The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Game-Changer

A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor.

Football, in the 1880s, was a rough and dangerous game. To address the abhorrent state of the sport, William McCrum, an amateur Irish goalkeeper and the author’s great-grandfather, proposed the penalty kick, a new and drastic sanction introduced to the game in 1891. For over a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon has not only regulated the conduct of football (also known as soccer) but has also inspired game theories and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature.

An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Gamechanger is a family history, a social history, and a history of the world’s most popular sport. It considers an extraordinary phenomenon as it examines the penalty kick’s psychological--even philosophical--grip on our imaginations, with its distillation of risk and chance into the penalty shoot-out, an all-or-nothing moment.

Robert McCrum is a writer and editor whose most recent book, Shakespearean, was published to great acclaim in 2021. Formerly the editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, he published Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Danilo Kis, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, Adam Phillips, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jayne Anne Phillips, Orhan Pamuk, and Adam Mars-Jones, among many others, during his time at the publisher. He also served as literary editor of the Observer for more than ten years. He is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Wodehouse: A Life and a memoir, My Year Off: Recovering Life After a Stroke.