FIRST they were a let-down on the pitch, now they’re proving a let-down off it. Three months after England’s over-paid and over-hyped footballers skulked out of the World Cup quarter-finals, their cash-in books about the campaign and their careers so far are, with one notable exception, failing spectacularly to score with the book-buying public.

Take Wayne Rooney, who reportedly pocketed £4m-£5m from HarperCollins for a five-book deal. His first effort, My Story So Far, was rushed out in July after the World Cup but has notched up sales of just 28,000. By my calculations, that’s barely enough to pay back a tenth of the book’s supposed £1m advance.

Frank Lampard is not playing too well at the bookshop tills, either. His autobiography, Totally Frank, has managed only 20,000 sales. Little chance there, one would have thought, of the Chelsea dynamo earning back his healthy advance. And then there’s Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole, both of whom will have to perform spectacularly to justify their publishers’ faith. Cole got £250,000 for My Defence; Ferdinand what his publisher, David Wilson, says is a “high six-figure sum” for Rio: My Story. No sales figures are available yet for the two books — both have just been published — but the early signs for Cole aren’t promising. His Amazon website entry is littered with comments from disgruntled fans fuming about greed and betrayal. “I don’t understand why anyone would buy a book written by a self-obsessed money-grabbing chav,” spits one reviewer.

Partly, this slump in sales is simply about winning and losing. When England’s cricket team won the Ashes last year, cricket books flooded the bestseller lists. And when England lifted the 2003 rugby union World Cup, the captain, Martin Johnson, sold a whacking 220,000 copies of his autobiography, Jonny Wilkinson 120,000 of his book My World. Both players got only a fraction of the advance — low six-figure sums — that Rooney secured for My Story So Far.

But there’s more to it than that, as a look at the performance of the fifth England book published this autumn, Gerrard: My Autobiography, makes clear. Steven Gerrard was as culpable as Cole, Ferdinand, Rooney and Lampard for England’s poor showing at the World Cup, but he has something going for him that most of the others don’t — loyalty. And the numbers help to prove it: sales of 50,000 copies and counting, and top spot in this weekend’s Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller chart. “Gerrard has always been a one-club man,” says sports publisher Wilson, “and he’s a real boy’s own hero for Liverpool.”

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