YOUR FOOTBALL NEWSLETTER - JULY 2023
Welcome to PUNDIT's newsletter! We’d love you to spare a few minutes of your time with us to dive into football nostalgia!
Our first edition has a cool story about the lesser-known legend Robin Friday, and includes our standard discount for our wonderful trivia game as well - just click the link below and use code NEWSLETTER at checkout.
There's also a free Premier League quiz you can download and play with your friends and family. It's also available in a digital version if that's more your vibe.
Hope you enjoy it.
Jonas Hagemann Jensen
Co-founder, PUNDIT Games
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Do you know who Robin Friday is? You ought to
By Patrick Johnson
Being a football fan is an odd thing. Over a billion people around the world watch and love the ‘beautiful game’ but due to the actions of a handful among our number, we’re often tarred with the brush that we’re, well, a bit thick.
However, if you dig a little deeper into the football fraternity, you often find intelligence, insight, compassion, wit, and a whole lot of excellent writers – if the number of books looking at football is anything to go by.
And that’s what I wanted to use my little portion of this newsletter to tell you about, one of my favourite books about a footballer you may have never heard of, Robin Friday. I suspect you might not have heard of him because the book is titled The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw.
Friday played most famously for Reading and Cardiff City in the 1970s, in a period during which neither team was in the English First Division, which is why no footage exists of him on the field. And yet despite this, he was voted Reading’s “Player of the Millennium” in 1999, which shows how the tales of his brilliance have taken on an almost mythic quality.
The book itself takes a deep dive into Friday’s life, briefly discussing his early years before looking in-depth at his short professional career from 1974-1977. It uses newspaper reports, stories from his family, former managers, fellow teammates, and those who knew him, to paint a picture of a maverick in the truest sense. Friday was a man who played as he lived, with absolute abandon and fearlessness.
In an age in which we can look up clips of so many past players in a moment on YouTube, there’s something special about appreciating a player whose greatest exploits can only be seen in your imagination through the written word. Although saying this, discussions have arisen a couple of times about creating a film based on the book, but this hasn’t happened yet, but there’s always hope.
And clocking in at under 200 pages, the book is an easy read and a great addition to a collection - the length perhaps reflects how Robin Friday’s life and career shone so brightly and lasted all too briefly.
Interestingly as a nice partner to this book, in 2020, an author called Stuart Kane wrote two fictionalised biographies in which Friday is the central character in the narrative. While some events in the books will be based on factual events, others are imagined (a bit like a 70s football version of The Crown). These are now on my ‘must-read’ list, and I’ll let you know in future if they’re any good.
For now, consider taking a dive into the life of Robin Friday, keep playing Pundit, and we’ll see you soon in time for the new season!
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