Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison review – lifting the taboo of being gay in football

Football is the most popular pastime in the world. When a big game is on telly, it’s viewed by millions of people. Stadiums take up vast areas in most cities and during the 2021/22 season, the Premier League and its clubs contributed £8bn to the UK economy.

And yet, there is such little great art out there about football. When was the last time you watched a really great film about football? Who is the great football director? The great football painter? The great football novelist?

There has always been a bizarre chasm between the world of football and the world of art, so much so that when I see a new novel on the horizon that is not only based around football but also introduces a queer element to the beautiful game, I cannot help but be intrigued.

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Greatest of All Time, Alex Allison’s second novel, comes five years after his Somerset Maugham Award winning debut The Art of the Body. Allison is a writer for whom that chasm between football and art seemingly doesn’t exist, to the point where even his official author’s bio makes reference to his loyalty to AFC Wimbledon.

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The novel begins with a single-sentence chapter –  “Before he was everyone’s, he was mine.” Instantly, we are in uncharted territory for a football novel. As the book fleshes itself out, we learn that our narrator is a footballer at the beginning of a promising career at a Premier League club. The details are purposefully hazy but that totally works.

Then, a new player is signed to the team, Samson Kabarebe, a much-hyped young player from Monaco with, we are told, a promising score of 184 out of 200 on the latest installment of Football Manager. Eventually, Kabarebe and our narrator become close friends and then, well, even closer friends. 

Allison’s style often veers towards being quite dialogue heavy, but in the sections of the novel dedicated to yearning, to our narrator’s confused longing for his teammate, he gives us some of his absolute best writing. And, as revolutionary as it shouldn’t be, the fact that this is a novel about two professional footballers who engage in an openly gay sexual relationship (to be very politically correct about it) is significant.

There are currently no openly gay Premier League players. Or, well, there are actually several of them. But being gay in football is still a huge taboo. For Allison to write about this exact subject, and to make it as completely normal as it should be, it should be championed.

Greatest of All Time by Alex Allison is out now (Dialogue, £22). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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