The Damned Utd was published by Faber and Faber in 2006. Brian Clough was the greatest English football manager of his generation — brash, brilliant, provocative — who took over Leeds United in 1974 after the retirement of his bitter rival Don Revie, and was sacked after just forty-four days. Peace reimagines those forty-four days from inside Clough’s head: the paranoia, the alienation of players who despised him, the self-sabotage of a man who got what he wanted and discovered he didn’t want it.
The novel alternates between the forty-four days at Leeds and the preceding years at Derby County, where Clough (with his partner Peter Taylor) built a provincial club into league champions through force of personality, tactical genius, and relentless psychological manipulation. The Derby sections show Clough at his best; the Leeds sections show the same qualities — arrogance, intensity, refusal to compromise — producing catastrophe when applied in the wrong context.
Peace’s style, normally associated with darkness and horror, here serves a different purpose: the repetition and obsessive circling capture the way Clough’s mind works — always returning to grievances, always rehearsing conflicts, unable to let anything go. The novel was controversial — Clough’s family objected to its portrayal — but it works as fiction precisely because it refuses to be biography: it is a novel about the psychological structure of genius and self-destruction.
Collecting The Damned Utd
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2006): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$30