By Niles Lashway (January 25, 2004)

A Season with Verona seeks to explain a phenomenon of life, when sport, in particular futbol, or soccer, is elevated to such a high status that it envelops some properties of religion to such an extent it practically becomes life itself. Stadiums become temples, and players saints, and the soccer ball, the tool of conversion. A season of soccer is like the first year of your new faith, pure excitement and dread.

Writer Tim Parks succeeds masterfully at capturing this phenomenon. Parks, an Englishman who has spent the last 20 years of his life living in the northern Italian city of Verona, brilliantly addresses the various dynamics of soccer. He takes you inside the club of his adopted hometown, Hellas Verona, and their fanatical supporters, the Brigate Gialloblu, the yellow-blue brigade. He chronicles their 10-month-long season, attending every home and away game, as they seek to avoid the fate that seems pre-arranged for them: relegation. 

What makes his work so readable and also addicting is how the book is presented in so many different ways. He does not limit himself to simply explaining the fundamentals of soccer; he barely touches on the dynamics of the game itself. Instead, he shows not only how soccer is like life, but how soccer affects so many aspects of life, regardless if one even likes it or not.

The book almost becomes a novel, with Verona struggling against the forces which seek to have them destroyed by relegation, and replaced by their more presentable cousin club, Chievo Verona. But he realizes that there are people who may not be fluent in soccer, such as most in the USA, and explains, when necessary, the properties of the game, such as relegation. Relegation occurs when a team in the top flight will get demoted to a lower level of professionalism, almost the equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, and the top teams from the lower division take the relegated teams’ places.

He addresses regional and cultural divisions that exist in Italy, and manifest themselves through soccer. How the north, and Verona in particular, is viewed as a bastion of racism (Hellas Verona have no black players on their teams, and the fans shout monkey grunts to blacks on apposing teams), fascism, and violence, a people not in touch with the modern world. Conspiracy theories are rampant in Italian soccer, for example that the big city teams control the Italian soccer federation, making the referees biased against the provincial teams, such as Verona.

Soccer, and especially the stadiums, are the venues where people are allowed to express such divisions and angers. People act and behave in ways they would never do in ordinary life, but soccer is not an ordinary sport to Italians. Police are required to segregate the groups of opposing fans, as violence is almost common place.

Despite such extremes, Parks always maintains that such extremes are there for a reason, to satisfy the urging all humans have of being part of something larger then themselves, almost in the same way as religion. 

Overall, the book is a breath of fresh air, it can not be classified into a single genre, and that’s what makes it so lovely. It’s a truly excellent work by an excellent mind.