SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS Sir Alex Ferguson is the most controversial and compelling figure in football. For many he ranks as the greatest manager of all time. He is certainly the most successful. It's been more than ten years since Ferguson's Manchester United triumphed over Bayern Munich in the dying seconds of the Champions League final. Since then he has presided over the rise and fall and rise again of José Mourinho; the arrival and departure of the world's best player, Ronaldo; the removal of one English talisman - Beckham - and the irresistible instalment of another - Rooney. Ferguson has been instrumental in making the Premier League the most successful competition in football, and he has endured while the mountains of cash have turned to valleys of debt. Throughout, award-winning journalist Patrick Barclay has been pitch-side and spoken to all those who know Ferguson best - fellow managers, former players, colleagues and commentators. The result is Football - Bloody Hell!: the definitive work on the game's greatest living legend.

Sir Alex Ferguson, who retired in May 2013 as manager of Manchester United is the most success manager English football has ever seen. He was simultaneously the most admired and feared manager in British football. During almost forty years in the dugout, and over half a century in the professional game, he’s torn up the record books, amassed a treasure trove of silverware, and unleashed the hairdryer – as well as the odd football boot – on countless players, rival managers, referees and journalists. But amid the sound, the fury and the mind-games lurks one of sport’s greatest wits. So here we present Sir Alex Ferguson: uncompromising, unrivalled and uncut. On Arsène Wenger: ‘They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I’ve got a fifteen-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages.’ On Dennis Wise: ‘He could start a row in an empty house.' On referees: ‘Can anyone tell me why they give referees a watch? It’s certainly not for keeping the time.’ On his humble beginnings: ‘People say mine was a poor upbringing. I don't know what they mean. It was tough, but it wasn't bloody poor. We maybe didn't have a TV. We didn't have a car. We didn't even have a phone. But I thought I had everything, and I did: I had a football.’ After the winning the European Cup in 1999: ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Football, eh? Bloody hell.’

Football. Bloody hell.' The longest serving and most successful manager in British football history shocked the world by finally retiring in May 2013 and instantly created more column inches and twitter mentions that the death of Margaret Thatcher. And he wasn’t just the greatest, but also one of the most outspoken, engaging and witty voices from the game, as this book proves. Here is the history of his supreme verbal sparring during his years at Manchester United - the man in his own words (with a few additional thoughts from those who knew him best and crossed swords with him most). 'There's nothing wrong with losing your temper once in a while if it's for the right reasons' 'If he was an inch taller he’d be the best centre-half in Britain. His father is 6ft 2in – I’d check the milkman' On Gary Neville 'He could start a row in an empty house' On Denis Wise 'The list of gentle, naturally retiring men who have been successful in their attempts at running clubs isn't a long one, is it?

Ferguson's own autobiography was a great bestseller on its publication in 1999. But Fergie's book told the story through only one pair of eyes. Now, Michael Crick, acclaimed biographer of Jeffrey Archer, writes the first fully rounded, independent portrait of Sir Alex. From his roots as a Govan trade unionist to the current peaks of world football, Crick applies the same forensic skills he applied to his study of the disgraced Tory peer. Through hundreds of interviews with those who've known and worked with Sir Alex, and delving back through the archives, Michael Crick explores the money and the politics of football, the bust-ups, the fights, and those memorable moments of glory. Charismatic and charming, volcanic and ruthless, searingly ambitious and astonishingly successful. What makes Sir Alex Ferguson tick? How did this complex character become the most successful manager in British football, producing -- first at Aberdeen and now at Manchester United -- two of the most prolific trophy-grabbing machines in the modern game? THE BOSS is essential reading not just for Manchester United fans and football followers in general, but for anyone interested in the skills of successful management.

Human beings are the only creatures known to engage in sport. We are sporting animals, and our favourite pastime of football is the biggest sport spectacle on earth. The Philosophy of Football presents the first sustained, in-depth philosophical investigation of the phenomenon of football. In explaining the complex nature of football, the book draws on literature in sociology, history, psychology and beyond, offering real-life examples of footballing actions alongside illuminating thought experiments. The book is organized around four main themes considering the character, nature, analysis and aesthetics of football. It discusses football as an extra-ordinary, unnecessary, rule-based, competitive, skill-based physical activity, articulated as a social (as opposed to natural) kind that is fictional in character, and where fairness or fair play – contrary to much sport ethical discussion – is not centre stage. Football, it is argued, is a constructive- destructive contact sport and, in comparison to other sports, is lower scoring and more affected by chance. The latter presents to its spectators a more unpredictable game and a darker, more complex and denser drama to enjoy. The Philosophy of Football deepens our understanding of the familiar features of the game, offering novel interpretations on what football is, how and why we play it, and what the game offers its followers that makes us so eagerly await match day. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the world’s most popular game or in the philosophical or social study of sport.

In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century, Europe's two great socialist empires collapsed suddenly. After years of subservience to Moscow and Belgrade, national leaders at the margins of the Soviet and Yugoslav spheres now played for the highest stakes. What had previously been administrative internal borders became wild international frontiers where sickening violence reared its ugly head amongst the peoples of Eastern Europe. Journalist Rob O'Connor follows those peoples for whom sovereignty and freedom have come at the highest price, telling their stories from the perspective of that ultimate laboratory of social science, the football pitch. As new nations have sought to rescue what is left of their cultures from the wreckage of forced Sovietisation, football has joined up the past with a deeply uncertain present. In these stories, the game is played both as an act of resistance and as an act of rebuilding. It represents ideas about identity and community – a pacifist's alternative to the butt of a rifle. In war, football survives to remind people of their humanity.

Frank Worrall is a journalist who writes regularly for the Sunday Times and the Sun. He is also the author of number one bestseller Roy Keane: Red Man Walking, and countless football books including Rooney: Wayne's World, Giggsy and The Magnificent Sevens.

Remember when Zinédine Zidane lifted the World Cup in 1998? Kylian Mbappé doesn't. The forward wasn't born when the French team first became world champions. But it was Mbappé's unique talent that helped France reach the summit of world football once again in 2018, erasing years of failure, rancour and shame. For Les Bleus, the road between these two highs was blighted by bitterly painful lows. Zidane's headbutt; a players' strike; infighting and recriminations; even sex scandals and blackmail. Mbappé witnessed it all as he honed his prodigious talent in the banlieues of Paris, and his story embodies France's journey from disaster to triumph. In Sacré Bleu, Matthew Spiro traces the rise, fall and rise again of Les Bleus through the lens of Kylian Mbappé. Featuring a foreword by Arsène Wenger and interviews with leading figures in French football, Spiro asks what went wrong for France and what, ultimately, went right.

Shortlisted for The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2019 Long before perma-tanned football agents and TV mega-rights ushered in the age of the multimillionaire player, footballers' wages were capped – even the game's biggest names earned barely more than a plumber or electrician. Footballing legends such as Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews shared a bond of borderline penury with the huge crowds they entertained on Saturday afternoons, on pitches that were a world away from the pristine lawns of the game's modern era. Instead of the gleaming sports cars driven by today's top players, the stars of yesteryear travelled to matches on public transport and returned to homes every bit as modest as those of their supporters. Players and fans would even sometimes be next-door neighbours in a street of working-class terraced houses. Based on the first-hand accounts of players from a fast disappearing generation, When Footballers Were Skint delves into the game's rich heritage and relates the fascinating story of a truly great sporting era.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.