Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby says beautiful game has lost its way

As the 20th anniversary of the publication of Fever Pitch nears, Nick Hornby worries that the cost of supporting top clubs has turned the game from a passion into a theatre-style 'treat'

It was the book that changed the way many people thought about sport – and also what it meant to be a man in the late 20th century.

Fever Pitch, ostensibly the story of one man's love affair with Arsenal football club, launched the career of its author, Nick Hornby, now one of the country's most popular writers, spawned a number of imitations and was turned into a film starring Colin Firth.

But now, coming up to the 20th anniversary of its original publication, when it will be reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, Hornby questions whether the youthful addiction he had for his club can still be found among today's supporters, largely because of the game's gentrification.

In Fever Pitched: Twenty Years On, to be broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow afternoon, Hornby recalls that in the 1970s he paid 15p to join the crowd in the north stand at Highbury, Arsenal's former ground in north London. Cheap tickets meant Hornby was able to feed his addiction, but now he questions whether this weekly football fix is still possible.

"You can't do that any more," Hornby tells the programme's presenter, John Wilson, the son of Arsenal goalkeeper Bob. "My impression is that most kids go now [to football matches] as they would go to the theatre, a treat, something they would see three or four times a year."

Hornby questions whether this is healthy for the long-term future of the game. "Because of the way the Premiership is, you can sell out football grounds like that. Whether in 20 years' time these kids will still be keen to go, or whether they will want to go two or three times a year, or whether the habit will have gone, it feels as if it's going to be different."

Some writers have suggested that, if football has moved upmarket, Hornby himself must accept responsibility for helping intellectualise the game and broaden its appeal to the middle classes. But the Cambridge-educated, home counties-born author, whose book was written partly as a result of his experiences in therapy, believes the separation of football from its working-class roots occurred long before Fever Pitch.

"My feeling is that football changed during the 1960s: England won the World Cup and George Best was a pop star," Hornby says.

For the first time, large numbers of middle-class children were attracted to the game. "When Fever Pitch came out, all these people were in their 30s and … they tended to be the sort of people who reviewed Fever Pitch or wrote features about it. What it looked like was that all these people were making up their allegiances to football, when in fact no one had asked them about it before."

Arsenal itself has been gentrified. From the club's old stadium, now converted into luxury flats, Hornby spies the Arsenal Fish Bar, which used to boast pictures on its walls of the players eating fish suppers. Hornby notes that there were no more photographs once the current manager, Arsène Wenger, took charge.

And despite his addiction to Arsenal, Hornby appears uncomfortable that the old stadium, whose pitch has been transformed into gardens and whose famous art deco exterior still stands, is now a home to the sort of people who can afford to follow Premier League sides.

At one stage in the programme he is bemused to note there is a swimming pool under where Dennis Bergkamp scored his second goal for the club and agrees that he would have been happy to see the stadium razed to the ground.

It is a poignant admission by a man who remembers Highbury fondly for providing a white, middle-class boy from the suburbs with "somewhere in particular" to be on Saturday afternoons and the material for a new form of confessional writing lauded by everyone from academics to those the young Hornby idolised.

Arsenal hero Liam Brady said: "I think Nick in general has done the game a big favour, but potentially more than anything it's done the people who don't understand the game the biggest favour. I think understanding anybody's point of view or anybody's love or anybody's madness is always a good thing."

Source: Jamie Doward, The Observer on 4 Mar 12