A new biography of Stanley Matthews

Lords laid on a nifty do the other day for the British Sports Book Awards, which was a great reminder of the quality of so much sports writing here.

The best books duly won — Gideon Haigh’s perfectly pitched On Warne (Simon and Schuster), and the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh’s biblical Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong (Walsh must by now have an Armstrong-themed trophy cabinet the size of Sir Alex Ferguson’s). But if you want a tip for next year, keep an eye on my former colleague Jon Henderson’s staggeringly well-researched life of Stanley Matthews, The Wizard (Yellow Jersey Press).

It’s the first unauthorised biography of a man who was a global celebrity, and the most famous footballer in the world for a time. He died in 2000 and more than 100,000 people packed the streets for his funeral. The statistics of his career are staggering: he was 42 when he made his last appearance for England in 1957, more than 22 years after his first, and he was 50 when he played his last League match, for Stoke in 1965.

From very early on in his career he would regularly add upwards of 10,000 to a gate. Matthews helped pull in the highest crowd for an international match — an eye-watering 149,547 for Scotland v England in 1937. Apart from at the very end of his career, he never earned more from playing than £20 a week, the most you could make till the maximum wage was scrapped in 1961, though Matthews was always astute enough to market himself in other ways.

Through the agreeable mists of time, there is a perception that Matthews’s footballing life was unbuffeted by turbulence. Not so: he had uneasy relationships with four of his six managers.