At its best, football is a glorious, uplifting, unifying sport. But it hasn't been at its best for some time. Disillusioned by corruption scandals, billionaire club owners and an ever-smaller group of title challengers, Martin Calladine drifted away from the game that had defined 25 years of his life. He found solace in an unexpected place: American football. Despite the glitz and the endless ad breaks, the NFL has a curiously Corinthian purity: preventing teams buying success by sharing TV money equally, having a strict salary cap and, with the draft, letting the worst teams get the pick of the best new players. The Ugly Game is a funny, angry book of essays for football fans setting out where the game has gone wrong and showing that, perhaps surprisingly, the NFL has many of the answers.
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