Football violence, or the threat of it, is regarded as a recent problem, but the 1930 final, between South American rivals Uruguay and Argentina, was hardly a calm affair, says Glanville. Argentinian fans were searched for guns; the referee, linesmen and players had to be given armed escorts and supporters were marshalled by police with fixed bayonets, though there was no report of hooliganism.

One hero of the match was Castro, a one-armed Uruguayan who replaced the unfit Pelegrin Anselmo as centre-forward. Allegedly threatened with death unless he threw the game, he nevertheless scored the final goal to ensure a 4-2 win for Uruguay.

Glanville, a soccer correspondent in Britain who has covered the past 10 World Cups - that is at least 36 years of writing about football - pulls no punches in his preface. 'It is to be hoped,' he says of the upcoming competition, 'that it will be more open, entertaining and adventurous than that in the United States. There, as one anticipated, the enthusiasm was enormous, the crowds immense, but much of the football was defensive and dull and the final was a protracted fiasco . . .' The Brazilian team that won was a 'parody of the great, creative Brazilian sides seen in so many previous World Cups', and won without glory against an exhausted Italian side forced to travel about 4,800 kilometres from east coast to west for the final.

This year's entry of 32 teams is too many, he says. 'The problem, overall, is that much too much football is being played at the top level, far too great a burden is being placed on players, and sooner of later the game must implode.' But before that there are plenty more books to be produced. Others about the World Cup include the newly-published - and expensive - Gary Lineker's Golden Boots: the World Cup's Greatest Strikers, 1930-1998 (Hodder, $305) in which the former England player gets to travel around the world, courtesy of BBC TV, to interview 21 top scorers from the finals of past World Cups. He has a co-author, Stan Hey, who perhaps really wrote the words.

Also available in Hong Kong are the lavish, and self-explanatory, Ultimate Encyclopedia of Soccer and Ultimate Encyclopedia of European Soccer edited by Keir Radnedge (Hodder, $340).

Among biographies, the latest, of George Best, was released last month (Bestie: a Portrait of a Legend, by Joe Lovejoy, published by Macmillan, $288). Also just out is Ruud Gullit: My Autobiography (Century, $288), similar to two books published last year by British sports reporter Harry Harris, but allegedly containing 'never-before-revealed' detail of his ousting from Chelsea this year.

For England fans, among new works are Sir Les: the Autobiography of Les Ferdinand (Headline, $288) and The Goal Machine: Portrait of a Football Superstar by Jason Tomas (Mainstream Publishing, $255) about Alan Shearer. Bobby Robson: My Autobiography (Macmillan, $288) will be published in August, following last year's Bobby Robson: High Noon - a Year at Barcelona by Jeff King (Virgin Books, $250).

A more acclaimed, and critical, biography of one of football's more controversial figures was recently published in paperback. Hand of God: the Life of Diego Maradona by Jimmy Burns (Bloomsbury, $119) refers in its title to Maradona's famous goal for Argentina that put England out of the 1986 cup in Mexico. Accused of handball, he said later that if any hand had been involved, it was the 'hand of God'.

Then, of course, there are the works of and about Eric Cantona, soccer's French 'intellectual' who nevertheless has famously shown his kicking abilities off the pitch as well as on. Here is what publisher Mainstream Publishing has to say about its latest work, The Meaning of Cantona: Meditations on Life, Art and Perfectly Weighted Balls, by Terence Blacker and William Donaldson, $170, published last year: 'The tall man scores goals. Fools mock the way his hair is cut and say it looks as if he has a pineapple on his head. The tall man hears laughter and stops scoring goals. Who is the fool? Who is the pineapple? Few personalities embody the complexities of modern life as precisely, yet as enigmatically, as Eric Cantona. But who is Cantona? What does he mean? 'Blacker and Donaldson have moved among Cantona followers - the so-called Cantonistes - collecting aphorisms and reflections on life, nationality and those who have influenced him . . . The result is a collection of thoughts reflecting the inner Cantona - the Cantona which even he has not expressed.' We hope they are joking.

Not all these books are available now in Hong Kong shops, but more are arriving each day and we plan to review others on these pages throughout the competition. But since the World Cup runs from Wednesday until the final in Paris on July 12, orders placed now may arrive before the end.