Book: Own Goal - How Corruption, Egotism and Greed is Destroying Football - Simon Freeman (1999)

This is a fascinating book, a sort of non-fiction Fever Pitch which contains one journalist's views on how football is bouyant in the year 2000 but may well land up bankrupt in another few years.

Freeman is an ex-journalist on several serious newspapers - including the Sunday Times Insight team in the 1980s - who has some interesting things to say. Basically, the greed of £30,000 A week players (£100,000 by 2005) will destroy the game. Clubs like Freeman's boyhood Brighton & Hove Albion will become extinct.

It all makes sense, until you look at the game in 2006 which has been salvaged by multi-billionaires like Abrmovich and the new takeovers at West Ham, Liverpool (both by private billionaires) and Man Utd (thankfully by a relatively poor American who has put the scum £500m into debt - may they sink quickly!).

Freeman is right, though. I'm getting fed up with watching over-rated players on £100,000 a week. That includes the whole lot, even including Chelsea players (my club): Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney, Drogba, Henry; they are all vastly over-rated. You hear all the type - "England the best team in the world" before the 2006 World Cup, then turn out to be total rubbish - and watch these prima donnas on tv, live every week and they are always rubbish.

An excellent book by an author who also wrote a book about Rinkagate, the 1976 scandal that saw the downfall of North Devon MP Jeremy Thorpe.

Well worth reading.