I’m sorry but you won’t find here the just-in-time-for Christmas sports autobiography blockbusters. With just enough manufactured controversy to ensure blanket coverage when they are launched, even a skim read will reveal that, on the contrary, they tell the reader very little they didn’t either know or suspect already.

Floodlights and Touchlines by Rob Steen (Bloomsbury)

As a writer, Rob Steen straddles that frustrating divide between the academic and the journalistic. His new book Floodlights and Touchlines reveals the quality of writing this mix can sometimes produce. 

A living history of the relationship between the spectator and his, or increasingly as Rob chronicles, her sport. This is social history of the very highest standard. 

Played in London by Simon Inglis (English Heritage)

Simon Inglis is rightly renowned for his writing on the cultural significance of stadia and other sporting buildings. 

Inglis’s played in London continues the richness of Inglis’s explanation.

Invincible by Amy Lawrence (Viking)

Amy Lawrence’s Invincible tells the story of Arsenal’s 2003-2004 unbeaten season. 

Lawrence’s is a writer who will help the reader to appreciate the football on the pitch with an understanding of how the game is played few can match. At the same time she never fails to appreciate the passion that makes us fans.

Field of Shadows by Dan Waddell (Bantam Press)

Sport of course doesn’t simply collide with economic forces — it is indivisible from the political and social too. 

The nazi Olympics of 1936 remains the strongest example yet of this combination. A platform for Hitler, sport used to seek to prove the physical superiority of the Aryan race, brilliantly demolished of course by black US athlete Jesse Owens’s four gold medals on the track and in the long-jump pit.

A superb achievement that has been allowed to mask countless examples of large sections of the sporting establishment’s effective covering-up and collaboration with the nazi regime in order to save their sports’ relations with Germany. 

An England football team ordered to give the nazi salute before an England v Germany game an incredible, and shameful, moment in English football’s history. 

Field of Shadows by Dan Waddell uncovers a part of sporting history from this period which I suspect even the most knowledgeable sports fan would be unaware of the 1937 English cricket tour of nazi Germany. 

Dan’s account reveals in this most extraordinary of settings how the cricket was framed by Germany’s fast-moving descent into nazi barbarism while England remained divided by tendencies towards appeasement and collaboration versus popular and militant anti-fascism. 

When being knocked for six could land Hitler a propaganda victory, cricket is not quite the gentle sport we’re used to.

The Race against the Stasi by Herbie Sykes (Aurum Press Ltd)

Herbie Sykes covers a different sport, cycling, and a different era for Germany the East German GDR years of state socialism and the Berlin Wall. 

Of course comparisons with the nazi era are both crass and ill-founded historically yet the clash between politics and sport all the same was a constant across these two contrasting periods in German history. 

Syke’s wonderful book The Race against the Stasi details the career, life and times of one of the sporting heroes of East Germany, Dieter Wiedemann — the culture that turned him firstly into an elite athlete, then into an icon of GDR socialism ,the disillusionment that led him to escape, turn pro ride Le Tour and the efforts of the Stasi to repatriate him.

The Breakaway by Nicole Cooke (Simon & Schuster UK)

At the core of British Cycling’s achievement in recent years to become genuine world-beaters and arguably Britain’s most successful sport have been women cyclists Victoria Pendleton, Lizzie Armistead, Laura Trott and others. 

Nicole Cooke’s autobiographical The Breakaway is both a powerfully-written testament to the measure of that contribution by a former world and European champion on the road plus a well-argued critique of the barriers that stand in the way of women’s cycling.

Tackling Rugby by Allyson M Pollock (Verso Books)

Sport of course should never be treated as a fixed, unchanging entity. 

It demands investigation and often a critique too. Allyson Pollock’s Tackling Rugby provides both. 

Her target? Children and youth rugby, the risk of injury, and the failure of the sport’s governing bodies to react, with practical suggestions for how to safeguard young players’ health and the future of the game.

The Game of Our Lives by David Goldblatt (Viking)

And my sports book of the quarter? David Goldblatt’s The Game of Our Lives is both a social history of domestic football and a critique of its modern, monetised manifestation. 

David combines a sympathetic and original explanation of why football is of such importance to so many while accounting for why it deserves nothing resembling a hagiography because of its many, mostly self-inflicted out of commercial greed, failings. 

As such it is a book that informs and inspires, a truly great piece of writing.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled “sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction” www.philosophyfootball.com