Personally, I love books where culture - especially political culture (and history) - is - are - analysed from oblique angles. They can be extraordinarily instructive - and very interesting, and give great off-beat examples with which to illustrate a wider political or cultural point, or historical perspective.
Anyway, I found them very useful as a way of connecting with sports-mad male students in my teaching days, when a 'hook' of football often made politics or history more palatable (and the students were always so gratifyingly impressed that I, a bespectacled bookish female actually knew about some of this stuff).
This often also had the additional - and, equally gratifying - effect of getting them more interested in politics (or history) as they now had examples which helped them "get it". Teaching my courses on communism, and other stuff, - and using occasional examples form the football world to illustrate a point - invariably worked, and guaranteed a rapt audience.
For what it is worth, I loved Simon Kuper's "Football Against the Enemy", for example, which won the William Hill sportswriting award the year after Nick Hornby had won it for "Fever Pitch" (which was excellent).
"Angels With Dirty Faces" got terrific reviews, and seems to have been meticulously researched - it is packed with interviews of legends who are now venerable old men, and does a good job of tying together the political, social, cultural stuff into the football story.
