Football Books I Love: In the Shadow of Giants, by Leandro Vignoli

I’ve always thought that there are essentially two types of football fan. There are the people, the majority, who enjoy the game for the spectacle on the pitch. They are interested in high-quality, technical football and more likely to watch the sport on TV than anywhere else. The football connoisseurs, they are generally not interested in diluting the quality of what they are watching when so much top-level football these days is available at the click of the button.

Then there is my group. My interest is not in fast, exquisite high-pressing and tiki-taka build-up play – I’d hardly be a Sutton United fan if it was. Instead, it is the stories around the clubs and the people that make them who they are that interest me.

I don’t want to pass judgements on Leandro’s Vignoli’s interest in watching quality football (the team he supports, Internacional of Brazil, are a historic and successful club), but I would wager that just by writing In the Shadow of Giants he is in the latter. The book is the result of a remarkable commitment from Vignoli to fly from his home in Brazil to Europe, with the stated aim of understanding the resilience needed to ‘support a team that never wins.’

His journey takes him to thirteen clubs, all of which have traditionally had rivals of greater stature in their own city. It is often so difficult to rationally explain what it is like to be a football fan, but In the Shadow of Giants does an excellent job of it through the stories it tells.

Whilst the clubs Vignoli visits all have the shared identity of being underdogs in their own cities, their individual stories are very different. Some stand out for political reasons – Rayo Vallecano and St Pauli have strong left-wing identities in places where local rivals, Real Madrid and Hamburger SV respectively, have fanbases that have at times leant to the right. In London, Fulham are stereotypically known as a club that are almost too nice, whereas Millwall, defined by the slogan ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’, are the complete opposite.

Then there is the fascinating story of Belenenses, which reminds us that football outside of the UK is not always so simple off the pitch. Belenenses are one of just two teams outside of Portugal’s ‘big three’ to have ever won the league title, albeit back in 1946. At the time of Vignoli’s visit, they were struggling under apathetic owners, with home crowds often only a few thousand. Vignoli explains that at the end of the season, Belenenses split into two clubs, with the fans backing the phoenix club C.F. Os Belenenses, who had to start again in the sixth tier. Meanwhile, unpopular owners Codecity continued with a professional version called B-SAD, though with virtually no support whatsoever this version of the club has since more or less disappeared, leaving the fans’ version as the sole representative of this historic club.

Vignoli’s final chapter sees him visit Torino, a club that I myself have visited for their derby game against Juventus. The story of Torino is one of the most tragic in the history of the game. Dominant in the 1940s in Italy, the Torino team flew out to Portugal to play Benfica in a friendly in May 1949. Sadly, they never made it home as their return flight crashed into Turin landmark the Basilica of Superga. With 31 fatalities, the crash wiped out one of football's greatest ever sides. Torino were declared league champions that season, but have won Italy’s highest honour just once since then. Vignoli does an excellent job of telling this sad story through the lens of the fans he interviews as part of the book.

Like In the Shadow of Giants, Amateur Hour looks to shine a light on the stories within football outside of the Premier League’s big six and the top few foreign clubs. It caters for those fans in the second category I mentioned earlier – those who find more excitement in uncovering the sport’s fascinating untold stories than they do in watching a nice passing move or an intricate finish.

About Johnnie Lowery

Johnnie is a football writer. His first book, Six Added Minutes, was written while he was at university and published in November 2019. With strong reviews from the likes of Jeremy Vine and Jacqui Oatley, it is selling well online. His second book, Match Fit, explores mental health in football, and was shortlisted at the 2024 Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards. Amateur Hour, which is due to be released in May 2025, is all about watching non-league football in the lockdown-affected 2020/21 season