Football Books

Unlike Cricket and Golf, Football was slow to foster a reading public and Victorian and Edwardian football books from the likes of Shearman, Alcock, Jackson and Catton are scarce and highly collectable. There are, of course, football annuals from the 1870s, which give a great sense of the early days of football and football history. Football books about tournaments took off in tandem with the development of the World Cup in 1930. Up until World War Two, however, the majority of football books published were instructional, although early club histories appeared for Sheffield Wednesday, Queens Park, Everton and others. The real explosion of the publishing industry bringing out football books followed WW2 and there are now many thousands of titles with most professional players rushing into print, many several times.