Synopsis
In the tradition of Adam Phillips and Darian Leader, Chris Oakley shines his spotlight on the world of football and with wit and erudition looks at the question of why there is this worldwide preoccupation with football. Does anybody have the answer? This book argues that football offers us the possibility of manageable doses of self-elected madness. A madness that is essential for a sane life. For the paradox is that this very madness is simultaneously therapeutic: football as an insistent provocation, repeatedly re-inaugurating the reverie or drift, disrupted by those moments of the most intense fracture, moments of the autistic stare.

Description
It would appear that football has claws, for the world as we know it, is possessed. Somehow it never lets go, and not merely the sports pages are in danger of being swallowed by its hungry sprawl. For many what is in play is seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, delirium, in more or less manageable doses. Although of course, just as the effects of the psychoanalytic tie are hardly containable to the classical fifty minute ‘hour', nor are these football passions bounded by the standard ninety minutes of any particular game.
Proffering a roller-coaster of intense discomfort, anguish ecstasies interspersed with abstracted longings so redolent of the back ward in-patient, forever lurking in the discontinued corridors of our old lunatic asylums. Yet always present, just round the corner, lies the possibility of almost uncontainable happiness, always an abundance, always an overflowing. Simultaneously football provides us with our own utterly personal and yet simultaneously collective, as in programmed, delusional system: a universe organised around the fixtures.
‘"Football Delirium" is not "applied' psychoanalysis, not a book that takes a privileged position in relation to its subject, but a set of wonderfully subtle and free-wheeling interwoven stories about psychoanalysis and football, and what they might have to say to each other. A book for, and about fans, and a book consistently intriguing for those who care little for either psychoanalysis or football, or indeed fans - because it is about so much more than its subject, because its enthusiasms are so contagious - "Football Delirium" has strange unsettling things to say about how the things that matter to us always matter too much, about the commitments we can't stop ourselves making, about how our passions are always a passion to forget ourselves. After "Football Delirium" joining in will never look quite the same.'
- Adam Philips
‘This game is mute, most of its participants are clinically unlanguaged, but it generates global noise to a critical degree: from the chest-beating of booted dirt-track baboons to the aviary-screech of Hackney Marshes, the chants, the spittle, the ritual curses.
Chris Oakley's delirious riff on all this is masterly, implicated, fast-twitch. He is a sleepwalker emerging from a very seductive coma. The elegance of his equations reflects years of pattern-making on football pitches all over the world. Here are insights, jokes, anecdotes, confessions. A "Sopranos" debriefing for Freudian couch critics and those who will never escape the gravity of their obsession.'
- Iain Sinclair
‘A new and deep thinking view of footballers and football.'
- Trevor 'Tosh' Chamberlain, Fulham & England Youth International 1954-64

The Author 
Chris Oakley is a psychoanalyst in private practice. When not working he spends his time attending football matches all over the world.