English Football has over 92 fully professional clubs. Players in the Premier League teams now earn an average salary of £2.3 million per annum. Meanwhile, on the bottom rung, entire squads make less in a year than Wayne Rooney takes home in a month. An army of young players sacrifice their education and prospects outside of sport for the dream of football success, despite that fact that 85% will be released from their contracts within five years.
Simon Akam’s book shows what the beautiful game really means for most players.
Luton Town Football Club played a vital role in bringing this book to life by opening their doors and allowing a Newsweek Europe journalist to embed with them: a generous act, which has resulted in a remarkable glimpse into life in a lower league club, and the community around it.
Про автора
Simon Akam is a contributing editor at Newsweek Europe. Born in Cambridge, England, he held a gap year commission in the British Army before reading English Literature at Oxford University. He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Columbia Journalism School in New York. After graduation from Columbia, Simon worked at the New York Times and subsequently spent several years in West Africa as a correspondent for Reuters and the Economist. He reported from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Uganda and the Gambia. In 2010 he won the professional strand of the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Competition. Simon’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Paris Review, the New Republic, the Literary Review and Intelligent Life.