Sports History

The 1988 Seoul Olympics played host to what has been described by some as the dirtiest race of all time, by others as the greatest....

Alan Shipnuck, the New York Times bestselling author of Phil, returns with a major work of insider reporting on the battle for the soul of professional golf between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-funded LIV Golf League....

An unforgettable British underdog story from one of our greatest narrative nonfiction writers, John Preston, and the international musical icon and bestselling author, Sir Elton John....

Girls Don't Play Sport is a fierce manifesto advocating for female athletes at all levels. It explores how we got to this point and asks where we need to go next to embrace the untapped potential of women's sport....

Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult reveals how England transformed the way Test Cricket is played....

Australia enjoys a rich sporting heritage. Our small population has yielded a disproportionate number of champions....

Cricket 2.0 tells the story of how an old, traditional game was transformed by Twenty20 and how this format moved from being a gimmick to the face of modern cricket....

This is the inside story of how England won the T20 Cricket World Cup, and where they go from here - from the players and key people involved....

From Shaolin warrior monks to the movies of Bruce Lee, a new history of the evolution of East Asian styles of unarmed combat, from kung fu to ninjutsu....

A quarter of a million people braved miserable conditions at Epsom Downs on June 2, 1954, to see the 175th running of the prestigious Derby Stakes....

The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity....

Best-selling surf writer Tim Baker tells this implausible story in an irresistible series of ripping yarns, offering rich life lessons, a maverick business primer and a wild ride of adventure, good times and outlandish ambitions spectacularly realised....  

The astonishing history of the rise, fall and rise again of women's football, A Woman's Game explores the history of women's football from the Victorian era to the present day....

Downloaded over 10 million times a year, The Football Ramble podcast has established itself as the essential independent voice of football punditry....

When cycling commentator Ned Boulting bought a length of Pathé news film featuring a stage of the Tour de France from 1923, he set about learning everything he could about it - taking him on an intriguing journey that encompasses travelogue, history and detective story....

The GAA is Ireland's largest civil society organisation, woven into the fabric of families and communities - and yet most books about Gaelic games focus on the greatest players and inter-county teams. This is the Life takes a witty and provocative look at grassroots GAA....

An entertaining look at one of sport's greatest rivalries - the Ashes - by former England spin bowler Graeme Swann....

From the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame comes a sweeping and lively history of the National Football League, timed to coincide with the NFL's 100th-anniversary season....

An entertaining collection of insider yarns by an Aussie Test cricket legend....

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes....

Former NFL general manager and three-time Super Bowl winner Michael Lombardi takes listeners on the ultimate journey through the NFL's history to present his calls on the greatest players and coaches the sport has ever seen....

For more than 30 years, H. G. Nelson has been finding the poetry in the punt and humour during half-time. Now, he turns his keen eye for facts and folly to the illustrious history of our great sporting nation....

The epic tale of the five owners who shepherded the NFL through its tumultuous early decades and built the most popular sport in America....

Born out the docks in the Victorian East End, Millwall and West Ham United's rivalry precedes the formation of both football clubs. The two areas of East London viewed each other with suspicion and discontent—something that only heightened after Millwall's move south of the River Thames in 1910....

Bestselling author Cass Pennant takes an engaging and unparalleled look at some of the most volatile and violent scenes of fans following their football clubs to have unfolded over the past five decades, and examines the lengths to which many will go to put one over their local rivals....

On the 9th August 2013 the Australian cricket team will step onto the Emirates Durham International Cricket Ground for a history making Ashes Test - the first ever on Durham soil. However there is a already a solid historical link between Australia and the county and nowhere is this more obvious than in ten matches arranged between Australia and a variety of sides in Sunderland between 1878 and 1977.

It’s an underdog story everyone thinks they know. Derrike Cope, an unheralded outsider from Spanaway, Washington, was running second to Dale Earnhardt on the last lap of the 1990 Daytona 500. As Derrike followed Earnhardt into the final corner, “The Intimidator” cut down a tire, handing Derrike his first career NASCAR Cup Series victory in just his 72nd start.

Watford Forever is the remarkable story of Elton John's ownership of Watford FC and its transformational journey to the top of the First Division under iconic manager Graham Taylor. Perhaps most remarkably, four of the same players who had been written off as has-beens went with them all the way from the bottom to the top.

Sport is an enduring element of British life and culture. Few other strands of Britain's history touch on so many significant aspects of past and present. And that's apart from the on-field action - the triumphs and heartbreaks that have become part of the national narrative. For a country so obsessed with the invention, playing and watching of sport, the story of how it has come to reflect us remains untold. More Than a Game tracks each game as a driver of social change, a vibrant expression of Britain's identity

Marion Motley was recognized as one of the gridiron's most outstanding players when he was enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1968. His legacy as one of four Black players to reintegrate pro football in 1946 helped blaze a path for Black athletes in the highest echelons of professional sports. This book tells Motley's story of adversity, personal tragedy, and triumphs using archival interviews and new interviews with historians, friends, and descendants.

After one win in 17 by the start of the summer of 2022, England needed something new. For 145 years, Test cricket was played mainly in one way: batters laid a foundation before daring to attack – and, even then, only if circumstances were favourable. Bowlers tried to bowl maidens, calculating that they would eventually force an error. But the old ways weren’t working. Then came ‘Bazball’, driven by new head coach in Brendon (‘Baz’) McCullum and captain Ben Stokes. 

Over the past two years, professional golf has been at war, and Alan Shipnuck is our most trusted correspondent. Following closely on the heels of his New York Times bestselling sensation, Phil, Shipnuck turns to LIV Golf’s controversial – and belligerent – storming of the professional golf world. In LIV and Let Die, Shipnuck delivers the inside story in real time, with fly-on-the-wall reporting from the yachts where LIV was hatched and within the corridors of power as the PGA Tour flailed to fend off the threat.

For five years Peter Ueberroth spearheaded the committee that oversaw the 23rd Olympiad held in Los Angeles, California. While the athletes trained, competed, and qualified, this future baseball commissioner and his committee—primarily comprised of business leaders and entrepreneurs—tackled the financial, political, and logistical problems they faced. Made in America is a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at what Ueberroth and his colleagues encountered on the road to the 1984 games

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators.

Who won the first Daytona 500? Fans still debate whether it was midwestern champion Johnny Beauchamp, declared the victor at the finish line, or longtime NASCAR driver Lee Petty, declared the official winner a few days after the race. Author John Havick interviewed scores of people, analyzed film of the race, and pored over newspaper accounts of the event. He uses this information and his deep knowledge of the sport as it worked then to determine what probably happened. But he also tells a much bigger story.