Best football books to buy this Christmas 2026

Forget the socks. This is what you actually want in your stocking. 🧦

Finding the perfect Christmas gift for a football obsessive is notoriously tricky. Another club scarf? They already have four. A new replica kit? You’re staring down the barrel of £85 plus.

Fortunately, 2026 has delivered a vintage crop of football literature that makes wrapping up something thoughtful and genuinely thrilling easier than ever.

Whether the fan in your life craves raw, dressing-room exposés, forensic tactical deep dives, or the defining stories of a blockbuster year on the pitch, we’ve sifted through the shelves to bring you the best football books to gift (or treat yourself to) this festive season.

Faber & Faber
The Damned United
Written by: David Peace
Pages: 350+
Best for: Fans of gritty football history and cult classics.
Few football managers have ever captured the imagination quite like Brian Clough, and few books have captured his volatile genius quite like David Peace’s 2006 masterpiece. Rather than a conventional biography, The Damned Utd is a dark, gripping work of biographical fiction. It thrusts readers directly into the claustrophobic mind of 'Ol’ Big 'Ead' during his ill-fated, 44-day reign as Leeds United manager in 1974. Arriving without his trusted right-hand man Peter Taylor, Clough attempts to force his will upon a dressing room fiercely loyal to his bitter nemesis, Don Revie, with disastrous, hypnotic results.
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Pan Macmillan
Games of My Life
Written by: Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz
Pages: 336
Best for: Manchester United supporters and armchair tacticians.
Rather than walking through a traditional cradle-to-grave autobiography, Ferguson structures his journey around 21 defining matches that shaped his life and football philosophy. The journey begins long before the glory years at Old Trafford, reaching back to his Glasgow upbringing and formative playing days, before delving into his trophy-laden spells breaking the Old Firm stranglehold with Aberdeen and orchestrating United's two decades of Premier League dominance.
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Guardian Faber Publishing
A Woman's Game
Written by: Suzanne Wrack
Pages: 272
Best for: Anyone captivated by the explosion of women’s football.
Women’s football isn’t just riding a modern wave of popularity - it is reclaiming ground stolen from it over a century ago. In A Woman’s Game, award-winning Guardian journalist Suzanne Wrack delivers an essential, eye-opening account of a sport that was systematically suppressed before fighting its way back to global prominence.
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Brown Book Group
The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup
Written by: Jonathan Wilson
Pages: 608
Best for: Football obsessives who crave tactical depth and geopolitical intrigue.
In a year when World Cup fever took over North America, Jonathan Wilson delivered what many consider the definitive chronicle of football’s greatest spectacle. Renowned as one of the game’s finest historians and the mind behind Inverting the Pyramid, Wilson takes on a monumental task: charting nearly a century of the tournament, from Uruguay's 1930 all the way to Argentina’s triumph in Qatar.
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Merky Books
A New Formation
Written by: Calum Jacobs
Pages: 288
Best for: Readers who see football through the lens of music, style, and broader cultural history.
Football writing often reduces the experience of Black players strictly to the racism they endured. In A New Formation, writer and VICTORY magazine founder Calum Jacobs pushes past that narrow frame, offering a rich, celebratory, and urgent exploration of how Black British players didn't just participate in the sport - they redefined modern British culture.
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Amazon
Football, She Wrote
Written by: Various Authors
Pages: 304
Best for: Anyone who loves diverse storytelling, punchy essays, and hearing fresh, authentic voices.
For decades, the sports writing shelf was an almost exclusively male reserve. Football, She Wrote, published by Floodlit Dreams, shatters that old archetype spectacularly, bringing together an extraordinary collection of pieces written entirely by women who live and breathe the beautiful game.
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Apollo Publishers
Raised a Warrior
Written by: Susie Petruccelli
Pages: 224
Best for: Readers who love deeply personal sports memoirs and stories of resilience.
Before the professional boom, women who played football at an elite level did so purely for the love of the game - often carrying hidden scars along the way. In Raised a Warrior, winner of the prestigious Vikki Orvice Prize, Susie Petruccelli delivers an intimate, unflinching memoir that tracks her life from a starry-eyed, barefoot tomboy in southern California to captaining Harvard University's women's soccer team.
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Head of Zeus
Ultra
Written by: Tobias Jones
Pages: 224
Best for: Readers who love subculture and insight into fanbases.
Italy has some of the most violent football fans globally, and this investigative book delves deep into the right-wing subculture that is often compared to British hooliganism. Tobias Jones gets up close and personal with ultras from Italy's most prominent teams in an intense testament that won the Football Book of the Year.
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Harper Collins
Zonal Marking
Written by: Michael Cox
Pages: 448
Best for: Tactical obsessives and armchair managers.
If Jonathan Wilson wrote the gospel on ancient football tactics, Michael Cox authored the user manual for the modern era. In Zonal Marking, the Athletic analyst sets out an ambitious thesis: modern European football did not evolve by chance, but through a relay race of tactical revolutions passed from one domestic league to the next over three decisive decades.
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Century
How (Not) To Be Strong
Written by: Alex Scott
Pages: 224
Best for: Anyone inspired by resilience and fans of modern punditry.
Alex Scott is known to millions as one of the most recognisable, trailblazing faces in sports broadcasting, and before that, a serial winner who lifted 21 major trophies with Arsenal and earned 140 caps for the Lionesses. But in How (Not) To Be Strong, Scott strips away the polished television persona to deliver an autobiography of rare vulnerability.
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