Footy Passions

Salary caps, drunken escapades, sponsorship deals, and teams celebrating victory and surviving defeat dominate coverage of football. Meanwhile fans agonise over season-ending injuries, sweat over results and look forward to the next game with a mixture of hope and dread. The keen supporter is immersed in a ritual of precarious pleasures played out within quasi-tribal cheer squads, intense friendship networks and families united in support for their team.

Footy Passions enters the personal world of keen supporters and reveals the extent to which football is more than a game.

'A terrific read. If your ongoing passion for footy - a game where, on muddy grounds in wintery conditions, blokes struggle for a leather bag of nothing - makes you doubt your maturity, then this is the book for you. Joy Damousi and John Cash have interviewed a range of fans whose articulate responses help us to understand that people find genuine meaning in football; that the love of this game really is tied up with people's sense of themselves. Family, friends, relationships, ethnic heritage, loss, loyalty, triumph, joy and suffering - these are the elements of life and of footy.'-JOHN HARMS, THE AGE