One day you'll write a book about this club. Or, more to the point, about me. So you may as well know what I'm thinking and save it up for later when it won't do any harm to anyone." Duncan Hamilton was there through all the madness, the success, the failures, the fall-outs, the drink, and the crumbling of Brian Clough's heady twenty years as manager of Nottingham Forest. He saw it all. From his first day on the job sitting in Clough's office, a nervous, green sixteen year-old sat opposite one of the self-proclaimed giants of the English game, politely refusing a morning whiskey, he would become an integral part of Clough's empire, and eventually one of his most trusted confidants.From the breakdown of Clough's testy relationship with Peter Taylor, his co-manager and joint founder of Forest's success, through the unrepeatable double European cup triumph, and on into the wilderness of the mid-eighties through which Clough's alcoholism would play an evermore damaging role, Hamilton had access to every aspect of the club, and more remarkably, the man in charge. Here, he paints a vivid portrait of a huge personality, a man with a God-given gift for management and the watertight confidence and ego to stare down his detractors in the media, boardroom and beyond. A man who grabbed life, and most of his players, by the balls and wouldn't let go until he got his way.This is a strikingly intimate portrait, at times sad, at others joyous, in which one of the unforgettable characters of English football is laid bare. But it is also the story of a man's education in the bizarre happenings of the football world, appreciatively guided by the most wonderful, loud-mouthed, big-headed and cocksure teacher of all.

    One of the game's great characters. A man who faced doen the demons. A top television pundit and columnist. This is the story of James Peter 'Jimmy' Greaves, one of the all-time greats of English football.Jimmy Greaves was born in east London in February 1940, and from humble beginnings began his rise to the top of the game. He scored on his Chelsea debut, aged seventeen, and became the first player to score 100 goals before the age of twenty-one. When Jimmy left Stanford Bridge for AC Milan in 1963, it outraged the Chelsea faithful, but after only four months Jimmy returned to London, to Tottenham Hotspur for £99,999. Scoring a hat-trick on his debut, Jimmy went on to help Spurs win the fA Cup and the European Cup-Winners' Cup. Throughout the 1960s Greavsie was the hero of White Hart Lane.But for all his success at both club and international level (44 goals in 57 games), there were dark struggles to overcome too. An injury picked up in the final group game of the 1966 World Cup meant that Jimmy cast a forlorn figure on the sidelines during England football's finest hour. And after a move to West Ham at the start of the 1970s, Jimmy career would be plagued by alcoholism. But however powerful his addiction, Jimmy was too strong a character to be pulled under. He came through and reinvented himself as a celebrated pundit on the beautiful game.'Greavsie' is a gripping and truthful autobiography, the story of a remarkable life laced with Jimmy's trademark wit. It is a fascinating account of the golden era of football, the characters who populated it, and the goalscoring machine at the centre of it all.

    This is the true story of courage, team loyalty and fortitude in the face of the most brutal oppression the world had ever seen. When Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, he caught the Soviet Union completely by surprise. At breathtaking speed his armies swept east, slaughtering the ill-prepared Soviet forces. His greatest military gains of the entire war were made in a few short months, and the largest single country that he conquered was the Ukraine, roughly the size of France. Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, was circled, assaulted and overrun, and among the city’s defenders who were captured and incarcerated were many of the members of the sparkling 1939 Dynamo Kiev football team, arguably the best in Europe before the war. Captured Kiev was a starving city whose population were deported in vast numbers as slave labour.However one man determined to save not just the surviving players from the Dynamo side but other athletes. He offered them work, shelter and, most valuable, bread, as workers in his bakery. Inspired by the charismatic goalkeeper Trusevich, the Dynamo side was re-formed as Start FC and a series of fixtures was arranged, all of which the team win handsomely, to such an extent that they inspired Kievan spirits. The final fixture against the Luftwaffe was agreed by the German authorities: a well-fed team from the Fatherland would vanquish the upstart Ukrainians, especially if the game was refereed by an SS officer. The match is an allegory of resistance; its consequences are brutal. Andy Dougan has discovered the truth behind a legendary encounter, sorting fact from fiction and restoring to the centre of World War II a moment of extraordinary poignancy and complex bravery, of which the cliché is demonstrably true: football is not a matter of life or death; it’s much more important than that.

    Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hells Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed. Through the prism of the ultras Jones crafts a compelling investigation into Italian society and its favourite sport. He writes about not just the ultras of some of Italy's biggest clubs – Juventus, Torino, Lazio, Roma and Genoa – but also about its lesser-known ones from Cosenza and Catania. He examines the sinister side of football fandom, with its violence and political extremism, but also admires the passion, wit, solidarity and style of a fascinating and contradictory subculture.

    A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality.Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons. Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and her book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

    In the follow-up to his critically acclaimed account of Guardiola’s first full season at Bayern, Pep Confidential, Perarnau now lifts the lid on the Catalan’s whole tenure in Bavaria.Pep Guardiola: The Evolution takes the reader on a journey through three action packed seasons as Bayern smashed domestic records yet struggled to emulate that dominance in Europe, analysing Guardiola’s management style through key moments on and off the field.Perarnau reveals how Guardiola improved as a manager at Bayern despite failing to land the ultimate prize in European football, examines his decision to leave Germany to take up the challenge at Manchester City and how his managerial style will continue to evolve in thePremier League.This is more than the story of three seasons with one of the biggest clubs in the game. It is a portrait and analysis of a manager and the footballing philosophies that have beguiled the world.

    Although they did not win a trophy, they claimed something much more important and enduring: glory, and in industrial quantities. They were a bewitching fusion of futuristic attacking football, effortless Scandinavian cool and laid-back living. They played like angels and lived like you and I, and they were everyone's second team in the mid-1980s. The story of Danish Dynamite, as the team became known, is the story of a team of rock stars in a polyester Hummel kit.Heralding from a country with no real football history to speak of and a population of five million, this humble and likeable team was unique. Everymen off the field and superheroes on it, they were totally of their time, and their approach to the game was in complete contrast to the gaudy excess and charmless arrogance of today's football stars. That they ultimately imploded in spectacular style, with a shocking 5-1 defeat to Spain in the 1986 World Cup in a game that almost everyone expected them to win, only adds to their legend.For the first time in English, Danish Dynamite tells the story of perhaps the coolest team in football history, a team that had it all and blew it in spectacular style after a live-fast-die-young World Cup campaign. Featuring interviews with the players themselves, including Michael Laudrup, Preben Elkjær and Jesper Olsen, as well as with those who played or managed against them, this is a joyous celebration of one of the most life-affirming teams the world has ever seen.

    . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer.After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place.

    England took their eye off a ball they arrogantly thought they owned, allowing other nations to run off with it.'It has been Fifty Years of Hurt since Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup trophy at Wembley, and in this groundbreaking book, Henry Winter will address the state England are in on the golden anniversary of their greatest moment. Part lament, part anatomy of an obsession, both personal and collective, it analyses the truth behind the endless excuses, apportions the blame for the crimes against English football, but is also a search for hope and solutions.Fifty Years of Hurt weaves more than forty exclusive interviews with the biggest names in the game - Jack Charlton, Alan Mullery, Peter Shilton, Glenn Hoddle, John Barnes, Chris Waddle, Gary Lineker, Ian and Mark Wright, Alan Shearer, Michael Owen, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Roy Hodgson - with a narrative dissection of the highs and lows of five decades of football. And as well as players and managers, Henry Winter talks to the fans, to agents, to officials, to the governing bodies, about every aspect, good and bad, of English football, to provide answers to the question: 'where did it all go wrong?'.It is a passionate journey by a writer with vast personal insight into the national team, with unprecedented access to all areas of the game, but also by a fan who wants his England back. The Fifty Years of Hurt must end.

    He never will. Philippe Auclair has interviewed every key player in Cantona's life to produce a biography that reveals, for the first time, the heart and inner thoughts of this most extraordinary character. Cantona played for six different French clubs, making his international debut at twenty-one, before going to England in 1992 and making an immediate impact with Leeds United. He transformed the team but became even more talismanic when he moved to Manchester United, where to this day Manchester United fans refer to him as "King Eric." Eric Cantona graced the Premiership like few others and he remains a deeply compelling figure to anyone who cares remotely about football.

    It is played, watched, written about and talked to death by millions virtually every day of the year. But how do the characteristics of England and Italy affect the game in these two footballing nations? Do the national stereotypes of Italians as passionate, stylish lotharios and the English as cold-hearted eccentrics still hold true when they kick a ball around? In The Italian Job, for the first time, a footballer of the first rank, Gianluca Vialli, in conjunction with sportswriter and broadcaster Gabriele Marcotti, tackles this debate head on. Uniquely positioned across both the English and the Italian games, they provide a fascinating and highly controversial commentary on where football is now and where it's headed. And they have invited some of the biggest names in the sport to join in their discussion. Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Sven Goran Eriksson, Fabio Capello and Marcello Lippi, amongst others, add their not inconsiderable weight to the highest-profile symposium on football ever convened.Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti explore every aspect of football, be it tactical and technical or cultural and sociological. Stuffed full of controversial opinions and gripping revelations, The Italian Job takes you on a journey to the very heart of two of the world's great footballing cultures.

    Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the unconquered, the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World.  In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon’s uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest’s secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe—the mysterious flecheiros, or “People of the Arrow,” seldom-glimpsed warriors known to repulse all intruders with showers of deadly arrows. On assignment for National Geographic, Wallace joins Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo at the head of a thirty-four-man team that ventures deep into the unknown in search of the tribe. Possuelo’s mission is to protect the Arrow People. But the information he needs to do so can only be gleaned by entering a world of permanent twilight beneath the forest canopy.Danger lurks at every step as the expedition seeks out the Arrow People even while trying to avoid them. Along the way, Wallace uncovers clues as to who the Arrow People might be, how they have managed to endure as one of the last unconquered tribes, and why so much about them must remain shrouded in mystery if they are to survive. Laced with lessons from anthropology and the Amazon’s own convulsed history, and boasting a Conradian cast of unforgettable characters—all driven by a passion to preserve the wild, but also wracked by fear, suspicion, and the desperate need to make it home alive—The Unconquered reveals this critical battleground in the fight to save the planet as it has rarely been seen, wrapped in a page-turning tale of adventure.

    It is the tale of a civil war that dragged Britain's most successful football club to its knees, through the High Court and almost into administration.Players Stephen Gerrard and Jamie Carragher tell of their anger at the broken promises, as well as their pain at watching loyal fans in open revolt. Manager chief executive, board members, leading fans and journalists reveal the torment at a revered sporting institution run by two men at war with each other, who trampled Liverpool's cherished traditions into the gutter. No story sums up the naked greed at the heart of modern football quite like Hicks' and Gillett's attempt to turn a buck at Liverpool. No-one has had as much access to the truth, or tells it with as much passion, wit and insight as Brian Reade. 'An epic Swindle' is the riveting story of how close one of the great football clubs came to financial implosion.

    While The Damned United was a fictional account of Clough’s short-lived but controversial reign at the club, this book reveals the true story, as told by the players he managed at the time. Vividly recreating the atmosphere of the era, the book features candid contributions from legendary names such as Peter Lorimer, Eddie Gray, and Norman Hunter. They reveal what it was like to make the transition from the relatively smooth management style of former manager Don Revie, who helped the club achieve success in Europe, to a constant crossing of swords with the outspoken Brian Clough, who left the club flailing at the foot of the league upon his premature departure. This explosive account covers all the drama that ensued from the moment Clough was earmarked by the club directors as the favorite to succeed Revie to his exit less than two months later, saddled with the knowledge that he had been the club’s most unsuccessful manager ever. Told from the perspective of those who experienced Clough’s dictatorial managerial methods at Leeds at first hand, We are the Damned United tells it how it really was rather than how it might have been.

    They may even have a point. But to build something so successful, so popular, so inescapable, you've got to have mighty strong foundations.Prior to 1992, the old First Division was England's premier prize. Its rich tapestry winds back to 1888 and the formation of the Football League. A grand century-long tradition in danger of being lost in the wake of Premier League year zero.No more! In The Title Scott Murray tells the lively, cherry-picked story of English football through the prism of the First Division. Rich with humour yet underpinned with solid research, this is a glorious meander across our national sport's varied terrain.With as much about Burnley, Wolves, West Brom and Portsmouth as the likes of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, we learn the less well-known stories the sport has to tell, such as the plight of Glossop, the smallest club to ever play top-flight football, and final day drama involving Huddersfield and Cardiff that knocks Michael Thomas into a cocked hat. We bask in the managerial genius of Tom Watson, the bowler-hatted Victorian Mourinho; celebrate the joy of the Busby Babes; discover the shameless showmanship of George Allison; embark on righteous escapades with Hughie Gallacher; and meet some old favourites in Don Revie, Bill Shankly, Alex Ferguson and Brian Clough.At turns exciting, surprising, witty and bittersweet, The Title is a highly informed, fresh and affectionate love-letter to the English game, and a delight for any football fan.