Product Description

Who controls football in Britain today? The FA? The clubs? The fans? The shocking reality is that organised crime is moving in more aggressively than a Wayne Rooney tackle and there's little the authorities can do about it. "Football and Gangsters" is a revealing investigation into how organised crime has begun to take hold behind the scenes of professional football. Michael Owen, Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Fowler are just some of the sport's big names to have fallen foul of the game's godfathers and paid the price. Their alarming stories are told here. Criminal organisations have manoeuvred themselves into a position of power in football. Drug dealers launder money by buying clubs; hooligan gangs have muscled their way into the boardroom; and the influence of Asian betting rings continues to grow. Through a series of dangerous undercover investigations, along with interviews with players, club officials, police and the underworld figures responsible, the sensational evidence is laid bare in this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7939 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 202 pages

About the Author
Former investigations editor at the Sunday Mirror, Graham Johnson is now a full-time crime writer and author of the bestselling Powder Wars and Druglord.

Customer Reviews

Gripping - gets you by the balls!
It could have been easy to dislike this book: written by a seasoned tabloid crime hack, it dishes the dirt on how gangsters have tried to muscle in on football - and frequently succeeded. The writer is an unashamed cynic about his own profession, making no apologies for the behaviour of 'Her Majesty's Press' (a phrase nicked, I believe, from the brilliant comedy Hot Metal), but he tells it like it is and, moreover, delivers each fascinating story with a grim humour and an elegant turn of phrase. More than that, he names names - big ones too! Rooney, Gerrard, Owen (oh yes!)...they're all there, Liverpool clearly being the author's area of expertise.

Recently, a proposed book dealing with the seamier side of Wayne Rooney's story, Roo Unzipped, was strangled at birth through fear of legal action, but there is plenty here to reveal the dark side behind the boy wonder (little of it of his own doing, to be fair...but the people who surround him are a different matter).

I guess football and crime are both 'bloke' preoccupations, so female readers might get a little bored, but I for one found it (to coin a literary word that sounds as though it ought to have been a football word) 'unputdownable'.

I love the read about Liverpool
Hard hitting straight to the point and names all the big names, fantastic reading Graham well done again. If you like reading books set in Liverpool try Soft Target by Conrad Jones its a cracker. Both superb !!

My best Journo tales compilation - vol 1
For those interested in the dark underbelly of football, this is a useful reprise of some of the incidents that have involved or surrounded some of the sport's biggest names over the last decade. It doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know but reminds you of things you may have forgotten.

Johnson's style is inevitably journalistic which makes this book accessible but it also limits. There is a lack of depth and analysis and where he opens up a potentially rich seem, he fails to mine it. He doesn't name names probably on the adivce of lawyers but to be fair - naming the names of some of the characters he alludes to may well be damaging to his health.

If it has one failing it is the fairly simplistic black and white - good guys and bad guys lines he draws. And no one actually believes that the journalists are the good guys, the white knights fighting for truth and justice - clearly something the author would like to believe but cant quite succeed in even convincing himself.

Not the most intellectually challenging book but will pass the time on the plane heading to a European fixture or the supporter's bus heading to an away match.