Jonathan Wilson

MASTERFUL Time Out REVELATORY Scotland on Sunday GLORIOUSLY READABLE Metro FASCINATING Independent EXCELLENT Telegraph ABSORBING Guardian Winner of the British Sports Book Awards Football Book of the Year The fifteenth anniversary edition, fully revised and updated, of Jonathan Wilson's modern classic. In the modern classic, Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing...

"Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying aces, an object of thrilled adulation. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender" — Vladimir Nabokov. Albert Camus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Pope John Paul II, Julian Barnes, and not...

'A master at telling football's greatest ever stories... Breathtaking. Wilson's eye for detail and his elegant writing brings the World Cup to life like no other book on the topic I have ever read' ELIS JAMES 'Epic in scope, awesomely rich in detail, and compulsively entertaining' TOM HOLLAND 'So much of what we know of football's history we know thanks...

The football World Cup is the most watched sporting event on the planet. It has become a global obsession: 211 nations initially entered the 2022 edition. It has been running for almost a century. Yet there is no comprehensive history of the tournament. Based on fresh interviews and meticulously researched, The Power and the Glory will change that. By 1930,...

"Beautifully written and immaculately researched. Jonathan Wilson is the finest sports writer of his generation" - Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads In 1953, the Mighty Magyars beat England 6-3 at Wembley, a result that echoes through the history of football. A year earlier, this Hungarian team had won Olympic gold. A year later, they lost agonisingly in the...

Having invented the game, everything that has followed for England has been something of an anti-climax. There was, of course, the golden summer of 1966, when Alf Ramsey's radicalism in unveiling his wingless wonders in a World Cup quarter-final paid dividends. And there was the great period of English dominance on the world stage, which fell roughly between 1886 and...