It is an inconvenient truth about the great Anglo-German football rivalry that while England makes an awful lot of fuss about it  "Two world wars and one World Cup"  Germans secretly feel more affection than spite towards the English game. There are several reasons for this. One is that Germany's national side has had a pretty decent run against England over the years (only since the early 70s, mind) and reserves negative vibes for arch-foes Italy and Holland. Another is the seemingly endless stream of stories and legends English football produces about itself: a deeper, more multi-layered mythology than can be found in Germany, where "the English disease", as it was then known, didn't really take hold until the time of the Weimar republic.

One of the most perplexing stories English football likes to tell about itself is that of the "fair play ethos", as German journalist Raphael Honigstein found out on the bumpy pitches of college football when he first came to England: "As soon as you took possession of the ball, studs would fly at you from both sides." But the referee would wave play on  even the most horrific challenge was at worst a "a clumsy tackle". Appealing to the official after a foul wasn't fair play  an elbow in the face apparently was.

The paradoxical relationship between playing fair and playing hard is Honigstein's starting point for an enlightening and entertaining exploration. He traces English managers' obsession with "getting stuck in" back to the identity crisis at the heart of the game's public school origins: faced with rugby, patently the more masculine of the two sports, football has "tended to overcompensate and err on the side of violence". As to "fair play", that too emerges as a hangover from the insistence on gentlemanly conduct in private education. The important point for Honigstein is whether "fair play" exists as a universally recognised concept. In that respect, he writes, it is not unlike the Spanish knight played by Charlton Heston in El Cid. His corpse strapped to his horse, he still strikes terror in the heart of his enemies: "A myth that is actually no longer in good health can still exude enormous symbolic power."

The application of a sociological framework to sports is certainly not novel in itself  British writers have become particularly good at this over the past decade, and Honigstein acknowledges his debt to Simon Kuper and David Winner. What is unique about Englischer Fussball is the unflinching attitude with which it rationalises myths about Englishness. Not for Honigstein the elegiac ode to Bobby Charlton's magisterial gait; he combs through the muscle memory of football for clues to the nation's attitude towards sex (repressed), emotions (bunged up), class (ever-present), wealth (hypocritical) and religion (all pervading).

Much like the archetypal British "box-to-box" player, it covers a lot of ground and doesn't shirk the occasional robust challenge: "In Protestant Britain heroes are not measured by the greatness of their deeds, only by the greatness of their suffering". Behind the anti-Man U default mode of English fans across the country, he sees "a perverse sense of envy"  because no one can match the suffering experienced by United fans when almost their entire first team died in a plane crash in 1958. It's polemical stuff, the kind of thesis a more etiquette-bound writer might have struggled to put to paper.

Honigstein, who writes on English football for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German Bundesliga for the Guardian, has a nice line in dry humour bordering on grouchiness, and there are chapters here that read as though they were written with a slight toothache. The stuff about the "warrior mentality" in English football ("Here the game doesn't simulate a battle, it is the game of war") rings a bit hollow, in particular the claim that other countries don't share England's martial attitude: after all it was Sepp Herberger, father of Germany's World Cup victory in 1954 and former Nazi party member, who once remarked that "a good footballer is also a good soldier".

Luckily, it's only a moment of moodiness. Honigstein's strength is that he doesn't have an axe to grind. The best chapter here is the one on the English game's perpetual mingling with pop culture, from the competitive fashion statements of the 70s "casuals" via 80s fanzine culture to David Beckham's sarong: Harder, Better, Faster, the original title of the German edition of the book, taken from the Daft Punk song, nicely ties together the strands of Honigstein's argument.

The holy trinity of football, fashion and music has rarely been written about so well and it takes a writer from the borderland between cultures like Honigstein to open our eyes to it.

Five years ago, the second tier of English football was given a new name. The Championship, it was to be called, ignoring that this was a league contested by the 21st to 44th best teams in the country. The divisions below were renamed too, and as the third and fourth tiers became League One and League Two, lowly teams such as Lincoln, Darlington and Bury were effectively promoted overnight. Twice.

It was cynical upgrading, the grandiose renaming of an inferior-seeming product to enhance appeal, like a chef scrubbing out peas on his menu and chalking in petits pois. But to Raphael Honigstein, a German journalist and Guardian football correspondent, it was more  an outright exposure of the English class system, of England's stolid commitment to the social climb. As he explains in Englischer Fussball, a book that dissects English football and, in equal measure, the English way of life: "In their endeavours to imitate the nobility, the middle and working classes ... claim aristocratic terminology as their own. Thus vile tower blocks from the post-war era are called 'courts'. Victorian 'mansions' are not villas on the edge of town but apartment blocks."

Mark that passage ouch. And yet, as with many of Honigstein's outlandish statements, it contains a kernel of truth. He is rarely kind to the English in this curious book  first written by Honigstein, who was part-educated in London, for a German readership in 2006  and he is often absurd ("Let us recall the Reverend Edward Thring and the Victorian fear of masturbation ... "). But he offers a perspective on England's football and its culture that is stimulating and rather fascinating in its peculiarity.

Some lessons. Football fans in England celebrate meaningless throw-ins won in the opposition's half because, colonially minded, they see value in territory. The amateur referee who instinctively scored a goal for the team on the wrong end of an 18-1 thrashing in 2001 did so from an irresistible urge for fairness. When, three years ago, Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech had his skull fractured by the charging knee of an opposition player, it was the English dyad of politeness and muscularity that led a BBC commentator to label the hospitalisation "a clumsy challenge".

Wayne Rooney is a hero because he has about him an air of "kebabs and urine", a reminder of childish football games on the street. And though the English are almost dementedly apologetic ("If you step on somebody's foot, they will say sorry"), the press are as remorseless as Attila, because newspapermen are tasked with expressing the things the rest hardly dare think.

There are nuggets about German character here, too: the journalist who asked Robbie Williams what he admired about the Rat Pack and then interpreted his answer ("The way they held a drink") to be praise for Sinatra's dexterity. But it is England, "the place where they codify everything, from human rights to cricket", that is Honigstein's subject for earnest translation. His book is best read in the way you might one of those republished war pamphlets, the kind that purport to explain the manners of a foreign race to a public broadly clueless. There are missteps but occasionally, from an oblique vantage, crisp truths.