How to Be a Footballer

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Part of the hugely successful Liverpool team of the 80’s, Nicol tells numerous funny anecdotes about life in the Anfield dressing room in a time when the game was full of characters and not overpaid prima donnas. He writes in-depth about the transition from Arsenal’s ‘boring, boring Arsenal’ tag to the Wenger Revolution and the joys of playing with one of the most technically gifted players in the world in Dennis Bergkamp. Two decades after the book’s publication, saturation football coverage and internet access means that fans are far more cosmopolitan in their outlooks than ever before. However, Football Against The Enemy remains the only book to take a definitive sweep on world football, and explain how political and cultural issues influence the game across the globe. Jon Spurling More of a memoir than a football autobiography, Ian Wright’s book is a must read for any Arsenal fan or football fan alike. Enter the Ultimate Football Heroes Hall of Fame! These legends of the game have made their mark on footballing history.

One of the most recognisable faces in British football, and the ex England manager, Sam Allardyce’s autobiography is blunt, to the point and pulls no punches. All in all one, we found Steve Nicol’s book to be one of the most funny, insightful and well written books that we have read for a long time. Refreshing in its honesty, ‘Big Sam’, is a real earthy kind of book which is not pretentious in any way and gives readers a real insight into the trials and tribulations of a Premier League manager. It helps that Fever Pitch is hilarious and beautifully written and that it offers a social history of Britain from the 1960s through to the early 1990s. Its only flaw is its formlessness: it’s a book to dip in rather than to read through. Simon Kuper I had mixed feelings when I began work on the book,” confesses Kuper. “I felt that the whole thing might be too big for me, and I was concerned about what friends would say when they read it. Yet I also had a sort of blind confidence in my writing ability. An established author probably wouldn’t have taken on such a project. It’s the sort of thing that a young writer needed to do.”One of the last ‘old-school’ footballers, Bullard’s enthusiasm for the game is infectious and he never took his privileged position for granted. This book is not just about football, it’s also a story of how someone can wrestle with alcohol addiction whilst at the same time playing at the very top-level of the game.

Not only does he speak to everyone – the man who designed Brazil’s yellow-blue-white strip, the man who scored the winner against Brazil in the 1950 final, beauty queens, priests – but he also goes everywhere and does everything. He visits three Brazilians playing for a club in a village of 1,000 people in the Faroe Islands. He appears in the Sao Paulo carnival for the samba school of Corinthians’ hardcore fans, wearing purple feathers. Futebol’s hundreds of interviews, facts, drawings, photographs and even maps will spare researchers trouble for generations to come. The football book was once a Christmas staple. No visit from Santa to the Ross household was complete without the Shoot! Annual or the Topical Times Football Book. These photo-based publications, along with the obligatory My Story by a star player, established a lowly perception of football books as either pictorial and aimed at children, or as cliche-ridden as a post-match interview with an impatient manager. But football is a metaphor for life, isn’t it? Surely the perfect vehicle to convey the frailties of human existence? There is also a really moving section in the book about the Hillsborough tragedy from the perspective of a player who witnessed first hand the terrible events. If you’re someone who would much rather listen to a book than read one, why not try the 30 day trial through Audible which gives you two free audiobooks to keep regardless of whether you keep the subscription or not. Higginbotham doesn’t try to be too controversial within his book and doesn’t name names when he recounts his stories, it’s just simply an honest account of the modern-day footballer.As the title suggests, this book from Manchester United legend Roy Keane is a follow-up to his hugely successful first book Keane: The Autobiography which was first released in 2002. A Chelsea man through and through, his positive opinions and reflections on every aspect of the club shine through, however this book will also appeal to fans of other clubs.

An intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate man, who uses his status to achieve goodness in the world, this book is a very enjoyable read. He reveals the truth about his darkest times since retiring from playing which include problems with drugs and gambling and his recent prison sentence after his conviction for grevious bodily harm. If you like Jamie Carragher’s punditry style then you will like his book as it’s written in the same kind of tone but it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea purely because of this football book’s age. Love him or hate him, you can’t seem to get away from Robbie Savage and his outspoken views on the beautiful game. From 1963 to 2016, Hugh McIlvanney wrote about sport for the Observer (30 years) then the Sunday Times (23 years). Released a year after his departure from the Observer and two years before his investiture as an OBE, this collection came out at a fascinating hinge in the timeline of the European game, a couple of seasons into the era of the Premier League and Champions League.

We love reading football autobiographies so we have compiled a list of the best football books for you to have a look at below. Liverpool and Scotland legend Steve Nicol’s book was released in September 2016 and is an absolutely hilarious account of the life of a professional footballer in the 1980’s. You might be surprised to see Provided You Don’t Kiss Me declared FFT’s greatest ever football book. It didn’t invert any pyramids or damn any uniteds. At its core, however, is a near-perfect account of a man and a manager both brilliant and flawed. One of the most eagerly awaited football books from one of the most respected pundits at the moment, Danny Higginbotham’s engrossing read hit the shelves in April 2015.