The media needs football just as much as football needs the media — that’s the main theme of Roger Domeneghetti’s book.

From the Back Page to the Front Room brilliantly details the relationship between the beautiful game and the press, something which is often taken for granted.

The moment a game ends reports are uploaded online, with millions reading about a match they’ve just finished watching. But there was a time when Britain’s media didn’t care about the sport and it only received a few lines in newspapers, something which would be unthinkable today.

From Birmingham’s Saturday Night football special newspaper in 1882 to the Morning Star today, Domeneghetti — this paper’s north-east England football correspondent — takes us through the evolution of football coverage and looks at the people who have covered it.

The Daily Telegraph’s Henry Winter provides tremendous insight into how press coverage has been transformed over the past 20 years. He notes that when England won the World Cup — yes, it really happened, in 1966 —some papers only had one reporter at Wembley. If they had reached the final in Rio last year, some tabloids would have had a minimum of eight staff in the press box.

But Domeneghetti doesn’t focus on recent events. He looks back at what could be the earliest origins of the game in China, around 255-206BC and the earliest forms of a regular printed press — again in China in the eighth century BC — right the way through to the current process of change in the written press, with the emergence of online blogs and Twitter and their unpaid know-it-all football pundits.

Equally insightful is Domeneghetti’s expert analysis of the role of television, ranging from the birth of Match of the Day and its Saturday night battle with ITV to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB acquiring rights to the Premier League.

It’s a book which leaves no stone unturned and it commendably dedicates a chapter to the relationship between women’s football and the media and the way in which it has developed.

Where some authors would just look at the players on the pitch, this one goes one step further and talks to Julie Welch, the first woman to write a football report for a national newspaper, and to Jacqui Oatley, the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day.

If you love the media, football or are interested in the way the pair have co-existed then this is certainly the book for you. A must-read.