Why am I passionate about this?
Growing up I was fanatical about football - playing, watching, reading and talking about it. I was also a little obsessed with its numbers, and apparently liked to recalculate league tables and goal differences in my head as the results came in on the BBC vidiprinter. Fast forward to University in the 1980s - a time when studying football’s business aspects was not common - I wrote my dissertation on the ‘Capital structure of Scottish football’. A Scottish perspective has remained present in much of my work, and I hope it also allows a little more distance when reflecting on the success and challenges faced by football in England.
Stephen's book list on football as a game, as business, and as community
Why did Stephen love this book?
Football is replete with characters and opinions.
The individual at the heart of this book, the legendary football manager, Brian Clough, had no shortage of either.
However, what is extraordinary about this book is that it introduces the reader to an entirely different version of Clough than the one we are most familiar with from the media.
It is a remarkable and scarcely credible story, one which is moving, and which highlights the kindness of the man, his family, and of many of the then players and employees of Nottingham Forest.
It also reminds us just how distant football, its clubs, and its star players and managers, have become from their people in recent decades.
1 author picked Be Good, Love Brian as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022
Craig Bromfield was just 13 years old when Brian Clough, on a whim, took him and his older brother Aaron in.
They came from Southwick, a depressed area of Sunderland, where they lived with their abusive stepfather, and from where they longed to escape. After initially meeting Clough while out begging for money, Clough later invited the brothers to stay at his house. From there a relationship formed which would see Craig living with the Cloughs for nine years, where he was a first-hand witness to the many…