Gavin Cooney

OKAY, YOU’VE READ all the end-of-year lists suggesting some Christmas shopping in the sports book market, so you’ve heard all about your Johnny Sextons, your Conor Nilands, your Joe Cannings, your Richie Hogans. 

So here are a few stand-out sports books which may have escaped your attention across 2024. 

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Fiction has largely ignored the fertile world of sport, or at least any fiction worth reading. (We’re looking at you, Steve Bruce.) That has happily started to change in recent years, with Kathryn Scanlon’s Kick the Latch - an experimental novel in the world of horse racing – an utter delight from last year. 

This year brought Headshot, the debut novel from American writer Rita Bullwinkel, which was longlisted for both the Booker and William Hill sports book prizes for 2024.

This isn’t quite Rocky by Bullwinkel: she uses the device of a fictional girls’ boxing tournament in America to explore the interior lives and gritty realities of eight characters, exploring why they are driven to fight.  In some cases, committing to boxing is these characters means of finding a violence without to stave off a different kind of violence within. 

It perfectly captures the dawning for those at the high end of youth sport: how a sport in which you marinate as a youth will look merely like a brief, fleeting attraction later in life. 

More evocative still is how these boxers fight: the writing is at all times clear and gloriously muscular. It’s a gem. 

How to Win the Premier League by Ian Graham 

Now that we see literary fiction writers are finally dedicating themselves to sport, we should not be surprised there are a few theoretical physicists in the game. 

Ian Graham has a PhD in that realm but moved into football, initially consulting at Tottenham Hotspur before he followed colleague Michael Edwards to Liverpool, where he rose to become head of research, and an architect along with Edwards and Jurgen Klopp of one of the greatest teams in the club’s history. 

Liverpool fans hoping for a bit of juicy insight into the Klopp years here will likely be disappointed, but what emerges instead is a clear picture into how the elite end of the sport actually works nowadays, happily accompanied by Graham’s wry sense of humour. This is timely, given the new trend of celebrity football executives and the wider interest in data, analytics, and of how clubs are run beyond just the dressing room. 

It’s not for everyone, but this writer found it genuinely interesting how Graham managed to figure out a means of measuring a footballer’s worth in data and numbers – this takes a certain kind of human creativity – while it also emerges that a blind belief in data and analytics will not save you, either.

As Graham says, Liverpool never signed a player without data analysis, but they never signed a player solely because of data analysis, either. Clubs can still only be successful if they get a series of brilliant people together in a room, and that usually means a kind of creative tension that will has an inherent sell-by date. 

Another selling point of this book: it officially settles the Messi/Ronaldo debate. 

Better Without the Ball by Dermot Keely and Neil O’Riordan

The League of Ireland is crammed full of great stories but disappointingly few of them have been committed to books. (How has Brian Kerr not yet done an autobiography?)

Recent books from Brian Gartland and Roddy Collins have been welcome, and to this we can add Dermot Keely’s memoir, published this year and written with Neil O’Riordan, who is chief sports writer with the Irish Sun. 

Keely is one of the truly great LOI characters, and thus this is a characteristically entertaining tour through that hardscrabble and sometimes knockabout world, filled as it with tales of feuds and fallings-out. Keely’s story is, however, shot through with a huge poignancy, as his son Alan died suddenly in May 2021. He was just 38.

“One of your kids should not die before you”, writes Keely. “Any parent who has lost a kid will tell you that you would go in the coffin yourself if it could bring them back. I was close to Alan, I even lived with him for a time with Dundalk, and our relationship survived the fact that I managed him, something which I had never wanted to do, never felt comfortable with and struggled to adapt to.

Alan’s mother Olive passed away within a few months of his death. Although she had not been well herself, I think it was too much for her to bear.

“Losing a child is like a sledgehammer and it sits with you every day. You do not get over it, you just learn to live with it, but you are in a different space, you have changed fundamentally.” 

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a garlanded American poet, non-fiction writer and cultural critic who has this year written a book that evades easy categorisation. 

This is a memoir, sure, but is digressive, poetic, utterly original and not exactly the most accessible text in this list. It follows the loose structure of a basketball match and preoccupies itself with LeBron James, who was born in Ohio a year before Abdurraqib himself.

But truly it’s more about the place that made LeBron rather than LeBron himself, which is also to say it’s about the place that made everyone who wasn’t LeBron, too: those who, like the author, found the ascension to whatever the hell is the American Dream wasn’t as easy as just hopping on an escalator.