Andrei Kanchelskis
Andrei Kanchelskis was born in Kirovograd, Ukraine, in 1969. In 1988 he began his playing career with Dynamo Kyiv – the most revered club in Soviet football. Following a year with Dynamo's Ukrainian rivals Shakhtar Donetsk, Sir Alex Ferguson made his move to bring Kanchelskis to Manchester United, months before the dissolution of the USSR. Kanchelskis beguiled fans at Old Trafford before he took his whirlwind wing play across the M62 to Goodison Park. A brief but memorable 18-month period at Everton was followed by spells at Fiorentina, Rangers and Manchester City, among others. He featured 36 times for Russia between 1992-1998, and currently resides in Moscow.
Andy Grant
Andy Grant was injured in an IED explosion in Afghanistan in February 2009 whilst on a tour for the Marines. In November 2010 he had his right leg amputated. Now a motivational speaker, world's fasted amputee over 10k and medal winning Invictus Games athlete, Andy Grant has never let life slow him down.
Arnie Baldursson and Gudmundur Magnusson
Arnie Baldursson and Gudmundur Magnusson are the editors of the LFChistory.net website. deCoubertin Books published their book Liverpool: The Complete Record in August 2011 to critical and commercial acclaim. The pair enjoyed further acclaim with publication of The Liverpool Encyclopedia in September 2013. Their second edition of Liverpool: The Complete Record was published in Autumn 2014.
Bob Latchford
Bob Latchford was born in Birmingham in 1951 and started his professional football career with his home town club, Birmingham City, as a teenager. A strong, powerful, traditional English centre forward he became one of the most coveted players in the country, and it took a British record transfer fee to bring him to Everton in February 1974. In total he scored 138 goals in 289 Everton appearances in a seven year spell at Goodison, also earning 12 England caps. He later played for Swansea, NAC Breda, Coventry, Lincoln City and Newport County, finishing up at Merthyr Tydfil. He returned to St Andrews as a youth coach in the mid-1990s, but subsequently turned his back on football following the death of his wife.
He now lives in Germany with his partner and two youngest children.
Bruce Grobbelaar
Bruce Grobbelaar's life has been a path less trodden. Born in South Africa, he served in the Rhodesian Bush War before moving to Canada to play football for Vancouver Whitecaps. He arrived in England, initially on loan at Crewe Alexandra. Later, Bob Paisley – Liverpool's most successful manager – decided to sign him as a replacement for the great Ray Clemence. Grobbelaar spent nearly 15 seasons at Anfield where he won 19 medals. The match fixing allegations followed, along with shorter spells at six other English clubs. He now splits his time between North America and the UK.
Clyde Best MBE
Clyde Best MBE was born in Bermuda in 1951. Described by Ron Greenwood, as ‘the best 17 year-old I have ever seen', the centre forward was signed by the West Ham as a teenager and spent eight years at Upton Park. He developed a reputation as a powerful, bustling centre-forward attracting widespread respect for defying the racism endemic in English football at the time. In 186 games for West Ham he scored 47 goals before embarking on a successful playing career in the United States. In the 1990s he worked as a coach, also managing the Bermudan national team. Best was inducted into the Bermuda National Sports Hall of Fame in 2004. He was awarded an MBE in the January 2006 New Year's Honours list for services to football and the community in Bermuda.
Colin Grainger
Colin Grainger was born on 10 June 1933 in Havercroft, West Yorkishire. He began his professional playing career with Wrexham in 1950, and went on to represent Sheffield United, Sunderland, Leeds United, Port Vale, Doncaster Rovers and Macclesfield Town. He earned seven England caps in the 1950s, and as a singer was signed to HMV. His brother, John Grainger, and cousins, Dennis Grainger, Jack Grainger and Edwin Holliday all enjoyed professional football careers as well.
Dave Hickson
Dave Hickson was born in Salford in 1929 and brought up in Ellesmere Port. His association with Everton Football Club started as a teenager during the Second World War and over two spells, which dovetailed time at Aston Villa and Bill Shankly's Huddersfield, Hickson scored 111 goals for the club and brought light to Evertonians during one of the darkest periods in the club's history. In 1959 he joined Liverpool, a transfer that outraged fans on either side of the Merseyside divide. He subsequently played for Tranmere Rovers, in the process becoming the only footballer to play on all 'three sides of the Mersey'. Named one of Everton's Millennium Giants, he died in July 2013 following a short illness.
David Bevan
David Bevan has written for the Guardian and Daily Mirror. He is a season ticket holder at Leicester City and attended every game home and away in the club's most incredible season.
The Unbelievables is his first book.
David Fairclough
David Fairclough was born in Liverpool in January 1957 and joined his boyhood club as a schoolboy striker. He exploded onto the scene as a 19 year old, his goals helping propel Liverpool to a League and UEFA Cup double – the first silverware of an extraordinary trophy-laden haul over a seven-year first team Anfield career. Despite many crucial goals, a guaranteed starting place was often elusive and he became universally known as 'Supersub'. Fairclough later played in Canada, Switzerland and Belgium as well as spells with Norwich City, Oldham Athletic, Tranmere Rovers and Wigan Athletic. Now a respected football analyst, Fairclough is a familiar face on LFCTV and remains a revered Liverpool legend.
Ewan MacKenna
Ewan MacKenna is an award-winning journalist and author. A former Irish Sportswriter of the Year, he is a columnist with the Irish Independent and has also contributed internationally to the New York Times, Bleacher Report, ESPN and Independent.
Federico Farcomeni
Federico Farcomeni is the author of George Raynor: The Untold Story of English Football's Forgotten Giant. He is a multi-lingual journalist (Italian, English, Spanish) who has been working at all media levels as a sports journalist during the last nine years. He has contributed to the Daily Mirror, Independent, Blizzard, FourFourTwo, Goal.com, La Gazzetta dello Sport and the occasional talk on BBC World Service and as well as Italian radio stations.
Gavin Buckland
Gavin Buckland is official statistician to Everton Football Club and has written a number of books about the club, including Strange But Blue and two editions of the Never Mind the Toffees quiz book. He is a long-standing contributor to the Everton match-day programme and Everton magazine. Gavin also collaborated with John Keith on 2008 Reasons Why Merseyside is the Capital of Football, a compendium celebrating 125 years of football in the city. He has checked the questions for BBC TV's A Question of Sport for more than 20 years, and has set questions for several football-related TV quiz series. His second title with deCoubertin Books, Boys from The Blue Stuff was published in August 2021.
Howard Gayle
Howard Gayle was born in Toxteth, Liverpool in 1958. When his family were moved out of L8 due to the containerisation of the city's docks in the early part of the 1960s, a childhood spent in Norris Green had a profound influence on the rest of his life. A Liverpool supporter, he followed the team home and away as a self-confessed football hooligan before he emerged from the terraces as a first team player. Howard later joined Birmingham City, taking in spells at Sunderland and Blackburn Rovers also. He now lives back in Liverpool's south end, on the streets where he spent his earliest years.
Howard Kendall
Born in Ryton-on-Tyne in 1946, Howard Kendall started his illustrious football career with Preston North End as a 15-year-old wing half and in 1964 became the youngest player to appear in an FA Cup Final. He signed for Everton in 1967 and became one of the club's greatest players, winning the League Championship and serving as captain. He later played for Birmingham City and Stoke City, before turning to management with Blackburn Rovers. In 1981 he embarked on the first of three managerial spells at Everton, twice winning the League Championship, the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners Cup. Kendall was also twice crowned Manager of the Year. He left to join Athletic Bilbao in 1987, interspersing spells back at Goodison with interludes at Manchester City, Notts County and Sheffield United. Named Everton's Manager of the Millennium, he remained a popular face at Goodison Park until his death in October 2015.
Ian Laschke
Ian Laschke is the author of the Rothmans Book of Football League Records 1888-89 to 1978-79. A keen eye for stats, he lives in Woking.
Iñigo Gurruchaga
Iñigo Gurruchaga was born in the Basque city of San Sebastián-Donostia. He has lived in London for many years working as a journalist. In English, he is co-author, with John Bew and Martyn Frampton, of Talking to Terrorists (Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country). He is the author in Spanish of Staff, Noches en El Continental, based on his experience as a hotel night porter in London, El Modelo Irlandés, a reportage on the Northern Ireland peace process, and Scunthorpe Hasta la Muerte, based on the travels of Alex Calvo García in English football.
Jack Gordon Brown
Jack Gordon Brown was born in London. After studying journalism at the University of Salford, he became an editor at deCoubertin books in 2016. He collaborated with Philip Ross and James Corbett on Faith of Our Families: Everton: An Oral History. Jack worked with Philip Ross for the second time on England: The Complete Record, published in 2018. Jack recently worked with Tatenda Taibu on his autobiography.
James Corbett
James Corbett is a sports correspondent and award-winning author who writes about football for publications including The Blizzard, FourFourTwo, World Soccer and contributes to the BBC World Service's World Football programme. He worked with Neville Southall and Howard Kendall on their autobiographies and his Everton Encyclopedia was published to acclaim in autumn 2012. In 2017, his oral history of Everton, Faith of our Families, was a commercial and critical success.
James Montague
James Montague is the author of When Friday Comes: Football, War and Revolution in the Middle East. Hailed by Grant Wahl as ‘the Indiana Jones of Soccer Writing', he writes about football for the New York Times, Blizzard, World Soccer and CNN.com, and can be heard regularly on the BBC World Service's World Football Show. His last book, Thirty One Nil: On the Road with Football's Outsiders, won Football Book of the Year at the 2015 British Sports Book of the Year awards.
John Duerden
Born and bred in Blackburn, John Duerden writes about football for a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, ESPN, World Soccer, FourFourTwo and Associated Press. Married with two daughters, When Rovers Won the Premier League (2019) will be his fourth book, though only the third in English.
John Northcutt & Steve Marsh
John Northcutt was a lifelong West Ham fan and author of several books on the Hammers. John passed away in 2018. Steve Marsh is curator of the West Ham United Online Museum. They are the co-authors of West Ham: The Complete Record.
Josh James, Andy Kelly and Mark Andrews
Josh James has written for the Arsenal matchday programme since 2001 but been a supporter of the club all his life. A regular matchday reporter and commentator for first-team games on Arsenal.com, Josh is also the resident statistician in the club's media department, and has edited the official handbook for each of the past 17 seasons. He has contributed to several titles, including the Arsenal Opus, The Immaculate Season and Kings of Cardiff.
Mark Andrews has been a supporter of Arsenal since the early 70s and is a columnist for the Arsenal matchday programme and official magazine, specialising in the club's history. He has several written books on the club, primarily based on the Plumstead period and runs thearsenalhistory.com with Andy Kelly.
Born into an Arsenal supporting family, Andy Kelly started watching the Gunners in the mid-1970s when he stood on the terraces with his dad and older brother. He has been collating information on the club for more than 40 years, and has written, and contributed to, many books about the history of the Gunners.
Mark Platt
Born and bred in Liverpool, Mark Platt has followed the Reds all his life and attended his first game in 1978. He started writing about the club in 1992, as a founding editor of XTRA Time Magazine and is a regular contributor to both the LFC matchday programme and official magazine. Platt has been employed by Liverpool Football Club since 2001, starting off as a journalist on the website before taking up a role as television producer when LFCTV launched six years later. He has penned nine previous books on Liverpool, including The Red Journey, Cup Kings 1965 & 1977, At The End Of The Storm and Joe Fagan: Reluctant Champion.
Martin Hardy
Martin Hardy is the northern football correspondent of the Times. He was short listed for best new writer at the Cross British Sportsbook awards for his first work, Touching Distance.
He has worked extensively in the north-east of England, previously for the Daily Mail and Independent. His knowledge of the region goes back as far as Kevin Keegan's first game for Newcastle United.
Rafa's Way is his third book.
Michael Walker
Michael Walker is a freelance reporter based in the North-east. Originally from Belfast, Michael studied at Newcastle University in the mid-1980s and after spells working in London and Manchester, returned to the North-east in 1995. He has been there ever since working for the Guardian, Independent and Daily Mail, while writing a regular saturday column for the Irish Times. One of those columns became the idea for his book Up There: The North-East, Football, Boom & Bust. His history of football in Ireland, Green Shoots, was published by deCoubertin Books in 2017.
Neil Atkinson & John Gibbons
Neil Atkinson's first game saw Liverpool win 5-0 and Gary Gillespie score a hat-trick. If ever a bar was too high… Since that halcyon day in 1986 Neil's gone to school, started and finished a Liverpool fanzine and performed a series of office jobs to varying degrees of success. Currently he is in the process of writing and producing cinema while presenting The Anfield Wrap in its myriad of forms. He is usually to be found in Liverpool city centre. Running late.
John Gibbons got his first Liverpool season ticket in 1992 when he was 10 years old. He's had it ever since. He has been to 10 of the 12 cup finals Liverpool have played in this time.
John's best imagined in a suit and carrying a trumpet rushing from A to B as he plays with a variety of bands in Liverpool who request his services. He organises and promotes the popular Dovedale Social music night on Penny Lane.
He has written for The Anfield Wrap about football and music since 2011. When time allows he writes for other Liverpool outlets about music. Neil and John present The Anfield Wrap on CityTalk 105.9 and get a load of people to come into a room and talk football with them. Their book Make Us Dream tells the story of Liverpool's 2013/14 season.
@knox_harrington @johngibbonsblog
Neville Southall MBE
Neville Southall was born in Llandudno in 1958. He left school at 16 and worked as a hod carrier, binman and waiter, while rising through the ranks of amateur and non-league football. His breakthrough in 1980 came with Bury, and a year later he joined Howard Kendall's Everton. Over a 16-year Goodison career Southall would go on to become the club's most decorated player, twice winning the League Championship and FA Cup, as well as the 1985 European Cup Winners Cup. He was awarded Footballer Writers' Player of the Year in 1985, an MBE in 1995 for services to football and is Wales's most capped player.
Nick Harris, Helen Harris & Paul Marshall
Nick Harris is chief sports news correspondent of the Mail on Sunday, editor of sportingintelligence.com and multiple winner of the SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year. Helen Harris was a journalist by training and former national press officer for Britain's largest natural history charities. She passed away in December 2020. Paul Marshall is an historian who became interested in Victorian race-walking when researching the life of an ancestor. He is editor of kingofthepeds.com.
Owen Amos
Owen Amos is a BBC journalist, working for radio and online. He started his career as a news reporter on the Northern Echo in Darlington. He has written for When Saturday Comes and the Wisden Almanack, and runs the website britishcoachesabroad.com. He was brought up near Darlington and now lives in London (with his wife and scarf collection). He is collaborating with India national team coach Stephen Constantine on his autobiography.
Paolo Condo
Paolo Condo is a reporter and commentator for Sky Italia, and a European Football Correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport. He is the only Italian journalist with a casting vote for the prestigious Ballon d'Or award.
Per Mertesacker
Per Mertesacker was a central defender for Hannover 96, Werder Bremen and Arsenal, playing 518 games across fourteen years as a professional. Born in Hanover, he has 104 caps for Germany. He works at Arsenal in their academy.
Philip Reade
Philip Reade, who has collaborated with Andy Grant in writing You'll Never Walk, is a journalist and documentary producer at LFCTV, Liverpool Football Club's TV channel.
Philip Ross
Philip Ross was born in Liverpool in 1967. He is a lifelong Everton and England supporter, with a background of research and database production. He launched the first Everton Former Players' foundation website and worked on the book Faith of Our Families: Everton: An Oral History. He worked with Jack Gordon Brown on England: The Complete Record.
Ragnhild Lund Ansnes
R. Lund Ansnes is an author, journalist and broadcaster. She is the author of three books about Liverpool FC and was the editor for the Norwegian translation of Bill Shankly's autobiography. Her speciality is storytelling and to make people open up in conversations with her — for books, on stage, for TV, podcasts and radio. She is married with two children and lives in Liverpool.
Richard Sydenham
Richard Sydenham was born into an Aston Villa-supporting family in Birmingham in 1974. He became a journalist in 1994 and initially wrote for newspapers in the West Midlands, predominantly on Aston Villa and Warwickshire CCC. He has mostly written on international cricket over the years for organisations including Reuters, the Associated Press (AP), Sunday Telegraph, Daily Star Sunday and more, before starting his own sports agency, Big Star Creations. This is his sixth book after previous ones included ghost-writing the autobiography of cricket great Curtly Ambrose (Time to Talk) and his publication on a Hollywood icon, Steve McQueen: The Cooler King – His Life Through His Movie Career, which won the Beverly Hills Book Awards' Biography of the Year.
Rick Glanvill & Paul Dutton
Rick Glanvill and Paul Dutton are well known to Blues fans, especially through the popular pre-match briefings on the official Chelsea website.
This is their second book collaboration; Paul previously provided the statistics section for Rick's critically-acclaimed Chelsea FC – The Official Biography.
Paul has been a Chelsea supporter since 1967, his first match being Manchester United at Stamford Bridge in March 1969, and is an East Stand season ticket-holder.
Paul is married and has four Chelsea-supporting children. He has been a regular contributor to the matchday programme since the mid-Eighties and the club's official statistician for ten years.
Rick is an award-winning writer and researcher and a Blues fan since the mid-Sixties. He began writing for Chelsea publications in 1993 and has several books about the club and its players to his credit, including the 2009 Sports Autobiography of the Year, Paul Canoville's Black And Blue. A Matthew Harding season ticket-holder, he has been Chelsea's official historian for a decade.
Rob Sawyer
Rob Sawyer was born in 1970 with Everton the cusp of clinching the league title for a second time under Harry Catterick's guiding hand. Regaled from a young age with stories of Dean, Lawton, Creswell, Collins, Kendall, Harvey and Ball – becoming anything other than the 4th generation of Evertonian in the family was never an option.
A columnist for the Toffeeweb independent Everton website, Rob is also a member of the EFC Heritage Society. He lives in Cheshire with his family, still making pilgrimages to Goodison Park and following the trials and tribulations of his local team Stockport County.
Ron Atkinson
Ron Atkinson was born in Liverpool in 1939, moving to Warwickshire as a child, where his football ability was recognised by Aston Villa; a club he would later manage. After ending his playing career at Oxford United where he was nicknamed 'The Tank', he entered coaching with Kettering Town in 1971, then moving to Cambridge United. Having developed his reputation at West Bromwich Albion as an advocate of expansive flair football, he would lead Manchester United to two FA Cup successes. He later won the League Cup twice, at Sheffield Wednesday and Villa, and managed in Spain with Atletico Madrid. His last job was with Nottingham Forest in 1999 before he entered the world of television punditry.
Simon Hart
Simon Hart has been working in sports journalism since the late 1990s and has been present at the past five World Cups. He reports on European football for UEFA's website and publications, and also writes for the Independent. His previous work includes Here We Go and in 2018, he released the critically acclaimed World in Motion.
Simon Hughes
Simon Hughes is a journalist for The Athletic. Simon is the author of five books: Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout (2009), Red Machine (2013) — the winner of the Premio Antonio Ghirelli prize as Italian soccer foreign book of the year — Men in the White Suits (2015), Ring of Fire: Liverpool into the 21st Century (2016), and On the Brink: A Journey Through Football's North West (2017).
Simon Mullock
Simon Mullock is the Chief Football Writer at the Sunday Mirror.
Stephen Constantine
Stephen Constantine has managed six national teams, which is more than any other Englishman. His first national job was in Nepal in 1999; he has since managed India, Sudan, Malawi, and Rwanda. Born in London, and raised in England and Cyprus, Constantine also spent a year as Millwall's first team coach. He is now in charge of the Pakistan national team, and runs FIFA courses for coaches and players around the world.
Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson was born in Birkenhead in 1961. A lifelong Evertonian, he has studied, lived and worked – and followed the club home-and-away – from places as varied as Ellesmere Port, Sheffield, Bristol, Epsom and central London. In 2006 he combined a passion for statistics and all things Everton and launched the popular website evertonresults.com. He now lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and two children.
Everton: The Official Complete Record is his first book. A second edition of Johnson's seminal work was published in Autumn 2016.
Tatenda Taibu
Tatenda Taibu was born in Highfield, Harare, on 14 May 1983. He represented Zimbabwe in 28 test matches and 150 One Day International, and has also represented teams across the globe.
Terry Crouch
Terry Crouch was an amateur football player, coach and historian, who authored the first two editions of The World Cup: The Complete History.
He was educated in Barnet, where he played in amateur football leagues and managed to continue supporting Queens Park Rangers while living in Garstang, Lancashire, with his wife and five children. He compiled and wrote two editions of The World Cup: The Complete History, dedicating them to his uncle, Laurie Crouch; his cousin, friend and team-mate, Michael 'Martin' Lannon; and, with love, to his father, Barry Crouch. He died in January 2009, after which the author and sports journalist, James Corbett, took over updating his seminal work.
Tim Rich
Tim Rich has spent a quarter of a century writing about sport, starting on the Sunderland Echo, where he was the paper's cricket correspondent. He had two spells working for the Independent, sandwiched between three years as the Daily Telegraph's northern football correspondent. He has covered five World Cups, three European Championships and seven European Cup finals.
Tony Coton
Born in Tamworth, Tony Coton played more than 500 games during a 16-year goalkeeping career with Birmingham City, Hereford United, Watford, Manchester City, Manchester United and Sunderland. After retiring in 1997 with a broken leg he joined Sunderland as a reserve-team manager, before moving to Manchester United a year later to become their first full-time goalkeeping coach. He has worked as a scout for numerous clubs and served briefly as assistant manager to Mick Harford at QPR. He is now head of recruitment at Sunderland.
Webb Miller
Webb Miller (1891-1940) was an American journalist and war correspondent. He relocated to Europe during the First World War and lived for many years in London. For more than a quarter of a century he was one of the most brave and ubiquitous chroniclers of world affairs and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1937.
deCoubertin Books were proud to reissue his forgotten classic I Found No Peace in the UK in January 2011.