3 days ago
Scoring book goals as the English Premier League kicks off
The football season starts this weekend with the English Premier League (EPL) getting underway with defending champions Liverpool taking on Bournemouth. Although most European nations have their own football league, the EPL has a special place in the football calendar, and is one of the most followed sports leagues in the world, with a viewership of more than 4 billion people spread across more than 150 nations.
The fact that it retains its appeal over a period of 9–10 months (the 2025–2026 season will end on 24 May 2026) every year makes this all the more staggering. A huge reason for the popularity of the EPL is the presence of some of the most high-profile players and managers in the league and also its rich history, with many clubs going back more than a hundred years.
Small wonder that the EPL and the clubs involved in it have a global following, with fans wearing player jerseys and waving pennants and scarves even thousands of miles away from the UK. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about or just want to know more about the nuances of the league, there is plenty of reading material around.
Football is a bit more than a kick in the grass and twenty-two people trying to put a leather ball in goals on two extremes of a 100-yard-or-so ground. There is a lot of thinking, planning, and strategising that goes around in the sport.
If you want to know what to look out for, or to figure out what the commentators are talking about, then Tifo Football Channel's How To Watch Football: 62 Rules for Understanding the Beautiful Game, On and Off the Pitch is the best book for you. This 256-page compact volume comes with a number of illustrations and is literally a primer for the game, explaining formations, strategies, playing positions, the transfer market, and even exploring beliefs and myths around the game. It is beautifully designed and simple to read. It is not EPL-centric but would definitely help you understand the league better.
A more detailed look at the evolution of how football is played in the EPL is found in Michael Cox's The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines, which covers the manner in which EPL teams play the game and how it has evolved. It does need an update as it does not have enough of the Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp era, but Cox writes smoothly and actually ends up giving a history of sorts of the EPL and different characters in it, from the legendary Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger to the mercurial Jose Mourinho and the steady Harry Redknapp. Over about 550 pages, Cox not only gives you a detailed look at EPL football strategy but even a snappy history of EPL itself.
A very dramatic history of the league is provided by Jim White's Premier League: A History in Ten Matches, which picks ten important matches from the league and narrates their impact on the growth of the league over the years. Many might not agree with the choice of matches, but White captures the excitement of the league through them, with detailed previews and analyses of the aftermaths of each match.
Gavin Newsham also takes a similar approach to telling the story of the EPL, but he uses quotations by different people and comments in the media in his extremely readable You Can't Win Anything With Kids: A History of the English Premier League Told Through Quotes. The title itself comes from football pundit and former player Alan Hansen's legendary prediction about Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in 1995, after the team lost its opening game of the season. United went on to win the EPL more times than any other team.
This and many other quotes are used skilfully by Newsham as he takes the reader through an EPL journey. Of course, Eric Cantona's epic statement after assaulting a spectator is there: 'When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.'
Football data freaks should make a beeline for Ian Graham's How to Win the Premier League: The Inside Story of Football's Data Revolution, which explains how data was used to influence football strategy in the EPL. Graham had worked with Liverpool as Director of Research during the years of Jurgen Klopp, and his narration of how the club and the EPL analysed data around formations and different segments of the match is an eye-opener. What's more, it is one of the most recent books in the list, and brings you right up to the 2025 season!
A more sombre and human look at the man running a football team is seen in Michael Calvin's Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager, which looks at the role of the modern football manager. It is a life full of pressure from players, fans, and board members, where a summary sacking is never far from the horizon. Calvin interviews a number of football managers including Sean Dyche, Brendan Rogers, and Eddie Howe to capture the challenges and insecurities of what is perhaps the EPL's toughest job.
For those who just want to get an idea of why the EPL is the phenomenon it is, without getting too wrapped up in football technicalities, David Goldblatt's The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain is the perfect book. Goldblatt has written extensively on the sport from a social perspective, and his take on why English football enjoys the stature it does and why it means so much to many people is a terrific read, hailed as the social history of the EPL.
The 400-odd-page book begins with Sir Richard Turnbull's famous quote about the sport: 'When the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind only two monuments—one was the game of association football, the other was the expression 'F*** off',' and winds its way through the emergence of the league, and its various aspects that make it so popular.
Note that we say 'popular' rather than 'success,' because Goldblatt is not too enamoured of the commercialisation that is part and parcel of the EPL. Hardcore football fans might not quite like it, but this is as good a study of the EPL as it gets. Those who cannot understand the popularity of the sport itself can read another Goldblatt classic, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, which spans more than a thousand pages but is a must-read for those wanting to know more about soccer and society.
Because like it or not, football is important to millions of people around the world. As the legendary Bill Shankly, the man who made one of the EPL's most famous clubs, Liverpool, a household name, is believed to have said: 'Somebody said that football's a matter of life and death to you, I said 'listen, it's more important than that.''
