Matchdays: The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga, by Ronald Reng review

That the recent reports of an authorised Kevin De Bruyne biography being in the pipeline were treated with a general shrug of the shoulders says a great deal about the state of football-related publishing market. The Belgian midfielder may be a star in the making but it would be quite something if the 23-year- old had the makings of 80,000 words in him that anyone other than the most devoted fans of his current club, Wolfsburg, really wanted to wade through.

For his three major football biographies to date, Ronald Reng has dealt with more compelling stories that have clearly reached a conclusion of one sort or another.

It's more than a decade since his The Keeper of Dreams won well-merited critical acclaim for its hugely entertaining first-hand account of the rather bizarre career of German goalkeeper Lars Leese who, somewhat briefly, got a taste of Premier League stardom with Barnsley.

More recently, his gruelling yet tender account of German international Robert Enke's battle with depression and eventual suicide – A Life Too Short – earned him multiple awards, considerable recognition and a much larger audience.

Here, in Matchdays, he returns with another remarkable story featuring many of the same elements, most notably perhaps a relentless sense of personal alienation that put so much clear water between his previous efforts and the genre's more run-of-the-mill offerings.

The subject this time is Heinz Höher, a former Bundesliga footballer and manager who, after a lifetime of scheming, approaches the author to tell his story. It’s a remarkable enough yarn in itself, with its central character a clearly flawed individual who, as one of the multitude of players he falls out with down the years, Kurt Jara, puts it, may be guilty, among other things, of thinking too much but saying too little.

His story is told, however, against the background of the game’s development in postwar Germany, where the very idea of professionalism is initially viewed with disdain. Somewhat inevitably, in a world where money generally translates into success, the result is widespread institutional hypocrisy and individual corruption, culminating in the Bundesliga’s great match-fixing scandal of 1971.

The dark days that followed are nicely chronicled by Reng who touches, through his recounting of Höher’s career, his sometimes deeply troubled personal life as well as the environment in which the clubs that employed him were operating, and on the wider societal shift in what was then West Germany pre- and post-reunification.

The most significant outside element, though, is the account of the media's development over the 50 years or so covered by the book. The vehicle for this is the launch and gradual evolution of the magazine programme Das Aktuelle Sportstudio, initially a pioneering if slightly shambolic sports show that gradually becomes slicker and almost exclusively soccer-oriented. An appearance by then little known coach Ralf Rangnick on the programme in 1998, which features here, is widely cited these days as a turning point for the German game and the discourse around it.

Höher fails to fulfil his potential as either a player or manager due to a curious mix of arrogance, innocence and desperately poor decision-making that, it seems, contribute to a personality ill-equipped to deal with the peculiar world he inhabits, but his story is told with an affection that makes him pretty difficult to dislike.

There are touches of football genius about him. As a coach in what was then one of the game’s most tactically conservative big leagues, he experiments endlessly in the hope of getting his team to amount to more than the sum of its parts. Along the way, he has some significant successes with the help of innovations that will much later become closely associated with far more celebrated characters. Inevitably, he also endures his share of mishaps and misadventures.

The strain of life on football’s management merry-go-round takes its toll. He has spells in Greece and Saudi Arabia, neither of which goes entirely to plan, before getting one last crack at home.

Back in Germany age, outside pressures and ill-health brought on by drinking prove to be his undoing and, having briefly rediscovered some joy in the game while coaching kids, he throws himself with trademark single-mindedness into the development of a young prospect, an outsider himself, whose family have returned to Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, it doesn’t go quite to plan. Emmet Malone is Football Correspondent