The Complete Number 9 is an interview series where we ask authors nine questions about their book, the writing process and their football-writing influences.
Since its origins as a provincial cottage industry almost twenty-five years ago, online gambling has become a globe-straddling behemoth worth more than £10 billion a year. It can sometimes feel as if the point of sport is to bet on it.
How did we get here? How did a new wave of gambling brands hijack sport on a global scale? In Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport, Darragh McGee travels the world to tell the incredible story of the digital brands who unleashed this new world of gambling onto a new generation of fans (and got very rich doing so).
What gave you the idea for the book?
I'm an academic by training, and have been researching the digital age transformation of sports gambling for a decade now. The impetus for the book came from a burning desire to translate that research into a more accessible long-form narrative that could help fans and a wider audience understand all the ways that gambling came to hijack football today - and why that should worry us.
So Imitation Games was really a leap of faith for me, and I'm deep grateful to The Bodley Head, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for the faith they showed in the project at its inception.
How was the writing process?
Long and occasionally frustrating, but creatively energising in ways that I've never experienced previously. Unlearning the conventions of academic writing was a real challenge early on, not least while working on the book around the edges of a full-time job.
The subject matter of the book also meant stitching together a story that is as much about late-stage capitalism, big tech and human psychology than it is about sport and fandom. The devastating human harms associated with sports gambling also added an emotional dimension that often weighed heavily.
Becoming a father of two amid all this brought levity, even amid candles burning at both ends!
What was your biggest influence whilst you were writing the book?
Key influences in the football writing canon included the likes of David Goldblatt's The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, together with David Conn's The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football.
Shout out also to the satirical genius of the Guardian cartoonist, David Squires, as well as the writing of Jonathan Lieu, Jonathan Wilson, Barney Ronay and so many more.
On the raw realities of gambling harm among athletes, Paul Merson’s autobiography, Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery, offered vital insight.
How did you first get published?
Imitation Games is my debut non-fiction book, so it is a major first of sorts, but as an academic, I've been fortunate to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals, and have my research featured in media and magazines. Along the way, I've also been able to hone my authorial voice with content for BBC Radio 3 and 4, which I did after being named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2020. All of this felt like stepping stones to this book!
What advice would you offer other writers when writing gets hard?
Embrace the fact that writing good non-fiction is bloody hard! There is an illusion that books pour out of some authors with minimal fuss, but in my experience, that's not the case. Reminding yourself of why you're writing the book also helps to anchor your purpose on a daily level. On a practical note, some of the best ideas come when you're not sat at a desk, but rather walking, running or talking to friends/peers about your work..
What is your most memorable football experience?
As a fan, it’s got to be one night in August 2003, when Irish Nobel laureate, John Hume, persuaded none other than FC Barcelona to play my local team, Derry City, in a friendly that featured the likes of Ronaldinho, Puyol, and two youngsters, Iniesta and Xavi. I was 16, and would spend the next two decades realising how much world class talent was on show that night, but also reckoning with the political symbolism of the Catalonian giants playing in Derry.
What was the last football book you read?
Published while I was deep in the writing of Imitation Games, I naturally gravitated to the investigative nous of Miguel Delaney's States of Play: How Sportswashing took over Football. His clarity on what football means to us, and why fans and communities should reclaim ownership of it, resonated given my similar concerns about the degradation of the game by an incessant wave of online gambling brands.
What is a football book more people should read?
I’d strongly recommend revisiting David Conn's brilliant 2005 book, The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football. At two decades distance, his foreshadowing of how governance failures and corporate greed would cannibalise culturally valued aspects of the game are borderline prophetic. More optimistically, his own passion for the game also reminds us of what we love about it and why the collective effervescence of fandom is unrivalled!
What is your next football-writing project?
That remains to be seen! However, writing for a popular audience has been so affirming that I hope Imitation Games isn’t my last foray into long-form football writing. As my research evolves, it may be that my next writing project is slightly wider in scope, about the many tensions of masculinity today, and the challenges facing young men in these turbulent times.
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Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport is published by Bodley Head and is out now.