Amazon sent me an e-mail today suggesting some books I might like to buy.

Top of the list was Downfall: How Rangers FC Self-Destructed by Phil MacGiolla Bháin, the story of the meltdown of the biggest club in Scottish soccer.

It would indeed be a book I would be interested in buying. The story of the downfall of one of Britain’s major  sporting institutions, I find fascinating. I follow bloggers and tweeters on the subject and not (just) out of schadenfreude.

I have a soft spot for Celtic because of its links with the Irish diaspora.

Celtic Football Club set up by an Irish Marist Brother Walfrid (the spitting image of Pat Crerand) on 6 November 1887, to help his efforts to alleviate poverty in the East End of Glasgow by raising money for his charity, the Poor Children’s Dinner Table.

Walfrid was following the example of Hibernian who were formed out of the immigrant Irish population s a means of fund-raising 12 years earlier in Edinburgh.

My antagonism towards Rangers stems from the fact that I hate sectarianism and as we all know Rangers had a long-standing policy (as did Linfield) of never recruiting Catholics, although a few slipped through the net. I also accept that many people support Rangers (and Linfield) because of historical, family and purely sporting reasons and I don’t want to tar all their supporters with the same brush.

But the question behind this blog is this: how did Amazon know I would be interested in reading Phil Mac Giolla Bháin’s book?

Also on their list of recommendations are other books on the Old Firm but how did Amazon know I might be interested in these? I tend not to read sports books but the Rangers story is much more than a simple sports story that it has grabbed my attention.

it is about ethics, sectarianism in Scottish soccer and society, high finance, history, how people who pointed out the Emperor had very few clothes were diagnosed with Celtic paranoia and most of all  it is about power in Scottish society, who has it, who hasn’t, how the Scottish media have failed abysmally to let people know what was going on and how bloggers have always been a couple of steps ahead of them.

It is about the tens of thousands of Rangers supporters and how they deal with the crisis at their beloved club, how they handle the truth and how they move on.

It is about threats and thuggery on one lever and on another it is about and the nature of truth.

Yes, I would be interested in reading Downfall but how did Amazon know and what else to they know about me?

 

 

 

 

 

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