Watch Out

While I was doing the book, boasting about all the access I was getting, Dr John Carrier from my Sunday-morning football team, a sociology lecturer at LSE, said I should do some proper surveys of the first-team pool. I was in a unique position, so I should use it. He helped me work out a series of questions about the players' social, domestic and political habits, apart from their football life. I tried to gauge their pleasure in playing and found to my surprise that all of them had enjoyed the act of playing football more at fifteen than now, at the top of their career, because of course of all the stresses and pressures. Almost all the players said they would never want to coach or manage. They had seen the state Bill Nick got into and wouldn't want to be like him. (Despite what they said then, eight later did end up as managers.) On the political front, almost all the players said they were Tory, except three, one of whom, Steve Perryman, assumed all players must be Labour, because of the background they had come from.

These surveys and appendices took up forty pages of the finished book - and over the years have attracted more letters from readers than the book itself. Other writers, not necessarily writing about football, have used the surveys to compare and contrast with other groups.

The book was serialised by The Sunday Times and also The People who naturally took out the juicy stuff, such as it was. One player, Alan Gilzean, was described knocking back a few lagers and Bacardi on the train home. One coach was quoted swearing and shouting and making racist comments. Nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing compared with the misdeeds that get reported today, but some of the club directors were furious, saying the club's good name was being tarnished. I got a letter from Lord Goodman, of Goodman and Derrick, the most feared firm of libel lawyers at the time. Fortunately, both Bill and the chairman had indeed read the manuscript - and I could prove it. The chairman had even made odd pencil marks in the margins. I was also able to prove that each player had read the bits about himself, and had not objected. I never heard anything further.

The book was popular with football fans all over the country, not just among Spurs followers. Foreign rights were sold in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was even sold in the USA, where soccer was not played professionally.

After Tony Godwin had left, Weidenfeld let the book go out of print, much to my fury, but I managed to get the rights back. I then sold them to Mainstream, the Edinburgh publisher, who have kept the book in print ever since, with regular updates. It's now even back in print in the USA. It's considered something of a football classic, according to polls in various football publications, such as FourFourTwo, despite the fact that in the book, the players are on £200 a week, live in £20,000 houses and wear flared trousers.

Today, such a book would be practically impossible. All Premiership clubs and players have hordes of lawyers, accountants, agents, plus endless corporate deals and sponsorship arrangements. They wouldn't or couldn't say hello to you, without charging a fortune. But they probably wouldn't be bothered anyway with a book like mine, as they are all so rich.

Football is now a totally different game, a huge industry, with a massive TV audience round the world, billions of pounds swishing around and players like Beckham becoming one of the most recognised and richest young men on the planet.

And yet, at heart, I like to think that the sort of feelings and emotions, training and rituals, pressures and pleasures which I tried to capture and convey in 1972 are still true and believable. I also like to think, in my fantasy world, that playing the game itself is not really totally different from playing with Dartmouth Park United. Except of course we never had proper strips.

© Hunter Davies 2007 Extracted from The Beatles, Football and Me, A Memoir, by Hunter Davies, published by Headline at £7.99. It is available for £7.59 including postage from The Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or buy the book here.

The Glory Game is also available from The Times BooksFirst at the reduced price of £7.59. Buy the book here.

Explore Football

• Premier League

• Football League

• Scotland

• European Football

• International Football

• TheGame

• Live Match Tracker

• The Fink Tank

• Fantasy Football