Books
Unfit and Improper Persons: An Idiot’s Guide to Owning a Football Club
Ever dream of setting up your own football club?
Join the team behind The Price of Football podcast as they set up a (fictional) football club and discover what’s really going on behind the scenes of the beautiful game.
Buying a football club will set you back a few quid, but you’ve also got to pass the FA’s ‘fit and proper persons test’. That all seems like a bit of a faff to the team behind the award-winning podcast The Price of Football, so acclaimed comedy writer Kevin Day, football finance expert Kieran Maguire and producer Guy Kilty start an imaginary club instead.
In Unfit and Improper Persons they take West Park Rovers* on a hilarious journey from the lowest level of the FA pyramid right up to the English Football League, the Premier League and, if fortune favours the fictional, into the heart of Europe.
Who Are Ya?: 92 Football Clubs – and Why You Shouldn’t Support Them
artly autobiographical, partly polemical, but mostly funny, Who Are Ya? is a snapshot of modern football, exploring the history of all 92 English Football League clubs .
During his time as a broadcaster, comedian and former Match of the Day presenter Kevin Day has spoken to thousands of football players, managers and most importantly fans from across the generations. He spent thousands of hours crossing the country on trains, planes, automobiles, coaches – and once a donkey called Lightning – watching football at all levels. This book is the result of that: a tale of being chased down a railway line at Cardiff, a story of meeting George Best, an account of a lady getting her first Hull City tattoo at the age of 80!
Crisply funny and with a host of celebrity football fan contributors – including Stephen Fry, Jo Brand, Alfie Boe, Eddie Izzard, Gabby Logan, and Romesh Ranganathan – Who Are Ya? celebrates the joys and miseries of being a football supporter.
The Price of Football: Understanding Football Club Finance
Kieran Maguire, one of the UK’s top football finance analysts, shows how professional clubs operate as businesses and explains, in non-technical language, how to read, understand and interrogate club accounts.
As a clear-headed analysis and presentation of the financial imperatives and challenges facing football clubs across the English and Scottish Leagues, it has become a welcome resource not only for students of the industry, but by a wider constituency of supporters looking to understand their club’s latest transfer deal, or season ticket price.
This revised and updated second edition includes analysis of the most recent club accounts, as well as the impact of Covid-19 on the game’s finances, the latest legal rulings on club affairs, and expanded coverage of the “creative accounting” ploys that some notable clubs have used.