Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football

This is the second Jonathan Wilson book I've read and, though not quite as good as Inverting the Pyramid, this one is immensely readable. It brings together some of my favourite topics - European travel, Cold War intrigue, history, political skulduggery and, of course, football.

Wilson's explorations take in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, The Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, The Caucasus and, finally, Russia. The many 'highlights' include the great Hungary team of the 1950s not being allowed to return to Budapest right  after their failure to win the 1954 World Cup, the Shakhtar Donetsk president 'buying the farm' after an assassin's bomb ripped through the VIP lounge at a home game in 1995, the brilliance of the Yugoslavia World Youth Cup winning team of 1987 and the unsettling case of Eduard Streltsov, arguably Russia's greatest ever player.

I'm going to rip a part of the epilogue out here to explain what Wilson thinks of the future of Eastern European football (note this book was written in 2006, so the situation may have changed for some nations, however doubtful that may be).

"Poland and Hungary seem almost to have given up - a sign, perhaps, of nations no longer desperate enough to require validation through football, and not yet comfortable enough to invest it with the faintly ludicrous importance it has in England today. Serbia and Romania wonder how they can have fallen so far, so quickly. Georgia and Armenia ponder the point of football when there are no Muscovites to upset. Bosnia-Hercegovina slowly puts itself back together after war. Everybody has their specific concerns: railing against corrupt owners, mercenary players or a feckless football association; but everywhere outside of Russia, the basic problem is money."

A thoroughly researched and highly recommended book.