Robbie Fowler: My Life In Football: Goals, Glory & The Lessons I've Learnt


Robbie Fowler - 2019
    He is the sixth-highest goal scorer in the history of the Premier League and notched 183 goals for Liverpool alone.But before all of that, he was a Liverpool lad who loved the game, the Kop and everything that came with it. My Life In Football is the story of a boy who became a legend.Born in Liverpool in 1975, Robbie Fowler became a club icon by the time he was 18. Now, he takes us through the games that have shaped his life and football philosophy, over 25 years after he first signed as a professional for Liverpool.Engaging, personal and revealing, Robbie opens up about his astounding achievements, the price of fame and the regrets and struggles of being a professional footballer. From Hillsborough to Madrid, via the cup treble, that goal line celebration, hundreds of goals, Houllier, Benítez, Klopp and more, Robbie explains his thinking about the modern game. Inviting readers inside the dressing room, he shares stories of legendary teammates like Rush, Owen and Gerrard, as well as his rise to football's top table. How did he get back up so many times after the injuries that blighted his career? What gave him the drive to keep going and pursue his dreams?Robbie's My Life In Football harks back to a simpler time when fans and players shared the same story, and when the local boy really could dream of scoring a hat-trick for his home club when Saturday came.

Pointless


Jeff Connor - 2005
    The Shire are lucky if all eleven players make it to a game, they have an average home attendance at their dilapidated Firs Park ground of 200 and they ended the 2004/05 season bottom of the Scottish Third Division - for the third consecutive year. Granted access to all areas, Jeff Connor gets into the dressing room, the board room and the dug-out. But, above all, he gets into the spirit of the club. He began the season a scoffing cynic and finished it lost in admiration for one of the dottiest sporting institutions in Britain as the Shire attempted to reach the promised land - SECOND bottom of the Scottish Third Division. At times funny, sad, heart-warming and embarrassing, as events on and off the pitch unfold, Pointless is an unmissable insight into a unique football team

Big Sam: My Autobiography


Sam Allardyce - 2015
    Before he took the England manager's job in July 2016, he was the second longest-serving manager in the Premier League, behind Arsene Wenger.Over the last 42 years, Allardyce has seen it all. The game he so loves is radically different to that in which he made his debut back in 1973, and in telling his wonderfully colourful story for the very first time, Allardyce talks intriguingly about the changing face of players and managers. His autobiography positively crackles with characteristic insight, honesty and hard-hitting opinions.

We Are the Damned United: The Real Story of Brian Clough at Leeds United


Phil Rostron - 2009
    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.

The Wenger Revolution: Twenty Years of Arsenal


Amy Lawrence - 2016
    In the subsequent twenty years as manager he has transformed the club. English football's longest serving manager has overseen a period of radical change. His experience spans across the spectrum from complex challenges to historic success.The Wenger Revolution chronicles this fascinating era through the combination of distinctive photographs taken from the inner sanctum, and words from Amy Lawrence.This is a stunning photographic journey, based on the images captured by official club photographer Stuart MacFarlane, who has had exclusive access for many years. Publication coincides with the twentieth anniversary of Wenger's arrival in England.The Arsenal he joined bears little resemblance to what the club looks like as we approach 2016. A total renovation in terms of training, stadium, style, economics and a global audience has taken place under Wenger's instruction.His successes illustrate what a sensation he created in English football. He is regarded as a guru of new football methods, getting a club with a traditional English culture to give up drinking, modernize diet, embrace new training methods, and play with a panache that ripped up the stereotype of Boring Arsenal. The Wenger Revolution is worth commemorating, and this book will do so in style.

Damaged: My Story


Paul Stewart - 2017
    It was a dream that would lead him into a nightmare of sexual and physical abuse from which he has still not recovered. Stewart was abused every day for four years by his junior football coach. He suffered in silence and embarked on a successful career that saw him play for Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Sunderland, scoring in an FA Cup final and winning caps for England. Behind it all, he was a broken man – many times he wished he could end his life. He turned to drink and drugs as a way of coping with his devastating secret. In 2016, Stewart was sitting at his office desk one morning when he read a Daily Mirror story about a footballer who had been abused. His world was about to change… Paul Stewart: Damaged is one of the most powerful and emotionally charged football life stories you will read.

Legacy


Tim Cahill - 2015
    Born in Sydney to a Samoan mother and Londoner father, Timothy Cahill grew up in the sprawling western suburbs, where cricket and rugby league ruled. It was a long way from his father's beloved West Ham and the English game that transfixed a young Tim with his own unlikely dreams of one day playing professionally.Growing up in the 1980s, life for Tim was about family, football and more football - training, playing and watching it with his brothers. Beginning as the youngest and smallest boy on the field, Tim steadily worked his way through the local club sides with an on-field toughness and intelligence that made the unlikely a possibility.By the time he was a teenager, Tim's parents boldly applied for a bank loan to fund his travels to England. It was an act of faith repaid with a successful trial for Millwall, the storied London club. After 249 appearances and 56 goals and cult-hero status among the fans, he signed for Everton, where he would enjoy a highly successful Premiership and stellar international career - leaving the legacy of becoming one of the most admired and respected Australian sportsmen of all time.With his trademark honesty and candour, Tim reflects on what it takes to make it to the top - the sacrifices, the physical cost, the mental stamina, the uncompromising self-belief, but also the loyalty, the integrity and the generosity. An autobiography that is more than a record of the goals and the games, Tim Cahill's story is a universal reminder of the importance of making your moment count.

The Anatomy of Manchester United : A History in Ten Matches


Jonathan Wilson - 2017
    In doing so, he identifies the pivotal moments in the club's rise to being one of the foremost teams of the twentieth century.With his trademark tactical acumen, Wilson goes back to the matches themselves and subjects them to forensic examination, re-evaluating and reassessing, and going beyond the white noise of banal player quotes and instant judgements to discover why what happened happened. It is in this way, as far as possible, a football history of a great club.And because this is Manchester United, there is additional resonance. From the completion of Old Trafford in 1910, United have had a significant financial advantage. Yet their past has not been one of sustained success. As such, their history is also, to an extent, a history of English football, with all of its possibilities and frustrations.

How NOT to be a Football Millionaire - Keith Gillespie My Autobiography


Keith Gillespie - 2013
    And lost a lot.One afternoon he added up how much he had squandered during the course of his professional career. It made for uncomfortable reading...Manchester United £60,000Newcastle United £1,102,000Blackburn Rovers £3,510,000Leicester City £1,050,000Sheffield United £670,000Bradford City £15,000 Glentoran £43,875Total (plus extras) £7,215,875That day seemed a world away from 1993 when he burst on to the scene as a fresh-faced young star with Manchester United. A dark-haired lad from the streets of Northern Ireland with a God-given talent, he was dubbed the new George Best.One of the famous Fergie fledglings, he made his debut aged just 17 before moving on to Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle where he came so close to landing a Premiership title winner’s medal. International caps piled up too. It was a thrilling adventure. Flying down the wing and sharing pitches and dressing rooms with legends, but behind the success and glamour, it was a different story.Like Best, Gillespie had a talent for self-destruction. He liked a drink and there were women but they weren’t causing a big problem – it was keeping hold of the millions he had earned from the game that ultimately proved his downfall.It wasn’t just about gambling. A nightmare ordeal during a training break in La Manga landed him in jail for a crime he did not commit. Then, in 2010, Gillespie became headline news again when a series of flawed business deals saw him declared bankrupt.How Not To Be A Football Millionaire is one of the most honest autobiographies you will read, about a player who lived the football life to the full.It tells a fascinating and moving human story of the darker side of the glory game. About winning and losing, fortune and fate, hope and heartache... About having the world at your feet and being left to ask yourself: ‘Where did it all go wrong?

Single-Minded: My Life in Business


Claude Littner - 2016
    His abrupt style and zero-tolerance policy on nonsense have become the highlights of every series. But what is he like in real business?Single-Minded reveals the story of Claude's varied career and the turbulent years that shaped him. From being told at school that he would never amount to anything to his current status as a boardroom heavyweight both on-screen and off it, success has never come easy. Claude's complex, fascinating work has taken him into many different industries and countries, encompassing retail start-ups; knife-edge company rescue missions; the bruising rough-and-tumble of Premier League football; facing down French trade unions; taking on Texan oil barons in multi-million-dollar deals; and, in the private sphere, conquering life-threatening illness.Told with characteristic candour and disarming modesty, Single-Minded is an unflinching account of a remarkable career in the spotlight.

Quiet Genius: Bob Paisley, British Football's Greatest Manager


Ian Herbert - 2017
    The man whose Liverpool team won trophies at a rate-per-season that dwarfs Sir Alex Ferguson's achievements at Manchester United and who remains the only Briton to lead a team to three European Cups.From Wembley to Rome, Manchester to Madrid, Paisley's team was the one no one could touch. Working in a city which was on its knees, in deep post-industrial decline, still tainted by the 1981 Toxteth riots and in a state of open warfare with Margaret Thatcher, he delivered a golden era - never re-attained since - which made the city of Liverpool synonymous with success and won them supporters the world over. Yet, thirty years since Paisley died, the life and times of this shrewd, intelligent, visionary, modest football man have still never been fully explored and explained.Based on in-depth interviews with Paisley's family and many of the players whom he led to an extraordinary haul of honours between 1974 and 1983, Quiet Genius is the first biography to examine in depth the secrets of Paisley's success. It inspects his man-management strategies, his extraordinary eye for a good player, his uncanny ability to diagnose injuries in his own players and the opposition, and the wicked sense of humour which endeared him to so many. It explores the North-East mining community roots which he cherished, and considers his visionary outlook on the way the game would develop.Quiet Genius is the story of how one modest man accomplished more than any other football manager, found his attributes largely unrecorded and undervalued and, in keeping with the gentler ways of his generation, did not seem to mind. It reveals an individual who seemed out of keeping with the brash, celebrity sport football was becoming, and who succeeded on his own terms. Three decades on from his death, it is a football story that demands to be told.

#2Sides: My Autobiography


Rio Ferdinand - 2014
    Candid, outspoken and supremely honest, this is his story: from the early days as a schoolboy trying to impress the local kids on the muddy pitches of Peckham, through to picking up the Champions League trophy on a rainy summer’s night in Moscow, #2Sides is the tell-all account of a unique life in the game. On winning and losing; on defending and attacking; on managers and fellow players; on friendships and rivalries; on the ups and downs of the beautiful game; and on playing for club, country and for yourself – this is a full spectrum of life at the very top of the footballing tree, and a superb retrospective of a truly fascinating career.

Ryan Giggs: My Life, My Story


Ryan Giggs - 2011
    Here, he recalls the glorious memories of his record-breaking career at Manchester United, as well as highlights from his international career with Wales. Giggsy's words bring 20 seasons of pictures to life, as the most decorated player in English football history relives 11 Premier League wins, four FA Cup successes, three League Cup winner's medals, and two Champions League victories, and remembers the people who have helped to make him a true sporting great.

You'll Win Nothing With Kids


Jim White - 2007
    You'll find Jim in the same place every week, failing to organise a bunch of lads into something resembling a team while on the far side of the park his opposite number, a wannabe Mourinho in brashly monogrammed tracksuit, struts the sidelines, shouting - always shouting. This is the hilarious story of Jim White's time as manager of his son's football team: the highs, the lows, and the dog turd in the centre circle. At this level, winning spirit is not so much about passion, pride and belief as praying that your star centre forward has remembered his boots. Most importantly, it's about the enduring relationship between fathers, sons and football. This is the story no one who has ever watched his or her child play sport will want to miss.

Mr Unbelievable


Chris Kamara - 2010
    As a player, Kammy trawled football's outposts with the likes of Bradford City, Stoke City and Portsmouth where he suffered the slings, arrows and hurled bananas of racial abuse. Later, during the autumn of his career, he played in Howard Wilkinson's swashbuckling Leeds team where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Eric Cantona and Lee Chapman.On hanging up his boots, he moved into the dugouts at Bradford and Sunderland as manager before joining the Sky football revolution as roving reporter on Soccer Saturday and Goal On Sunday's eagle-eyed analyst, amassing a raft of catchphrases along the way.Mr Unbelievable is a hugely entertaining, moving, shocking and laugh out loud funny story of a genuine cult hero.