Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

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Eniola Aluko

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE TELEGRAPH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS* 
 
Eni Aluko: 102 appearances for England women's national football team. First female pundit on Match of the Day. UN Women UK ambassador. Guardian columnist. First class honors law degree. Now an inspirational author. 
 
They Don't Teach This steps beyond the realms of memoir to explore themes of dual nationality and identity, race and institutional prejudice, success, failure and faith. It is an inspiring manifesto to change the way readers and the future generation choose to view the challenges that come in their life applying life lessons with raw truths of Eni's own personal experience. 
 
'A fascinating examination of her multiple identities - British and Nigerian, a girl in a boy's world, footballer and academic, a kid from an estate with upper-middle-class parents, a God-fearing rebel... Aluko does not hold back - and few people from the football establishment emerge with their reputation intact' Guardian

They Don't Teach This

Trevor Royle

Ian Archer

'It has to start somewhere for everyone, this daft, wild, extraordinary notion that happiness is a Scottish lap of honour and that the greatest, most hysterical happiness would be a Scottish lap of honour on a World Cup final day, England having just retired to the dressing-rooms, not just beaten, but destroyed, humiliated, thrashed, gubbed . . . ' - Ian Archer 
 
 First published in 1976, We'll Support You Evermore is a collection of reminiscences about the nation's favourite game. Hilarious tales of after-match celebrations and moving accounts of growing up playing football on the mean streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh rub shoulders with memories of superb victories, glorious defeats and drunken jaunts abroad. Together, these produce an entertaining portrait of Scottish supporters. Novelist Alan Sharp and Gordon Williams contribute essays, as do journalists Ian Archer, John Rafferty and Hugh Taylor among others. Each writes about his own personal recollections of the game: the Wembley Wizards, the Famous Five, Third Lanark, the Old Firm, Queen's Park, Hearts, Hibs, and many more. There's something here for every fitba'-daft reader.

We'll Support You Evermore

The Impertinent Saga of Scottish Fitba'

Duncan Hamilton

'Without football, we were strangers under a shared roof. With it, we were father and son.’ 
 
Inspired by his father’s devotion to Newcastle United and the heroes of yesteryear, Duncan Hamilton brings to life a bygone age telling the story of British football from the hardscrabble 1940s and the ‘never-had-it-so-good’ ’50s right through to the dowdy First Division of the ’70s and ’80s, and today’s slick Premiership. Hamilton recalls some of football’s most sublime players, managers and characters, from Bill Shankly and Jackie Milburn to George Best and Lionel Messi. 
 
But at the heart of The Footballer Who could Fly is Hamilton’s relationship with his own father. Here he tells how football became the only real connection between two people who, apart from their love of the beautiful game, were wholly different from one another.

The Footballer Who Could Fly

Hugo Borst

‘Am I so smart or are you so stupid?’ – Louis van Gaal 
 
I started out wanting to write a book about Marco van Basten. I still do, but I dread the moment when I have to write something I know will make him unhappy. He’s not a man you wage war on. With Louis van Gaal it’s different: as a journalist he leaves you no choice. You’re not worthy of the name if you aren’t prepared to return fire when he starts yelling. 
 
Hugo Borst is an award-winning writer, journalist and TV pundit. He is also a close friend of Louis van Gaal. Well, he used to be. 
 
O, Louis is Hugo’s attempt to get to grips with this larger-than-life character. Full of outrageous stories and unintentionally hilarious encounters, Borst details his quest to understand the man and the breakdown in their friendship. He interviews an array of experts who each interpret the great manager from the perspective of their own field – a cleric, a politician, a psychiatrist, an impersonator, 
a theatre director, writers, poets and a trio of keen comic minds. Through these meetings as well as through his own encounters with Van Gaal, Borst is finally able to unlock the personality of this exceptional, talented, infuriating and even, occasionally, loveable man. 
 
‘This book will sell well. Everything that has my face on it sells well’ – Louis van Gaal

O, Louis

In Search of Louis van Gaal

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Fredrik Ekelund

Karl Ove Knausgaard and fellow writer Fredrik Ekelund kick around thoughts and ideas on football, life, art and politics. 
 
Karl Ove Knausgaard is sitting at home in Skåne with his wife, four small children and a dog. He is watching football on TV and falls asleep in front of the set. He likes 0-0 draws, cigarettes, coffee and Argentina. 
 
Fredrik Ekelund is away in Brazil, where he plays football on the beach and watches matches with friends. Fredrik loves games that end up 4-3 and teams that play beautiful football. He likes caipirinhas and Brazil. 
 
In Home and Away, two writers use football and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to reflect on life and death, art and politics, class and literature and the most important question: was this the best football championship ever?

Home and Away

Writing the Beautiful Game

Anthony Clavane

This is a book about football. It's about unconditional love for a club, even when it doesn't always seem to love you back. But it is also a book about much more than that. 
 
Anthony Clavane loves Leeds - certainly the football club, but also the city, and the tribes that make it. Now that he is an exile in the South, his frequent pilgrimages to the stadium speak for themselves. But he no less loves the rarely-glimpsed back-streets of his youth; and even has a feel for the long-gone slums where his ancestors once settled. Leeds is his promised land; idealised and unreachable, yet still it defines him. 
 
'Sports writing at its very best' Daily Telegraph

Promised Land

A Northern Love Story

Andrew Anthony

'Score and few will remember; miss and no one will forget' 
 
Talking to some of the game's most successful players and managers, the question the book seeks to address is simple: can England overcome their fear of the penalty? 
 
The penalty shoot-out is the greatest set piece of sporting drama ever conceived. 
 
Cruel, arbitrary, tortuous and unfair, it has also presented the England football team with a new and infinitely more punishing manner in which to lose. Three times in the past decade the nation has sat on the edge of its collective sofa and watched the seemingly inevitable unfold as Stuart Pearce, Chris Waddle, Gareth Southgate, Paul Ince and David Batty have selected the wrong shots in the lottery of international championship shoot-outs. 
 
Except it's not a lottery. There is an art to scoring penalties, which calls upon a unique combination of physical prowess and psychological strength. In the corridor of truth that leads from the penalty spot to the goal-line, a succession of English footballers have had to confront not only the opposing goalkeeper but the hopes and dreams of fans and fellow countrymen and, of course, themselves. 
 
'A tour de force of narrative journalism' Observer

On Penalties

Nick Hornby

As a young boy, growing up in the Home Counties and watching his parents' marriage fall apart, Nick Hornby had little sense of home. Then his dad took him to Highbury. Arsenal's football ground would become the source of many of the strongest feelings he'd ever have: joy, humiliation, heartbreak, frustration and hope. 
 
In this now-classic book, he vividly depicts his troubled relationship with his father, his time as a teacher, and his first loves (after football), all through the prism of the game, as he insightfully and brilliantly explores obsession, and the way it can shape a life.

Fever Pitch

John Doyle

In The World is a Ball, critic and author John Doyle travels the world in pursuit of his first love - football. In dispatches from Italy to Ireland and from Buenos Aires to Bratislava, and between encounters with crazed taxi drivers and drunken fans dressed as leprechauns or in lederhosen, Doyle celebrates the evolution of soccer as a global phenomenon. 
 
He begins his journey with the first game he saw in repressed 1960s Ireland - a match which left a lasting impression on him - and then skips through the decades to concentrate on football in the twenty-first century. Here he focuses on the World Cups of 2002 and 2006, the European Championships of 2004 and 2008, and the key games and teams involved in qualifying for the historic 2010 World Cup in South Africa. 
 
With eyewitness accounts that are both hilarious and nostalgic, The World is a Ball brilliantly weaves together travelogue, match-reporting and compelling social history. It's an insightful and thought-provoking vision of the beautiful game which for some is more a religion than a sport: where colonized nations can triumph over their colonizers, the poor are rich in the pleasure of play, and for ninety minutes, anything seems possible.

The World is a Ball

Roddy Collins

Paul Howard

Roddy Collins is a football man - now in the sixth decade of a career as a player (at sixteen clubs), manager (twelve clubs) and commentator. And he is a funny man: an unequalled raconteur with a sharp eye for the absurdities of the professional game and spectacular recall. He has made friends wherever he has gone, along with some high-quality enemies. When John Delaney said he could get Roddy a job if he'd just stop criticising him, Roddy replied that he'd 'rather dig holes in the road'. 
 
Now, with the brilliant Paul Howard, Roddy puts it all down on paper for the first time - the adventures, the rows and the craic - in what is not only one of the funniest but also one of the most eye-opening books ever written about professional football.

The Rodfather

Inside the Beautiful (Ugly, Ridiculous, Hilarious) Game

Colin Shindler

Before the Thai millions and Abu Dhabi billions, Manchester City was always a club that attracted fierce controversy. 
 
July 1965: Manchester City are on the scrapheap, managerless and languishing in Second Division mediocrity. Desperate to reverse the club's fortunes, the board turns to Joe Mercer, a respected football veteran hungry for a final chance to achieve management glory. Yet age and ill health are against Joe: he needs an assistant, and volatile, ambitious coaching genius Malcolm Allison is his man. Recently sacked from managing Plymouth, Malcolm is out to prove that his innovative tactics can breathe new life into the staid English game. City is the perfect opportunity to show off his talents - especially since Joe promises him the manager's job in two years' time . . . 
 
July 1970: City rule supreme, having just won their fifth trophy in as many seasons. The Mercer-Allison partnership is the most successful management team in the club's history. But, unwilling to let go of his success, Joe breaks his word and refuses to step aside. In order to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as the greatest manager in English football, an embittered Malcolm engineers a boardroom takeover that risks everything he and Joe have worked for. 
 
Based on real events, Colin Shindler's novel explores the clash of personalities that led to the spectacular rise and fall of Manchester City's 'Golden Age'. Malcolm and Joe's story is a cautionary tale of how ambition and betrayal brought down two men who had the world at their feet and of how two of the greatest management partners in British football history became the worst of friends.

The Worst of Friends

The Betrayal of Joe Mercer

Bill Buford

___________________________ 
THE BESTSELLING ACCOUNT OF FOOTBALL VIOLENCE 
 
Welcome to the world of football thuggery. 
 
They have names like Bonehead, Paraffin Pete and Steamin’ Sammy. They like lager, football, the Queen, and themselves. They love England. They dislike the rest of the known universe. 
 
The beautiful game remains ugly. 
 
From following Manchster's Red Army to drinking with skinheads, acclaimed writer Bill Buford enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of Hunter S. Thompson. 
 
Among the Thugs is a terrifying, malevolently funny, supremely chilling book about the experience, and the eerie allure, of crowd violence and football culture.

Among The Thugs

Peter Storey

True Storey is the compelling autobiography of notorious 1970s football legend Peter Storey, dubbed 'the bastard's bastard', who gained a reputation for ultra-violence on the pitch and had a capacity to find even greater trouble off it - a fact borne out by a string of criminal convictions and several jail sentences. 
 
 A key member, as their midfield enforcer, of the resilient Arsenal team that won the European Fairs Cup followed by the cherished Double in 1970-71, Storey was a confirmed ladies' man who loved a drink. In the mid-'70s, Storey's pub, the Jolly Farmers in Islington, became a magnet for north London villains and he rubbed shoulders with Great Train Robber Tommy Wisbey and Howard 'Mr Nice' Marks, Britain's biggest drug smuggler. 
 
 Storey talks candidly about the crimes he committed and the spells in prison that blighted his life. He reveals the truth about his feud with George Best and relays an astonishing account of how Bertie Mee tried to make him miss the 1971 FA Cup final against Bill Shankly's Liverpool side because the Arsenal manager wanted Eddie Kelly to start instead. 
 
 Today, Peter is an elusive character but a man transformed and at ease with life. Only now does he feel the circumstances are right to set the record straight and tell his side of a remarkable True Storey.

True Storey

My Life and Crimes as a Football Hatchet Man

Bill Leckie

Penthouse and Pavement is not a book for glory-hunters. It is a book about pain. It's about the anguish of watching your team lose 9-2 in the very first game you ever saw, about the horrible inevitability of defeat that so many feel so often. It's about despair, dismay and black, frightening, deathly gloom. 
 
But it's also about hope. About dreams. And about dreams which sometimes, just sometimes, come true. Like the once-in-a-lifetime ecstasy of winning the Cup or a league. And as anyone who's had that moment-of-a-lifetime knows, the joy is even greater because you've known the pain. For Bill Leckie, who has followed St Mirren since 1964, it all became worthwhile when they won the Scottish Cup in 1987. This book is about these clubs and the people who love them. It's about the kind of fan who doesn't go to games expecting to win . . . or, worse, demanding it. This book is about being willing to accept a lifetime of frustration in return for one day of utter wonderment.

Penthouse and Pavement

How to Survive in Football Without Sucking Up to the Old Firm

Duncan Ferguson

They don't make footballers - and football autobiographies - like this any more. The brutally honest, riotously entertaining story of the much-loved Everton legend and iconic Premier League bad boy. 
 
Praised by Wayne Rooney and Sir Alex Ferguson as one of the greatest and most passionate players to ever play the game, Duncan Ferguson, or Big Dunc as he is known, is larger than life in every sense. Measuring a towering 6 feet 4 inches in height, from the moment the striker emerged in British football in the 1990s, he was front and back page news. On the pitch, fans loved Duncan for his roguish charm, his thrilling goals and his total commitment in every game. Fighting tooth and nail, he was a born leader and took no prisoners. Like his rival Roy Keane, he played close to the limit, and often crossed it. Such as the time he was sentenced to 3 months in Glasgow’s toughest prison for headbutting an opponent – the first and only time a footballer has ever gone to jail for a crime committed on a football pitch. 
 
In BIG DUNC: The Upfront Autobiography, Duncan reveals, for the first time, the full story: the truth about his experiences in prison, his partying with African princes and Liverpool gangsters, his fighting with burglars, his making and losing a fortune, and how he turned his life around through his beloved Everton F.C.. In the process, the book sheds light on one of football’s most charismatic but notorious and enigmatic hardmen. Duncan has also been a manager and a coach. He is a pillar of the community in Merseyside, giving back to stricken children who share a similar tough upbringing to his own. Duncan's book takes readers on a rollercoaster ride of humour, drama and redemption. Buckle up.

BIG DUNC

The Upfront Autobiography

Neil Jeffries

Fraser Marr

Most relationships between a fan and a favourite football team go way beyond the casual. Almost always that relationship is a torrid, steamy and passionate love affair. A love affair that rarely lives up to expectations. A love affair that seldom satisfies and, most of the time, just plain hurts. 
 
 So it is for supporters of Leeds United, a club with a big reputation secured in the late 1960s and early '70s, but tarnished in the '80s and rebuilt only partially in the '90s. Come the start of the 1996-97 season, Leeds were a Premiership club on paper, but on the pitch looked far from it. The supporters groaned and the new board acted swiftly, manager Howard Wilkinson being replaced by the once disgraced George Graham. The football world watched as the former Arsenal supreme sought to rebuild both Leeds and his own reputation. All the club had was time, hope and the love of its fans . . . 
 
 Love Hurts tells the story of some of those fans. It is a diary of one extraordinary season, told and photographed in a uniquely personal way by two men for whom following Leeds is a labour of love requiring hours of motorway travel to matches offering variable amounts of torment and despair, of ecstasy and humour. The book pulls no punches, and points the finger whether the team wins or loses. No quarter is given and no fan of any team who reads is can fail to recognise the joy and pain it contains.

Love Hurts

Motorways, Madness and Leeds United

Jack Milburn

Written by his own son, Jackie Milburn: A Man of Two Halves gives an unprecedented insight into the life and career of the legendary Newcastle United forward. To this day, 'Wor Jackie' remains the Magpies' top goalscorer, having notched up 238 goals in 492 appearances in the black-and-white shirt throughout the 1940s and '50s. Milburn also won the FA Cup with Newcastle three times in five years. 
 
Jackie Milburn delves beneath the surface glory to reveal how, in spite of his remarkable success as a player, Milburn was constantly tortured by his lack of self-belief. It details his days across the Irish Sea after becoming player/coach at Protestant Linfield FC and explains why he felt the need to move on after receiving menacing threats directed at his family. It reveals how, as newly appointed manager of Ipswich Town, he had a totally unexpected falling out with the departing England supremo, Alf Ramsey. We also learn how the pressures of work took their toll on Milburn and how he spent his post-football days working in a scrapyard, before being rescued by the world of sports journalism. 
 
Later in life, many honours continued to be bestowed upon Milburn, and when he died in 1988 huge crowds lined the streets for his funeral parade. 
 
Few people had a bad word to say about Jackie Milburn, and this candid biography, with contributions from Sir Bobby Robson and Alan Shearer, expertly demonstrates why he is still held in high esteem half a century after the peak of his career and 16 years after his death.

Jackie Milburn

A Man of Two Halves

Martin Knight

Martin King

Hoolifan is the story of one man, Martin King, and his experiences spanning three decades with the country's foremost soccer gang. Chelsea have always been at the cutting edge of football violence, and King himself was at the heart of the evolving Chelsea mob for some 30 years. From his first visit to a football ground in the early 1960s, he charts his development from a rattle-waving child through to a fully fledged member of the notorious Chelsea Shed in the 1970s and finally to his exploits as a key player in the most feared football gang of the 1980s and 1990s - the so-called Chelsea Headhunters. 
 
King describes the leading characters of the various eras, not just from Chelsea but from across the country. He also records every clash, ambush and act of revenge in vivid detail, as well as the camaraderie and style of this most infamous soccer gang. 
 
This is not just another book on the well-trodden subject of football hooliganism, as, unlike so many authors, Martin King makes no attempt to distance himself from the violence and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. 
 
At times provocative, often humorous and always honest, Hoolifan places the phenomenon of football hooliganism in its true social context.

Hoolifan

30 Years of Hurt

Football has reinvented itself. As television money has poured into the game, the traditional working-class fans have poured out - not by choice, but by economic necessity. According to those in charge of the game the football hooligan has at last been eliminated from the landscape. But how true is this much-vaunted claim? Martin King, author of Hoolifan, brings his story up to date in The Naughty Nineties. Ironically, he finds that football hooligans now really are in the minority but they are far more dangerous and committed than ever before.

The Naughty Nineties

Football's Coming Home

George Best

'We were the first generation to have to deal with the modern stardom of football. Some handled it better than others' George Best 
 
Written in the months before he died, Hard Tackles and Dirty Baths is George's farewell letter to the great footballing era in which he burned so brightly - a personal history of the golden years before TV and agents changed everything. From the breaking of the maximum wage to the cusp of the first million-pound player, it follows the triumphs and tragedies of every season from 1960 to 1974. It is the story of our greatest footballing generation - Greaves, Moore, Law, Charlton, Osgood, Lorimer, Jennings, Hurst and, of course, Best himself.

Hard Tackles and Dirty Baths

The inside story of football's golden era

Michael Calvin

'For those of you missing your football fix, anything by Michael Calvin is worth a read – the hugely respected sports journalist writes eloquently about the modern game in page turner State of Play.' 
DAILY MIRROR 
 
_______________________________________________________ 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 
 
Award-winning author of The Nowhere Men, Living on the Volcano and No Hunger in Paradise returns with his magnum opus on the state of modern football 
 
First he revealed the extraordinary lives of football scouts in The Nowhere Men. 
 
Next he unearthed the pressures on football managers in Living on the Volcano. 
 
Then he chronicled the hardships of young players striving to make it in No Hunger in Paradise. 
 
 
Now in State of Play, in what marks the pinnacle of a career investigating the human stories of football, award-winning writer Michael Calvin turns his eye to the biggest story of all - the game itself. 
 
 
From mental health to money, concussion to Champions league, fan-owners to oligarchs, women's football to world cups, Calvin gets under the skin of the beautiful game, and reveals why it is truly the game of our lives. 
 
 
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with leading figures around the world, from Arsene Wenger to Steven Gerrard, Calvin reveals the winners, the losers, the politics, the pleasure, the hope, and the despair of the world's most popular sport.

State of Play

Under the Skin of the Modern Game

Danny Baker

Danny Kelly

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne. 
 
Paul Gascoigne is a legend, both on and off the pitch, and a hero to a generation of football fans. The man who, during Italia '90, made it OK to cry, and made the English fall in love with football all over again. Despite endless books about him he is still an enigma to most, so who better than his closest confident (and national institution himself), Danny Baker, to explain what truly makes him tick. 
 
This digital bite has been extracted from Danny Baker and Danny Kelly's brilliant book Classic Football Debates.

How to Understand Paul Gascoigne

Lives Less Ordinary

Ben Sharratt

Kirk Blows

From the World Cup-winning days of Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters to highly acclaimed modern-day heroes such as Joe Cole, Michael Carrick and Jermain Defoe, West Ham United supporters have always had the greatest affection for homegrown Hammers. Since the 1960s, talents such as Trevor Brooking, Tony Cottee, Paul Ince and Rio Ferdinand (who has twice hit the headlines as the world's most expensive defender following his move to Leeds and Manchester United) have been nurtured and brought through the club's ranks, ensuring the Hammers can rightly lay claim to having one of the country's most fruitful youth policies. 
 
In this revised and fully updated paperback edition, Claret and Blue Blood brings together all these characters and others for the very first time, including new chapters on Anton Ferdinand, Stephen Bywater and Kevin Horlock. Using exclusive new interviews, the authors present biographical pieces that collectively tell the story of West Ham United's evolution over the last half-century. Focusing on each player's roots, development and personal achievements, Claret and Blue Blood is a unique book that features key characters, candid conversations, successes, failures and controversies as it explores the very essence of West Ham United.

Claret and Blue Blood

Pumping Life into West Ham United

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015* 
 
A man punches the wall in a strategic show of anger. Another complains he has become a stranger to those he loves. A third relies on “my three a day: coffee, Nurofen and a bottle of wine.” Yet another admits he is an oddity, who would prefer to be working in cricket. A fifth describes his professional life as “a circus”. These are football managers, live and uncut. Arsene Wenger likens the job to “living on a volcano: any day may be your last”. He speaks with the authority of being the longest serving manager in the English game, having been at Arsenal for 17 years. The average lifespan of a Football League manager is 17 months. Fifty three managers, across all four Divisions, were sacked, or resigned, in the 2012-13 season. There were fifty seven managerial changes in the 2013-14 season. What makes these men tick? They are familiar figures, who rarely offer anything more than a glimpse into their personal and professional lives. What shapes them? How and why do they do their job? Award-winning writer Michael Calvin provides the answers. 
 
Insecurity is a unifying factor, but managers at different levels face different sets of problems. Depending on their status, they are dealing with multi-millionaires, or mortgage slaves. Living on the Volcano charts the progress of more than 20 managers, in different circumstances and in different phases of their career. Some, like Brendan Rodgers and Roberto Martinez, are at the peak of their profession. Others, like Chris Hughton, Brian McDermott and Gary Waddock, have been sacked, and are seeking a way back into the game. They offer a unique insight into a trade which is prone to superficial judgement and savage swings in fortune. Management requires ruthlessness and empathy, idealism and cunning. Stories overlap, experiences intermingle, and myths are exposed.

Living on the Volcano

The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager

Gary Lineker

***Includes a new foreword by Gary Lineker about football in lockdown*** 
 
Shortlisted for The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 
 
'Lineker is nearly as good a presenter as I was a footballer' DIEGO MARADONA 
'Hilarious, almost as funny as me' ALAN SHEARER 
'This is Lineker unleashed. As a non-football nut I didn't expect to enjoy it, but between laddish anecdotes are passages of sudden tenderness. . . Lineker opens up, dislodging memories and reflections, not just about football but his whole life.' THE TIMES 
_______________________________________________________________ 
'Football is a simple game. 22 players chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win.' 
 
This book is inspired by the stories Danny and I have shared with each other about what life in football is really like: in the dressing room, in the commentary box, on the pitch and - with the appropriate pixellation - in the showers afterwards. 
 
What's it really like to play with Messi? I wouldn't know, but I have starred alongside him in an advert for Walkers crisps. And, well, his performance was world-class. 
 
And what is a life in football really like? You won't learn much from the dull-as-dishwater post-match interviews - it's a world of secrets, superstitions, laughs and personalities, and let me tell you, half of it you won't believe. 
 
I've looked back at my playing days, from England to Leicester, Everton to Barcelona, Tottenham to, er, Nagoya Grampus Eight, and shared the chaotic behind-the-scenes secrets of Match of the Day - and Danny has chipped in with stories from a lifetime following the game as a fan. 
 
From Italia '90 to Leicester's Premier League fairytale, from yellow cards to World Cup trophies (I've never been awarded either), from Gascoigne to Maradona, you'll find it all here - everything you always wanted to know about football, but didn't realise that you did. 
 
Inspired by the No.1 podcast Behind Closed Doors

Life, Laughs and Football

***Includes a new foreword by Gary Lineker about football in lockdown*** 
 
Shortlisted for The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 
 
'Lineker is nearly as good a presenter as I was a footballer' DIEGO MARADONA 
'Hilarious, almost as funny as me' ALAN SHEARER 
'This is Lineker unleashed. As a non-football nut I didn't expect to enjoy it, but between laddish anecdotes are passages of sudden tenderness. . . Lineker opens up, dislodging memories and reflections, not just about football but his whole life.' THE TIMES 
_______________________________________________________________ 
'Football is a simple game. 22 players chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win.' 
 
This book is inspired by the stories Danny and I have shared with each other about what life in football is really like: in the dressing room, in the commentary box, on the pitch and - with the appropriate pixellation - in the showers afterwards. 
 
What's it really like to play with Messi? I wouldn't know, but I have starred alongside him in an advert for Walkers crisps. And, well, his performance was world-class. 
 
And what is a life in football really like? You won't learn much from the dull-as-dishwater post-match interviews - it's a world of secrets, superstitions, laughs and personalities, and let me tell you, half of it you won't believe. 
 
I've looked back at my playing days, from England to Leicester, Everton to Barcelona, Tottenham to, er, Nagoya Grampus Eight, and shared the chaotic behind-the-scenes secrets of Match of the Day - and Danny has chipped in with stories from a lifetime following the game as a fan. 
 
From Italia '90 to Leicester's Premier League fairytale, from yellow cards to World Cup trophies (I've never been awarded either), from Gascoigne to Maradona, you'll find it all here - everything you always wanted to know about football, but didn't realise that you did. 
 
Inspired by the No.1 podcast Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors

Shortlisted for the British Sports Book Awards 2018 
 
“What’s your dream, son?” 
 
A six year-old boy, head bowed, mumbles the eternal answer: “Be a footballer….” Steadman Scott, football’s most unlikely talent scout, smiles indulgently, and takes him in from the street. He knows the odds. Only 180 of the 1.5 million boys who play organised youth football in England will become a Premier League pro. That’s a success rate of 0.012 per cent. 
 
How and why do the favoured few make it? What separates the good from the great? Who should they trust – the coach, the agent or their parents? 
 
Michael Calvin provides the answers on a journey from non-league grounds to hermetically sealed Premier League palaces, via gang-controlled sink estates and the England team’s inner sanctum. He interviews decision makers, behavioural specialists, football agents and leading coaches. He shares the hopes and fears of players and their parents. He exposes bullying and a black economy in which children are commodities, but remains true to the dream.

No Hunger In Paradise

The Players. The Journey. The Dream

Harry Redknapp

The Sunday Times no.1 bestselling memoir from Harry Redknapp 
 
‘From kicking a ball as a kid under the street lamps of Poplar and standing on Highbury's North Bank with my dad, to my first game at West Ham, I was born head over heels in love with football. It saved me, and 50 years on that hasn't changed one bit - I'd be lost without it…’ 
 
Harry is the manager who has seen it all - from a dismal 70s Portakabin at Oxford City and training pitches with trees in the middle to the unbeatable highs of the Premiership, lifting the FA Cup and taking on Real Madrid in the Champions League. With his much loved, no-nonsense delivery, Harry brings us a story filled with passion and humour that takes you right inside every drama of his career. 
 
Harry finally tells the full story of all the controversial ups and downs - the pain and heartache of his court case, the England job, his love for Bobby Moore, his adventures at Portsmouth with Milan Mandaric, the Southampton debacle, Tottenham and Daniel Levy, and not forgetting his years at West Ham or the challenges at his current club QPR. 
 
It’s the epic journey of one of the great managers and, along the way, the story of the British game itself over the last five decades. In an era now dominated by foreign coaches Harry is the last of an old-fashioned breed of English football man - one who has managed to move with the times and always come out fighting.

Always Managing

My Autobiography

Gary Neville

Phil Neville

Paul Scholes

Ryan Giggs

Nicky Butt

Robert Draper

As modern football legends, the Class of 92 need no introduction. Class of 92: Out of Their League, however, opens a dramatic new chapter in the story of former Manchester United greats Gary and Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Nicky Butt, as they take on a new role in each of their lives: owners of semi-professional club Salford City FC. 
 
An enthralling, in-depth account of Salford's first two years under new ownership, Class of 92: Out of Their League combines first-hand accounts from Gary, Phil, Paul, Ryan and Nicky as they try to turn round the club's fortunes, along with a wider story of tremendous athletic and human drama. Featuring colourful characters like managers Anthony Johnson and Bernard Morley, star players, club chairman Karen Baird, lifelong fans, and more, this is a story told with real authenticity and grit. Accompanying the second series of the hugely popular BBC series, Class of 92: Out of Their League is both a testament to the best of modern football and a brilliant reminder, in an era when fans are threatening walkouts over rising ticket prices, of what football is really all about.

Class of 92: Out of Our League

Gary Imlach

WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 
 
A poignant and moving account of the author’s search for the man his father was and the life he led as a well-known footballer, blending the personal and the historical into an unforgettable story 
 
 Stewart Imlach was an ordinary neighbourhood soccer star of his time. 
 
 A brilliant winger who thrilled the crowd on Saturdays, then worked alongside them in the off-season; who represented Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and never received a cap for his efforts; who was Man of the Match for Nottingham Forest in the 1959 FA Cup Final, and was rewarded with the standard offer - £20 a week, take it or leave it. 
 
 Gary Imlach grew up a privileged insider at Goodison Park when Stewart moved into coaching. He knew the highlights of his father's career by heart. But when his dad died he realised they were all he knew. He began to realise, too, that he'd lost the passion for football that his father had passed down to him. In this book he faces his growing alienation from the game he was born into, as he revisits key periods in his father's career to build up a picture of his football life - and through him a whole era. 
 
‘The most emotionally charged and moving sports book I've ever read’ Daily Mail

My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

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