Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford
The hooliganism that Buford chronicled in the late 1980’s has largely been tamed, but as a look at the ugly side of fandom, Among the Thugs is unmatched. Buford joins soccer thugs in the U.K. for one horrendous (and usually alcohol-infused) riot after another. In Fever Pitch, Horby takes a swipe at this book as an example of slumming, but how do you follow people who drink themselves into oblivion and suck out the eyeballs of their rivals (literally) without slumming? A classic.

Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger
Bissinger lifts the lid on the all-consuming power of high-school football over the town of Odessa, Texas. In a small town, the boundaries between the fans, players, families and the school administrators break down, and Bissinger manages to capture the incredible psychological ramifications for all. Look for the movie (at long last) in October.

Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby
Before he was a super-hip novelist, Nick Hornby was just a crazed Arsenal fan. Here he examines his life through the lens of his obsession (he correlates major events in his youth not to his age at the time, but to key games in Arsenal’s past.) This book inspired me to go to a couple of Arsenal matches at Highbury, which were incredible brooding affairs. You don’t have to have seen a single soccer game (or even to have heard of Arsenal) to get into this book.

A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley
Simultaneously a tale of fan obsession and a chronicle of an alcoholic’s crawl through the wreckage of his life, this “fictional memoir,” as the author deemed it, is by far the best written book about a fan’s life. The New York Giants act as a blank screen onto which the narrator projects the aspirations he had for his relationship with his popular, achieving father, his wife, his career. This book is brutal, and of course especially sad, because Exley’s life so closely resembled the narrator’s. But if you can stomach it, and tolerate the narrator’s unrelenting misogyny, it’s an incredibly moving and harrowing read.

Paper Lion, by George Plimpton
This would be an antidote to Exley; the late George Plimpton’s account of his time in the training camp of the Detroit Lions – as a player. Wearing number “0,” Plimpton actually gets a few snaps during an exhibition game and the result is as hilarious as it is ugly. This is the ultimate tale of fan vicariousness gone awry. A new edition was recently published, just before Plimpton’s death, with a new, predictably entertaining introduction by the author.

Sport Fans, Daniel Wann, et al editors.
If you really want to get in touch with your inner sports geek, you should have a look at this one. It’s a very accessible compendium of much of the major psychological and sociological research on sports fans; my favorite section, which I cite in Rammer Jammer, is an examination of the stereotypes of sports fans – that we’re lazy, depressed, unfulfilled, etc. – all of which have been roundly debunked. (Did you know, for example, that studies comparing depression rates of fans to non-fans have found that fans are less depressed than non-fans?)

Sports Spectators, by Allen Guttman
This is a fascinating and very accessible look at fandom by a distinguished professor of American studies at Amhearst. I relied on the book heavily for Guttman’s research on the history of sports fandom.

The Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon
The first major work of crowd theory; a slightly longer than pamphlet-sized meditation on the behavior of crowds, written in the 19th century, when what Le Bon calls “psychological crowds” – crowds who were linked not necessarily by being in the same place at the same time, but by media, and word of mouth – were ascendant. Le Bon argues that a crowd becomes like a single organism, with its own thoughts and mode of behavior which are separate from the thoughts and behaviors of its individual members. 

These last two just come out, so I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. But they’ve both received positive reviews.

How Soccer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer
A number of reviewers have had a problem with the title of this book, saying that it overreaches. My guess is their irony meters are gummed up. It sounds to me like a playful boast meant to grab your attention, not an earnest hard-sell of the book’s contents. At any rate, I’m looking forward to reading it and I’ll add a few notes when I do.

The Meaning of Sports, by Michael Mandelbaum

Ditto