Once upon a time football was run by modest local businessmen. Today it is the plaything of billionaire oligarchs, staggeringly wealthy from oil and gas, from royalty, or from murkier sources. But who are these new masters of the universe? Where did all their money come from? And what do they want with our beautiful game? In The Billionaires Club James Montague delves deeper than anyone else has dared, to tell this story for the first time. It is part history of club ownership, part in-depth investigation into the money and influence that connects the super-rich around the globe, and part travel book as he crosses national boundaries in an attempt to reveal the real force behind modern-day football. Whilst almost always cloaked in secrecy, the billionaire owner has to raise his head above the bunker when it comes to football ownership - a rare Achilles heel that allows access to worlds normally off limits for journalists and outsiders. And so Montague criss-crosses the world - from Dhaka to Doha, from China to Crewe, from St Louis to London, from Bangkok to Belgium - to profile this new elite, their network of money and their influence that defies geographic boundaries. At its heart The Billionaires Club is a football book, about some of the biggest clubs in the world. But it is also about something bigger: the world around us, the global economy, where the world is headed and how football has become an essential cog in this machine.

Billionaires Club, The

Business & Money

James, Montague

Industries

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

While religion often violently divides the Middle East, the countries of the world's most explosive region share one thing - a deep and obsessive love of the beautiful game. James Montague travelled there for three years, observing the region's cultures and politics through the prism of football and interviewing all the major teams along the way. He soon realised that to understand the game there is to understand its people. For as much as football forms an unlikely common thread between different countries, the sport also reflects what is unique in the national characters of those who play, support and organise it. When Friday Comes is an insightful and humorous account of Montague's journey, during which he gets stoned with the Yemeni FA, harangues Iran's Deputy President at the World Cup, has a gun pulled on him by genocidal Lebanese football fans, encounters a rioting group of fanatical young Jews singing 'I'm West Ham 'til I Die' in mockney English and was made to strip and then dance for the Iraqi national team. This is a compelling travel memoir that will enlighten, surprise and entertain football fans everywhere.

When Friday Comes

Sports & Outdoors

Individual Sports

Mainstream

“In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey horny and wrinkled. He flew out of his chair with deadly inconceivable terror at his heart.” The art of telling a ghost story is a refined one and Montague Rhodes James was a master of it. With gentle cunning, he draws the reader into a narrative that at first seems innocuous, but that by gentle turns becomes darker and darker until he transfixes you with his prose, creating the most unforgettable, alarming, and frightening images. This volume contains all his timeless masterpieces from the four collections of his eerie tales: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925).

Complete Ghost Stories (Collector's Library)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Collectors' Library

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Books by James, Montague