Bøker av Alex Duff

In 1978, when Alex Duff first went to watch Brentford, players would go on midweek pub crawls near the Griffin Park stadium. Sometimes, in no fit state to go home, they would crash out in a terraced home where one of them lived opposite the stadium gates. The next morning, they clambered into a white van which one of them would drive to training, stopping on the way for a bacon sandwich and cup of tea at a greasy spoon café. Brentford had once played in the top-flight but now, idling in the third division, were a second home for players and supporters, but there was neither the ambition nor money to revive their best days. They bumbled along until in 2005, fed up with trying to make a profit from a club with an ageing stadium in an unfashionable west London suburb, owner Ron Noades agreed to hand over the business to supporters on the condition they take over responsibility for their £5.5 million overdraft. One of the fans, an Oxford University physics graduate called Matthew Benham, was making millions of pounds from professional gambling and threw in a £500,000 lifeline to help keep the club afloat. Initially, as a sort of academic challenge, he began figuring out if he could employ the mathematics which he used in beating the bookmakers to improve the club''s performance on the pitch. Smart Money is the story of how a scientist with an inquiring mind was set loose in a backwater of professional football, and how he turned a modest, little-known team into a competitor in one of the world''s most-watched sports leagues.

The fascinating and unknown story of the Tour de France's ever-changing relationship with money and power - and the enigmatic family behind it all.It started with a cash drop by an English spy in occupied Paris in 1944. Reserved for Resistance groups during the war, the money reached milien Amaury, an advertising executive, who was tasked to help France return to a free press once liberated. He soon launched a newspaper empire that - unbeknown to him - would own the rights to run what would become one of the greatest sporting events in history.Le Tour, once a struggling commercial phenomenon, began to rise in popularity across much of western Europe in the glum years after the Second World War, lifting the mood of the hungry and despondent French. But with the increased interest in the event, exacerbated by the creation of television and the internet, came several cultural threats to national heritage. Multiple attempts to wrest power and profits from the latest generation of the Amaury family - who still own the race and take tens of millions of euros home in dividends - have followed, but not without a fight.Fast-paced and fastidiously researched, Le Fric illustrates how moments off the bike at the Tour de France are every bit as gripping as the battle for the yellow jersey.

A no-holds-barred expose on the financial transactions of the world's favourite sport The transfer fees clubs pay to sign top players now top 4 billion a year but much of the money has been flowing out of the game.