Christmas books: Sharpe to the bottom of the glass

It's been a funny old year for the funny old game. And it will be chiefly remembered for the passing of our greatest footballer. But bear in mind, says John Tague, that the best football books of 2005 were of less elevated provenance

In a year dominated by the passing of the great George Best, it's fitting that there's a noticeable tone of nostalgia among the year's football books. Best himself, who did more to stock the book shelves with his continually recycled anecdotes than any other player, contributes his last in Hard Tackles and Dirty Baths (Ebury Press, £17.99). Supposedly the "inside story of football's golden age", it weaves personal recollection of Best's playing days with a season-by-season survey of football from the early 1960s to his retirement in 1974. As such it feels more the product of collaborator Harry Harris than Best himself, and - a few nice observations aside - makes an unsatisfying swansong for a footballer whose past ventures into print could be as entertaining as his exploits on the field.

The year's most outstanding book is easy to pick. Gary Imlach's My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes (Yellow Jersey £15.99) is a rich and satisfying look at the life of his father Stewart, a professional player whose career highlights included representing Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and winning the FA Cup with Notts Forest in 1959. It's a book that's difficult to define as it's so much more than the sum of its parts: a warm evocation of his father's life, and a frank and unsentimental examination of the lot of the professional footballer in the days when players were treated as little better than serfs by tyrannical managers and club chairmen. It also vividly sketches a lost time when fans and players lived side-by-side in the same community, the maximum wage made competition much closer not only within but also across divisions, and players didn't suffer constant scrutiny by a sensationalist and hysterical media. It's also a loving tribute from a son to his late father, and represents another triumph for the peerless imprint Yellow Jersey. If you're going to treat yourself to one sports book this year, make it this one.

Striking a different note in Pointless (Headline, £16.99), Jeff Connor writes comically of his experiences following Scottish football's perennial basement dwellers, East Stirlingshire. Comfortably Britain's worst team, the Shire, as they are known, have finished bottom of the Scottish Third Division three years on the run. The players earn no more than £10 a week (paid in coins), the manager works for free and the ever-absent chairman manoeuvres all season to sell the dilapidated ground from underneath the team with apparently no thought for where they might go. This could be a grim tale, but Connor has a keen eye for the ridiculous and his prose coolly brings out the absurdity of the sometimes hilarious situations he witnesses without ever patronising his subject.

The bulk of the year's other efforts are made up of that football staple, the player biography. The most notable are The Autobiography by Ryan Giggs (Michael Joseph, £18.99) and Patrick Vieira's My Autobiography (Orion, £18.99). The two have their strengths and weaknesses: the Giggs book is better written and with its insider's view of the rise of "Fergie's Fledglings" (Beckham, Scholes, the Nevilles et al) has a compulsive story to tell. Vieira tries to energise his effort with a couple of ill-judged stabs at controversy but his book is at its best when he comments as an outsider on the sometimes arcane practices of English football. While it would be unfair to describe either as bland, both lack a certain bite. Which is why Lee Sharpe's My Idea of Fun (Orion, £17.99) is so good. Sharpe was signed for Man Utd by Alex Ferguson back in 1988 and was a forerunner of the emerging Giggs generation. He was young, good-looking and played with a certain panache - but it's obvious he never really got on with his manager and still feels aggrieved at some of the infamous Ferguson tongue lashings he received. He has also been the subject of a number of lurid rumours about drug addiction, partying and "lifestyle" problems which he frankly discusses - and dismisses - here. Consequently (and unusually for books of this type) Sharpe's story is enlivened by an edge of anger. There are no cosy clichés recycled here; instead Sharpe voices direct and honest opinions about his experiences, good and bad, in the game. After he left United at his own request in 1996 he joined Leeds, but could not rescue a career that went into a steep decline. He retired, angry, disillusioned and somewhat lost, at 31. After a couple of years in the wilderness his life turned a corner (of sorts) this year when he appeared as a contestant on ITV's Celebrity Love Island. But in a genre more noted for playing safe with nondescript euphemisms, Sharpe's acerbic honesty about his mixed experiences in football makes for a refreshing and illuminating read.

Finally, no round up of the year can pass without a reference to the most charismatic manager to grace the Premiership since Brian Clough. The self-styled "special one", Jose Mourinho, is the subject of a glowing study by Patrick Barclay in Mourinho, Anatomy of a Winner (Orion, £14.99). Of his arrival, the great man himself has commented, "After 15 years, I'm an overnight success" - and it is the story of those 15 years that Barclay tells here. In so doing he creates a convincing portrait of a driven man tailor-made for managerial success. And with Mourinho's Iberian good-looks, his magnetism and his gift for controversy, I predict this to be the first of many titles that will wrestle with the enigma of the man in the grey coat. Maybe by the time Mourinho's finished with football, in terms of publishing at least, he'll have given even the prolific George Best a run for his money.