How to Be a Footballer

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I wanted football to have a proper place in popular culture; I thought someone should say ‘Not all of us are lunatics. We have legitimate emotional reasons for watching this game, which is incredibly important culturally and matters to everyone in the world.’”

Extremely funny from start to finish, the German with the Scouse accent lifts the lid on life playing for two of the biggest clubs in Europe in Bayern Munich and Liverpool as well the German national team. The book is also quite humourous in parts especially when he talks about his career in non-league football – a world away from the money and adulation he receives in the Premier League. Although the majority of the book details the funnier things that happened during his time as a footballer, Bullard also describes the heartbreak of the serious knee injuries that plagued him throughout his colourful career. Barton comes across in the book as a man who has a huge desire to win football matches at all costs, even at the expense of personal relationships, and he goes into detail about many of the scrapes he has been involved in over the years on and off the pitch.One of the few modern players who spent their entire UK career at the one club, Gerrard dissects the defining games of his illustrious club career as well talking about his experiences with the England national team, both good and bad. The only negative point of the book in our opinion is that he doesn’t talk as much about his 20 year playing career as maybe he should have, considering that he made over 400 first-team appearances.

From his days as a player at West Ham to his FA Cup win as manager of Portsmouth, this memoir shares the unbeatable highs and the dismal lows of a footballing career which has spanned over 50 years. The notorious prankster caused mischief at pretty much every club he played for and he recounts his stories in typical light-hearted fashion.

Following the theory of fandom as therapy, Hornby describes how he used Arsenal to escape from his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and so on. He treats his fandom as a problem, as something not entirely healthy. This set him apart from the previous notion of fandom as a hobby, and from his imitators who wrote cutesy accounts of watching bad football in the rain without any of Hornby’s honesty about their own lives. 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.