Football fan and solicitor William Barr takes a journey to rediscover his love for the game.

Recent events in the increasingly bonkers world of football – including Arab billionaires buying out a Thai multi-millionaire for control of Manchester City – highlight how the game, at the top end at least, is leaving its roots and reality far behind.

Those who follow the game by means of a satellite television subscription dream of where untold riches will take their teams, complain when £20m is not forthcoming to buy a player and appear non-plussed when, shock horror, their club actually loses a game. This leaves long-standing fans fearing that the spirit of football is ebbing away.

The Football League is increasingly seen as the lifeblood of the game and solicitor William Barr turned to its bottom rung for a transfusion of enthusiasm amid this disillusionment.

Though a Norwich fan, and thus not exactly wallowing in glamour, Barr – a consultant at East Anglia firm Mills & Reeve – chose to spend several months of last season away from his seat at Carrow Road, visiting every ground in League Two as he undertook a ‘journey to the heart of football’.

This strap, and the title, leave no room for doubting what the book is about. League Two is ‘proper’ football, unsullied by WAGs, overhyped matches, and overpaid prima donnas. However, fans of clubs recently promoted from the Conference (the apex of the non-league structure under League Two) tell him more than once how they miss the non-league game because that is where the true spirit of the game resides.

Each chapter follows a similar formula. Barr arrives in the area and provides a little sketch of the environs, before reaching the ground and musing on the particular issues surrounding the club, often in the company of a local fan. There is also rather a lot about pies, about which Barr has a (probably quite literally) unhealthy obsession.

It is then on to the game, and the point at which each chapter falls down. The pre-game sections are generally interesting and informative – unlike the lengthy report of a match that took place months ago about which most readers care little. More rigorous editing would not have gone amiss.

At the same time, Barr is a pleasant companion on our journey from Accrington to Wrexham, his writing easy on the eye, if a little too quick to grab the nearest cliché or pun – taking in a game between Barnet and Brentford, both of which are nicknamed ‘the Bees’, proved too much of a temptation, for example.

And by the end, what have we learnt? Barr has rediscovered his love for football through exposure to its grass roots. League Two football and its fans are held up as salt-of-the-earth types, epitomising what the game should be about. This is a reasonable generalisation, but then he has not revealed anything that those supporting such clubs do not already know. Down there it really isn’t the winning that counts – although that does not go amiss – but the taking part.

It is this, perhaps, that the Premier League has lost. The game is no longer an end in itself – global branding and huge profits are the order of the day. Barr is by no means the only football lover to rail against the perversion of the game, but it is a message that many involved in the Premier League clubs could not care less about. This is hardly Barr’s fault, but that, ultimately, is the flaw at the heart of this book.

Neil Rose is editorial consultant at the Gazette.

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