IF YOU'RE LOOKING for consolation as Euro 2008 begins today, consider the space that Waterstones will now have to give over to proper books in lieu of all the football autobiographies shelved in the wake of England's failure to qualify. Think of the titles that may now remain for ever unpublished: Born Slippy by John Terry; No One Seems to Have Realised That With a Name Like This I Must Be Welsh by Gareth Barry; Yes, the Circus Knows I'm Here by Peter Crouch; A Squirrel With Alopecia by Steve McClaren's hair; etc.

On the other hand, this week does see the publication of the very funny Footypedia, by Daniel Maier, an alternative dictionary - à la The Meaning of Liff - devoted solely to football: eg “farne (n.) - terrace chant that you can't quite make out.” And, in a similar vein, another writer, Paul Willetts, has just asked me to contribute to a book about Subbuteo.

Which makes me think that the English are in denial about the condition of our national game: best, when faced with international failure, to retreat to the sport's micro-culture, its always fertile soil of minutiae and idiosyncracy. But it also makes me wonder, as I have before, why - given the amount of passion and tragicomedy involved in the game - no one has ever written a great novel about football? There has, in recent years, been a lot of outstanding nonfiction on the subject, and some genuinely fascinating autobiographies. But novels? There is They Used to Play on Grass by Terry Venables, a horrific Rollerball-like vision of a time to come in which football is played entirely on the type of plastic pitch favoured by Luton and QPR in the 1980s (when the book was written: therefore, impresciently, what Terry imagined as the future), but frankly, that never quite made the Booker shortlist. And I'm not counting The Damned Utd, David Peace's fabulous recreation of Brian Clough's 44 days at Leeds United, because it's demi-fiction, docufiction, part of that new biopiccy, recreating-recent-history genre so beloved - because of its avoidance of the tricky issue of unfamiliarity - of publishers and TV/film execs these days.

In the US, conversely, the national game has always been a literary mainstay, so much so that when Philip Roth decided to write a book called The Great American Novel he made it simply about baseball. The novel that in 2006 ranked top of The New York Times list of the most important of the past 25 years - Don DeLillo's Underworld - is not just about baseball, but about a baseball. They have even managed to make successful films out of literary novels about baseball - Robert Redford's The Natural, from the novel by Bernard Malamud, and Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams, an adaptation of Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. We've got Escape to Victory.

Part of this is to do with the way that Americans imagine themselves. America is a culture that, having so little of it, fetishishes its own history, and baseball provides one of the few living examples of that history: that's why the New York Yankees sport virtually the same kit now as when Babe Ruth was playing, and that's why DeLillo choses baseball as a metaphor for the American Century.

It's also to do with the game, slow-paced, baroque-ruled, very male but very graceful, statistically complex, full of evocative place names (the Brooklyn Dodgers; Fenway Park; Ebbets Field - hear how the names spell out the word America in a sentimalised backlit glow) and providing a euphoric, against-all-the-odds vocabulary of “home runs” and “hitting it out of the park”: all this suits your searching-for-the-soul-of-American-man novelist.

Plus, there are other sports in top-notch American fiction. Updike's Rabbit books have basketball running through them; DeLillo wrote an earlier novel, End Zone about American football; and - a terrible ignominy on our literary menfolk - the literary buzz Stateside now surrounds Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, a post-9/11 Manhattan odyssey about, of all things, cricket: American bloody cricket.

Cricket, a similar game in many respects, could have been our baseball, literary-wise, were it not for the problem - not present in the US - of class. Where a novel about baseball says “I'm an all-inclusive American Everyman”, a novel about cricket (by an uncolonial Englishman) says “I went to public school”. Football also has a class problem: until Fever Pitch, the literary classes wouldn't have been interested, and afterwards most of them would be too worried about appearing mockney bandwagon-jumpers.

But there is perhaps one other reason why there's never been a great football novel. Football - if you are a fan - is just too dramatic, too genuinely exciting, too completely involving to fictionalise. Americans have always accepted the injection of theatricality into sport - all that cheerleading and Take Me Out To The Ball Game crap - whereas here, we know that any theatrical recreation, whether in prose or celluloid, is going to crumble compared with the experience of the real thing.

It's true: I was in Moscow three weeks ago, and, even if McEwan, Amis and Rushdie pooled their talents to co-write a novel about that final, or an event like it, I wouldn't want to read it, having been there. Roll on South Africa 2010.

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