You might not realise it, but there is a market out there showcasing some truly excellent writing on football. Yes, the beautiful game has birthed some equally captivating books that both pay tribute to it and lay bare its flaws.
It’s not just cash-in autobiographies and influencers screaming into the abyss on social media; there are now a whole host of publications that truly do justice to the sport’s status as a cultural touchstone.
We couldn’t possibly list all the ones that are worth your time here, but this selection represents a good place to start – here are our recommended football reads…
Best football books
If there’s a sports-themed buzzword of the 2020s, it’s ‘sportswashing’. It’s this very subject that Miguel Delaney concerns himself with here, examining the episodes that have seen the murkiness behind the sport get even murkier.
Revisiting topics like the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United, the faltering (at the moment) attempt to create a European Super League, and the progressive steamroller that was the World Cup in Qatar, this is as solemn as it is spellbinding.
Quite possibly one of the boldest fictional takes on the sport around, it takes on subject matter that has rarely been convincingly depicted: the pressure of the changing room, old-school ‘banter’ and its potentially debilitating impact, and what it’s like to be a young, recently released Premier League player forced to grab his chance in the lower leagues.
Speaking as a football fan, it’s easy to tell the more genuine attempts at portraying football on the page and those that don’t really get it. Thankfully, this falls into the former territory.
Football isn’t exactly renowned for lending itself to top-quality fiction, but there are a handful of notable examples that buck the trend – this is one of them.
Taking the format of personal recollections, meeting minutes and newspaper reports, we bear witness to one of the most heart-warming underdog stories of all time as a village team arrest all expectations and traverse any obstacles placed before them by going all the way to the final of English football’s biggest prize. It’s a swift read, but an unforgettable one.
With the heightening profile of women’s football over the last couple of decades, so too has there been a proliferation in the number of books to accompany them. Among the World Cup tie-in autobiographies, Suzanne Wrack’s treatise on the history of the sport is the best place to start.
Ruminating on how the sport survived years of effectively being banned, to its transformation into a modern-day juggernaut, this is both reflective and hopeful, shedding light on a side of football that hasn’t had anywhere near enough written about it.
Anything from Michael Calvin is worth your time – we could just have easily picked any of his books for this list – but his most recent publication, Whose Game Is It Anyway?, stands out.
Drawing back on his vast experience as a sports journalist, Calvin looks at a game that has at times never felt so distant from its fans – literally, at times, thanks to the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. A Premier League-centric story, this isn’t; following the game’s impact zones around the world, this captures the zeitgeist better than perhaps any other football book in the last decade has managed.
Whether or not you’ve encountered David Squires’ cartoons in the Guardian, this book is one hell of a treat. Providing his own deadpan slant on the evolution of football, his musings on the games’ assorted dramas, follies and disasters are simultaneously hilarious and thought-provoking, and always dead on the money. Not afraid to utilise random cultural references when skewing a particular subject, we sincerely hope that he keeps doing these cartoons forever.
Harry Pearson loves football, and doesn’t care where he watches it. Chronicling a season traversing the north-east in search of the beautiful game, taking in locales as varied as Newcastle’s St James’ Park and Langley Park in Durham, along the way he meets assorted characters and samples the delights of often spartan surroundings as he discovers where the soul of football really resides. His Covid-spanning follow-up, The Farthest Corner, is equally worthy of your time.
We’re slightly bending our ‘no biographies’ rule here – this is far too good not to include. Charting the author’s time reporting on Nottingham Forest during Ol’ Big Head’s 20 years as their manager, we witness his perspective of the highs (European success, the manager’s above-and-beyond caring nature) and lows (relegation, alcoholism and other volatility). A poignant portrait of one of football’s greatest-ever personalities.
Football books rarely feel as urgent as We Play On. In telling the story of Shakhtar Donetsk, journalist Andy Brassell goes far beyond results, transfers and trophy wins to explore what happens when a football club is forced to become something bigger than itself. Driven from its home by conflict in eastern Ukraine and later confronted by Russia’s full-scale invasion, Shakhtar emerges as a symbol of resilience, identity and national pride.
Brassell combines deep reporting with first-hand accounts from players, coaches and staff to show how the club continued to function amid extraordinary upheaval. The result is a gripping account of football’s power to unite communities and preserve a sense of belonging when everything else is under threat.
The editor of the excellent Zonal Marking website (also the title of his equally good second book), Michael Cox loves analysing tactics.
The result of his passion his his first book – The Mixer looks at the way teams play has evolved across the Premier League era, from 4-4-effing-2, to the false number nines and ball-playing goalkeepers of today. The perfect antidote to your typical dry statto treatise on the subject - this is compulsively reasonable and endlessly informative.
According to TripAdvisor, the number one attraction in Castel Di Sangro is the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta that overlooks it. But in 1996 there was only one thing that intrigued Joe McGinniss: the town’s football team. Having unexpectedly reached the second tier of Italian football, McGinnis spends the season documenting their struggle to stay in Serie B, although given the shady characters running and bankrolling the club, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when things don’t turn out quite as they seem...
Hellas Verona is not one of the glamorous sides of Italian football. They’ve never had a Francesco Totti, Roberto Baggio or Paolo Maldini (although Luca Toni did finish his career there, scoring 48 goals in 95 games), but when Tim Parks adopts the club as his own, none of that matters. Travelling the length of the country with fellow Hellas supporters (the motley Brigate Gialloblu crew), he follows the team home and away for a whole season, documenting the good – and often quite bad – of Italian football fandom.
While a high-octane approach to the game is very much the flavour of the month, it hasn’t always been that way. Remember when everyone wanted to keep the ball like Barcelona? Or Big Sam’s Bolton POMO’d their way to Europe? Wilson’s thorough dissection of football tactics through the years explains how we got from a load of blokes chasing a ball around the pitch to the highly structured styles of play we see today.
You couldn’t pay us to read a book about most people’s gap yahs but at the beginning of the ‘90s Simon Kuper embarked on a backpacking trip with a difference.
Starting in Germany, where he meets a fan separated from his beloved club by the Berlin Wall, Kuper visits 22 countries in 9 months to find out just what football means to people across the globe and how it can affect politics and culture.FIFA doesn’t think football and politics should ever mix. Football Against the Enemy proves that’s nonsense
It’s easy to forget that, away from the crowds of adoring fans, expensive cars and huge weekly salaries, footballers have to overcome the same mental challenges as the rest of us.
Robert Enke was an international goalkeeper who played for some of the world’s best teams, including a spell at Barcelona under Louis Van Gaal, but he also suffered from bouts of depression. Roland Reng shines a light on a life that, from the outside, looked close to perfect and shows how mental illness can affect anyone – no matter how good they seem to have it.
If Brazilians play football with the fluidity of a Samba dance and England tends to play with all the stodge of a suet pudding, how do the Netherlanders play it?
David Winner’s inventive examination expertly finds parallels between the Dutch’s Total Football and everything from the country’s landscape and architecture to its art and children’s literature. Some might accuse him of overthinking it – it’s just football after all, right? – but Winner’s connections are so compelling you’ll soon find yourself wondering which books reflect the English national side. Great Expectations, perhaps?
The World Cup is played by the 48 best national sides on the planet – but what about the ones that can only dream of even qualifying? In Thirty-One Nil, James Montague goes to watch some of the world’s lowest-ranking national teams as they embark on a quest to reach the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil.
These are the teams that have to search far and wide for eligible players, overcome crippling political situations, and navigate the aftermath of natural disasters just to play their games, even though they know their chances of qualifying are remote. Read this, and you’ll never bemoan an international break again.
Until 2018’s semi-final appearance against Croatia, Italia ‘90 remained the pinnacle of England’s World Cup achievements since lifting the trophy on home soil in 1966.
For a generation of football fans the tournament still holds a particular charm but All Played Out is no rose-tinted nostalgia trip. Davies is careful to call it as he sees it without generalising, and his access to the players and staff is a world away from the tightly controlled camps the squads retreat to these days.
With their affordable ticket prices, beer on the terraces and a sausage at half-time, it seems the Germans have pretty much got the beautiful game sussed out – but how did they reach a state of such footballing utopia? Uli Hesse’s Tor! (the German word for goal) explains all, from the reasons behind the various club names and the development of the 50+1 rule (which ensures fans always have a say over what happens at their clubs), to what happened when the Iron Curtain went up.
You might think a book published in 2005 would be out of date over 20 years later, but David Conn’s examination of how football became the bloated, cash-obsessed monster it is today has arguably never been more relevant.
By focusing on a selection of clubs, the Guardian journalist’s analysis of the Premier League’s inexorable rise explains so many of the game’s problems today, particularly the recent struggles of Bolton and Bury. Perhaps the most worrying part of it is that it’s easy to see many of the mistakes being made all over again.
If anyone has ever kicked a ball anywhere on earth, and at almost any point in history, chances are it’s mentioned somewhere in David Goldblatt’s 1000-page epic The Ball Is Round. It traces the spread of the game, tying it to particular conditions and cultural trends that show why there are some countries around the world that have been more resistant to its charms.
Those are in the minority though, and with unique match reports of landmark matches to punctuate things, The Ball Is Round leaves almost no corner of the world untouched.
Named after the infamous banner Galatasaray fans displayed at the Ali Sami Yen Stadium, Welcome to Hell is your comprehensive guide to Turkish football.
It’ll help you pick which of Istanbul’s Big Three to align yourself with (Beşiktaş, obvs); teach you about how the clubs’ ultras put aside their differences to fight back against police brutality during the Gezi Park protests of 2013; and make you realise just how badly commentators have been pronouncing Emre Can’s name all these years.
Adrian Tempany was in the Leppings Lane end at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. The opening chapter’s account of what happened that day is vital and truly harrowing, but rather than go over all the details again, he spends the rest of the book examining how the disaster has shaped not just English football but the country as a whole.
He explores some alternatives to prove that they exist, but inevitably, it all comes back to the tragic events in Sheffield. If nothing else, Tempany’s writing will leave you in no doubt that justice must be served for the 96 people killed that day.