear the story should listen to the audiobook read by the author.

Football and futility

Thomas Brussig, not only a writer but also a football fan and initiator of the German national team of authors, has also written a kind of football book: Mats Hummels auf Parship (Mats Hummels on Parship). The book consists of three monologues, not by footballers, but by coaches and referees. The monologues are proper rants.

The first monologue, Leben bis Männer, was written for the theatre and premiered at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin at the end of 2001. In it, Brussig takes up a wall sniper trial: the coach of one of the defendants has his say and is allowed to give his view of things. These are often clichés (“Women and football are always precarious. The more emancipated, the worse they are.”), but sometimes drift into the philosophical, for example when a connection is made between football and futility: “A footballer is doomed to fail... We constantly demand of ourselves what we cannot do. We’re completely numb to futility. Just because of football!”

Passionate thinking

Twenty years later, Brussig has rewritten this coach monologue for today with Mats Hummels auf Parship. Brussig turns the former disgruntled loser into an angry antivaxxer. This man has an opinion on everything, whether it’s the Covid vaccine, women’s football, language bans, the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar, Donald Trump, or the pros and cons of having Jerome Boateng as a neighbour. There’s a lot of loud thinking because, “A coach has to be able to shout. I, for one, never shout. It looks like shouting, but in reality, it’s thinking, and very passionate thinking at that.”

In the third monologue, first published in 2007, there’s a change of perspective. Schiedsrichter fertig (Referee Finished), is a monologue by a supposedly impartial person. It is a litany of futility and a reckoning, for there is absolutely no justice in the life of a referee. And even though the first-person narrator made his way up to FIFA referee, the reward sounds like a punishment: “You have to work hard to be booed... To be booed, mobbed, insulted, shouted at, slighted, threatened, and carried away to safety from eighty thousand angry, frenzied people is the highest, the greatest thing a referee can achieve.”