By Ian Ridley
THE IDEA for the Football Shorts series of books came to me during the Covid lockdown. Like many people, I was reading plenty but some days I just didn’t want to start a long book. I wanted some variety in my reading as my attention span ebbed and flowed with mood and anxiety about the state of the nation and its health.
I caught up with a series of short novels that hit the spot: Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac and JL Carr’s A Month In The Country; Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. What an astonishing book is that latter, by the way. A tale of a doomed affair, written in a combination of poetry and prose.
Of course, I read plenty of sports books, took the time to re-read some old favourites, like John Feinstein’s eye-opening A Season On The Brink about Bobby Knight, the Brian Clough of US College basketball and the book that made me want to write sports books back in 1991. And my own personal favourite football book, John Harding’s wonderful social and historical document, Football Wizard, The Story of Billy Meredith.
Down the years, I had accumulated quite a library of sports books (was fortunate to have been sent plenty to review in my career as a sports journalist) but found it difficult it to find anything shorter on those short-attention-span days. What if, I thought…
Thanks to the help of our good friends at Pitch Publishing, Football Shorts was born. Affordable reads for the discerning fan, perhaps tucked into the coat pocket on a journey to the match. Floodlit Dreams would commission, Pitch would produce. We delivered six books together in an enjoyable collaboration, three of them shortlisted for Best Football Book in the British Sports Book Awards.
Now Floodlit Dreams has gone it alone, our first at the end of last year being the TV legend Jimmy Mulville’s funny, poignant There’s Gonna Be A Show about his complicated love affair with Everton and his home city of Liverpool. It has been a tough act to follow but…
Last spring, I went down to Gloucestershire to see my old friend Tony Adams, whose two volumes of autobiography Addicted and Sober, 20 years apart, we had worked on together. We started reminiscing about 1996, the year of Euro 96 and when he accepted that he was an alcoholic. We noted, of course, that those twin 30th anniversaries were approaching, along with his 60th birthday. Maybe there’s a book in that….
I didn’t think too much more about it until I went back to visit him again in the summer. “So, are we doing this book?” Tony asked. I was a little surprised. I wasn’t sure it had been a serious idea but Tony had clearly been thinking about it. He liked the idea of a triology of books. And while he clearly had a lot to say, about the events of that momentous year and how he was now, he liked the Football Shorts length: 30,000 precise, potent words ought to do it.
I wanted it written by Christmas, as I knew my cancer was progressing and would need more, potentially debilitating, treatment at some stage, probably early in 2026, as has proved the case. And so we settled into our writing routine in regular two-hour sessions. I came at Tony with my questions in a chronological order, from January to December, and he answered them with his customary candour and his trademark honesty.
We’d been this way before, of course, but it is remarkable how much new material is offered by the insight of experience when the route is revisited. There was a marriage break-up as his first wife left him after her own drug rehab, his kids being removed from him due to his drinking, months without playing before a Euro 96 comeback and near-triumph as England captain. Then came more memories of the six-week bender that brought him to his knees, before a miraculous release from alcohol’s grip and his rebirth as a player with the arrival of Arsène Wenger as Arsenal manager.
Tony wanted to top it with a prelude about his previous drinking and playing years that would place 1996 in context and show it as the inevitable consequence, and tail it with updates on his relationships with all those major figures in his life that year, in and out of football. As the structure emerged organically, finally came his take on it all now with the accumulated wisdom that informs the man he is now. Sprinkled with a touch of Strictly Come Dancing along the way, of course.
We thought about calling it Thirty Years OffHurt but having to explain it if or when people didn’t get it straight away was a tad tedious and counter-productive. And on a cover, it could be misread as ‘Of Hurt’, making it a rather unoriginal title. Thus it became the simple, and hopefully evocative, 1996on the basis of keeping it simple, as advice in Alcoholics Anonymous has it.
It will almost certainly be the last sports book I write and it feels like a wonderful, privileged way to go out: a culmination of a special three-decade-long friendship that has enhanced my life and which Tony kindly allowed me to capture in an introduction. More importantly, I hope it is a book that goes beyond telling a rattling good tale and will offer inspiration, hope and help to people. Tony Adams has proved himself to be pretty good at that down the years.
Published in April 2026, a signed, limited-edition copy of1996: Reflections on the year that changed my life by Tony Adams with Ian Ridley can be ordered here.
