“‘Reading?’” former basketballer Chris Bosh remembers some of his coaches saying. “‘Every minute spent reading is a minute you could spend watching film, or hitting the gym, or putting up a hundred more free throws’. I’ve heard them say with pride, ‘I haven’t read a book in years’.”
Fortunately, as Bosh goes on to explain in his book Letters to a Young Athlete, the majority of sportspeople still read. During January’s play-offs, AJ Brown, the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver, was spotted on the sidelines reading Jim Murphy’s self-help text Inner Excellence. It seemed to have an effect — Brown and the Eagles went on to win the Super Bowl.
Footballers are no exception to the trend. Speaking at the Sharjah Book Fair, Mohamed Salah claimed 90 per cent of his success was down to books, explaining how he had a psychology-themed library with books in both Arabic and English.
Former Spain, Chelsea, and Manchester United midfielder Juan Mata is such a fan of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami that it influenced his decision to join J-League club Vissel Kobe in 2023, while Thierry Henry appeared at the 2004 World Footballer of the Year awards in a Che Guevara T-shirt after reading the revolutionary’s diaries from Bolivia.
Barcelona’s Oriol Romeu, currently on loan at Girona, has name-checked authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stefan Zweig, Enrique Vila-Matas, Manuel Vazquez Montalban and Josep Pla while his compatriot, Bournemouth head coach Andoni Iraola, told The Athletic last month about his love of Frankenstein.
Athletes read for the same reasons everyone else does — escapism, education, relaxation — but other factors are at play. Among Premier League footballers, motivational tomes feature prominently.
And so, to mark World Book Day, I was charged with reading the books that footballers read.
The most common genre is a type of book which lies on the intersection between self-help and psychology. One of the most read is Relentless by Tim S. Grover — a former trainer to basketball players such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Dwyane Wade. Emblazoned on its front cover is its central message: “From Good, to Great, to Unstoppable”.
“Every time I read it, I analyse it and highlight things in a certain colour,” Marcus Rashford told The Guardian in 2021, having named Relentless as his favourite book on multiple occasions. “Then the next time I read it, I’ll highlight things in a different colour, and I’ll compare what I learned that time with the previous time.”
Marcus Rashford is a devotee of Relentless by Tim S. Grover (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Rashford is not alone. After leading Chelsea to the Premier League title in 2015, John Terry wrote on Instagram that he was reading it on holiday and Relentless was passed between the England team at the 2018 World Cup. Twelve years after publication, it is still one of the most popular books which academy players read now.
The issue is that Relentless is not just a bad book, one which combines cod-science with an over-caffeinated elitism, but occasionally veers into a dangerous one.
Grover divides humanity (not just athletes) into three categories — Coolers, Closers, and Cleaners. Every person should strive to be a Cleaner — “The most intense and driven competitor imaginable… the insatiable addiction to success defines your entire life”. From the top of his dystopian caste-system, Grover looks down on Closers and Coolers — those who don’t quite have what it takes.
For players, it is clear why the thought of being a Cleaner is intoxicating.
“There are a lot of Cleaners in this team,” said former England midfielder Fabian Delph during the 2018 World Cup. “A lot of players at big clubs who want to better themselves. A few are reading Relentless. It’s tuning my mind (for) going into battle.”
The sense of “going into battle” makes sense. Grover pushes a predatory narrative throughout the book, with a certain coldness to its narration. Only you matter. His favourite phrase is “Done. Next”.
Take this description of witnessing a Cleaner at work: “You know something’s coming and all you can do is wait and watch, with fear and respect for his ability to handle anything without discussion or analysis. He just knows.”
Incidentally, it is always a ‘he’ — female Cleaners do not seem to exist.
Relentlessness seems as if it could be quite a nebulous concept, so despite stating “you must stop waiting to be told what to do and how to do it”, Grover provides 13 crucial aspects.
Here are two: “#1. You have a dark side that refuses to be good. #1. You’d rather be feared than liked.”
This is not a typo. Grover insists on labelling everything #1, because every piece of advice is equally important. Maybe he shouldn’t have — this is a rambling, disordered structure which throws slogans at a wall and sees what sticks.
But then again, this is a book for the social media age — designed to be digestible and quotable, for quotes to be underlined, typed out, and posted onto an Instagram story for 24 hours, probably next to a photograph of some warm-weather training. “Always demand more of yourself than others demand of you”. Post. Done. Next.
But I mentioned at the outset that Relentless is problematic. One of Grover’s central arguments is that Cleaners answer to no one; they have the ability to tap into their dark side. It is “your fuel, your energy”.
“I don’t know if there’s a better example than Tiger Woods, whose now-famous dark side led him to become involved with a dozen or so women who were not his wife,” he writes. “The scandal broke and it was suddenly pretty clear what had put Tiger in the zone.”
The elephant in the room here is Grover’s former pupil Bryant, held up as the model Cleaner on every other page of Relentless, who is suddenly absent from this section. Bryant was accused of rape in 2003: the criminal case was dismissed but Bryant eventually settled with the victim in a civil case, and apologised.
Kobe Bryant (left) was an iconic ‘Cleaner’ (Elsa/Getty Images)
In today’s Premier League, Relentless is still one of the mindset books pressed into the hands of academy prospects, described as outlining the sacrifices and dedication needed to reach the top.
With professional football still facing issues around sexual abuse — seven out of 20 Premier League clubs have had players or bosses investigated by the police for sexual offences since 2020 — anything which undermines players’ education, diminishing these as a “dark side” with on-pitch benefits, is dangerous.
But if Grover is criticised, he always has a response: “If you want to go somewhere new, you have to throw out the tired, old map and stop travelling the same road to the same dead end.”
You aren’t a Cleaner. You wouldn’t understand. Maybe you don’t want it enough.
It was with some trepidation that I began another book on similar themes — Bosh’s Letters to a Young Athlete. Leicester City manager Ruud van Nistelrooy is a big fan, recommending it to players such as Anwar El Ghazi while at PSV.
“He lent me this book and told me, ‘Listen, read this and come back to me later’,” El Ghazi told The Athletic in January. “It opened my eyes. I bought the book myself. I said: ‘I guess if my son ever wants to become something, he needs to read this book as well.’”
Bosh is a worthwhile narrator. A member of the NBA Hall of Fame, he reached the pinnacle, winning two NBA Finals with the Miami Heat, but also lost two, and was forced to retire in abrupt circumstances due to a freak blood clot condition. Rarely the most naturally talented on his team, he both played alongside superstars and as the star himself.
Historically, there is no group that Premier League footballers respect more than elite NBA players — LeBron James, Bryant, and Michael Jordan have arguably had a far greater impact on mindsets than Lionel Messi, Diego Maradona, or Pele. The books footballers read underscore this.
From the start, writing as an athlete, Bosh provides an empathy which Grover lacks. “The last thing you probably want is another voice in your head,” he begins. “I get it.”
Chris Bosh with his book Letters to a Young Athlete in 2021 (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)
The two books still work towards similar themes — the importance of hard work and grit over talent — but Bosh delves deeper into the motivation required to make those sacrifices, rather than simply assert that it needs to be done. Without going too literary theorist (I had a major Fredric Jameson era during my MA), Bosh asks the athlete to strip back layers of pretext to find the Real — their why.
In that, he sometimes runs counter to the type of single-track thinking which might be expected. It asks questions, rather than gives instructions, and that makes it a harder read than Relentless, but a far better one.
“Why are you at practice right now?” he asks. “Why are you working so hard? And don’t just say, ‘To win the state championship’, because you need to think bigger than that. Believe me, there’s nothing sadder than someone going through the motions with no real idea about why they’re doing it.”
While reading Bosh’s account, drawing on his career, the reason why footballers might especially want these self-help/psychology books becomes apparent.
Elite sportspeople face extreme emotion at a far higher frequency than other professions. You are in public. Your sense of self is closely tied to the see-saw of results. A bad day at work does not just lead to a one-on-one meeting with your manager, but thousands of opinions being aired, potential ostracisation from team-mates, and a one-on-one meeting with your manager.
The stakes are high and pressure is unavoidable.
This is where the work of Professor Steve Peters comes in — one of the most respected psychologists in elite sport. He has worked with British Cycling — Dave Brailsford described him as “the best appointment I’ve ever made” — while seven-time snooker world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan called Peters the “key to his success”. He has also been hired by both Liverpool and England.
His book, The Chimp Paradox, is popular with several footballers and draws on the central theory that different parts of our brains have different personalities with different agendas: the frontal (human), limbic (chimpanzee), and parietal (computer).
“Effectively, there are two beings in your head,” says Peters of the human and chimp, with the computer operating whichever part emerges on top. “The Chimp is the emotional machine that we all possess. It thinks independently from us and can make decisions. It offers emotional thoughts and feelings that can be very constructive or very destructive; it is not good or bad, it is a Chimp. The Chimp Paradox is that it can be your best friend and your worst enemy.”
Steve Peters attends an England training session in Miami ahead of the 2014 World Cup (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
The benefits in football appear obvious. It is a sport which is built on instinct and aggression — but crucially, controlled aggression.
Newcastle United winger Anthony Gordon is one high-profile reader of The Chimp Paradox. In Peters’ language, his red card on Sunday for shoving Brighton’s Jan Paul van Hecke can be explained as a triumph for Gordon’s inner chimp rather than his human brain.
Peters’ book attempts to explain how to control that chimp. In the book, he uses the example of a concert pianist, but it might be more useful to think of this in terms of a penalty shootout — he was brought in by the FA in 2014 to help England’s squad psychologically deal with their spot-kick hoodoo.
In a high-pressure situation, such as a concerto at the Royal Albert Hall or a penalty at the Maracana, the chimp feels the natural fight or flight response. The chimp’s fears can be handled — either by exercising it (releasing the emotion), boxing it (reasoning with the chimp) or bananas (things the chimp wants as a distraction or a reward).
For a shootout, the advice might be to box the chimp — to reason that a penalty has been practised time and time again — and to give it a banana, by settling into a pre-planned routine which distracts the chimp with the details of the process itself. The computer can then take over to execute the repeatable action. Effectively, Peters tools an athlete to achieve similar outcomes in varying scenarios.
Footballers are used to taking instructions and learning — whether from coaches, physios, nutritionists, agents, and family — and books are just one more input. Even with macho dressing rooms becoming more accepting of psychology, some players may prefer reading to a direct meeting.
But not all books are nakedly educational. Footballers read fiction, too. Tastes here are much more varied, but according to one tutor to Premier League footballers, some of the most popular fiction works on bookshelves are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic, seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, and NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers have all called The Alchemist their favourite book — as has Lee Carsley, England’s interim manager last year. Bryant was such a fan that he began to collaborate on a children’s book with Coelho, though that was shelved after the athlete’s death in 2020, and it is a particular favourite of many Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Premier League players.
A simple, fable-like structure, its plot feels almost designed to resonate with athletes — a shepherd from humble beginnings who wants to search for treasure and fulfil his dreams.
“What is a stranger doing in a strange land?” the hero is asked midway through the novel. He replies: “I am following my destiny. It’s not something you would understand.”
Despite being fiction, there are parallels with other self-help books — the plot leaps between loosely-connected events to deliver aphorisms and other kernels of wisdom. Content is secondary to resonance. Coelho borrows well-known phrases — “the darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn” — as well as coining his own.
In the introduction, Coelho writes how The Alchemist was cancelled by publishers after slow initial sales. “I never lost faith in the book or ever wavered in my vision,” he writes. “Why? Because it was me in there, all of me, heart and soul. I was living my own metaphor.”
Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a fan of The Alchemist (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
And footballers, too, see themselves living through the metaphor. Here’s former Liverpool goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek: “It’s the book in which I see myself reflected, about a guy who has to read the signs and choose the best path. ‘If I go to this club, what will happen?’ In life you’re constantly making choices.”
Former Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini says similarly: “From that book I learned to always follow my own path through life. And my firm belief is that I do a better job as a football coach if I dedicate myself completely to it.”
In the book the common link between footballers’ reading becomes clear: a search for control, which Dudek and Pellegrini both allude to.
“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the shepherd asks early in the novel. A mysterious figure replies. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
It’s easy to see why a footballer may feel they lack control — many enjoy a gilded lifestyle, but that exists amid a swirl of ever-changing team-mates, different cities, sudden transfers, and heightened emotion. Their career can be made on a manager’s whim, or ended by a mistimed tackle.
The Chimp Paradox is about maintaining control in the most high-pressure moments. Bosh, too, wants athletes to develop well-rounded skills to control their own career path. Grover even spells it out bluntly in Relentless — “A Cleaner is about control”.
To Kill a Mockingbird may seem incongruous but, aside from its obvious artistic and literary merits, one of the key themes for Lee’s characters is freedom of choice — to not to go along with the prevailing sentiment, but to take control of their own path.
The reading habits of footballers reveals a vulnerability that makes sense. It is a profession where tiny margins can cause huge waves. In their books, athletes need reassurance of their own agency.
It is World Book Day, but hopefully ending with a poem can be forgiven. William Ernest Henley’s ‘Invictus’ is well-known, oft-quoted, and no stranger to a sporting context, but it took placing it next to prose to realise why it resonates.
The closing lines summarise the ideology behind footballers’ reading:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
(Top photo: Liudmila Chernetska, Fstop123/iStock Photo; design: Will Tullos/The Athletic)
