1 Alex Ferguson The United manager was pictured last week in Barcelona with a little light reading. According to its author Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, is about how the leaders “got things done and the horrible things they were aiming for”. Fancy Fergie being drawn to a book about three dictators who all achieved power outside the land of their birth and nurtured dreams of European domination

2 Shaun Edwards The 2007 Heineken Cup final and Wasps are up against favourites Leicester. Is their coach, Edwards, worried? Apparently not. During a break in play he can be spotted on the touchline reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Holocaust survivor Viktor E Frankl. “When I played, I used to read in the changing room before a game to make sure I didn’t get too wound up,” he told The Sunday Times. “I do the same now to stop myself overcoaching. It’s a book but it’s also a coaching tool”

3 Eric Cantona United fans knew there was something about him when he announced: “I will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window.” Even Paul Scholes could not have put it better

4 Gene Tunney Muhammad Ali might have recited poetry but 1920s heavyweight Tunney was a boxing champion who not only read Shakespeare and Somerset Maugham but also listed Maugham among his acquaintances, as well as Ernest Hemingway and George Bernard Shaw. Tunney had been bullied as a child because he liked reading so much, and the fight crowd viewed his literary pretensions with some suspicion. They revised their opinion, however, when he beat Jack Dempsey in 1926 and 1927

5 Lucas Radebe In 2004, the National Literary Trust’s Premiership Reading Stars scheme asked footballers to name their favourite books. Sports autobiographies proved popular but the Leeds defender nominated Silas Marner by George Eliot. No doubt he and former teammate Lee Bowyer had spent many an evening discussing its charms

6 Pat Nevin Almost a decade before Graeme Le Saux arrived at Stamford Bridge with all his fancy airs and graces, Nevin had already been nicknamed ‘Weirdo’ by those in the Chelsea dressing room for his unusual interest in politics, art and literature. The Scot has described Voltaire, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Gogol as “wonderful” and in 1999 said that if he didn’t have time to read, he made up for it by “using talking books in the car. At the moment I’m listening to Pride And Prejudice”

7 Jim Courier The American tennis star took a ‘novel’ approach to changeovers during his 1993 world championship match against Andrei Medvedev in Frankfurt. Rather than knocking back the barley water, Courier refreshed himself by reading Maybe The Moon by Armistead Maupin. Medvedev won but Courier says he enjoyed the book

8 David Duval The golfer’s favourite book is the cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he owns a complete - that’s 21,730 pages - Oxford English Dictionary. In 2001 he spoke of jacking it all in to open a bookstore and coffee shop. He’s still playing but selling paperbacks would be the better-paid option right now

9 Ed Smith The Middlesex captain announced in 2006 that he was reading Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise: “He explores literary movements such as modernism and dissects great writers such as Forster, Orwell, and Maugham. It’s great company as a book.” Better company, one imagines, than Steve Harmison

10 Wayne Rooney The Manchester United star left school in Liverpool without a qualification to his name, but he has apparently now hired a personal tutor to rectify this. And to show how all this education has stimulated a new love of great literature in Rooney, here is a photograph of him reading a book that even the greatest minds have struggled with. Yep, it’s Gazza’s autobiography. Whether he’ll ever get round to reading his own memoir is another matter

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