A close look at the life of football managers.
Michael Calvin is one of the UK's most accomplished sportswriters,
having worked in more than eighty countries. He has covered every
major sporting event, including seven summer Olympic Games and six
World Cup finals. He was named Sports Writer of the Year for his
despatches as a crew member in a round-the-world yacht race and has
twice been named Sports Reporter of the Year.
His book, The Nowhere Men, a study of football scouts, won The
Times Sports Book of the Year prize in 2014. He became the first
author to receive the award in successive years, when Proud, his
collaboration with former Wales and British Lions rugby captain
Gareth Thomas, was named Sports Book of the Year in 2015.
In the same year Living On The Volcano, which exposed the pressures
on managers, was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of
the Year prize. No Nonsense, his collaboration with Joey Barton,
was named Autobiography of the Year in the 2017 British Sports Book
awards.
No Hunger In Paradise, an insight into youth football that spawned
a widely-praised BT Sport documentary, was a Sunday Times
bestseller. State of Play, a study of the morality and social
impact of modern football, was longlisted for the 2018 William Hill
Sports Book of the Year award.
He has been working closely with Thomas Bjorn on Mind Game to
capture the unique nature of golf, and the principles and
philosophies of the world's best players.
The honesty in Living on the Volcano suggests that in an era of
anodyne press conferences where so many managers speak a lot while
saying little, giving fans an occasional glimpse of these feelings
might be no bad thing
*The Guardian*
an illuminating new book...vivid journey on what it is really is to
be a football manager
*Independent*
Arguably the greatest asset of Michael Calvin’s previous,
award-winning book The Nowhere Men was its human insight into a
shadowy, under-appreciated world. The trials and tribulations of
scouting were vividly portrayed through interviews with figures
unaccustomed to the limelight... What Living on the Volcano does so
brilliantly, is pick up the recurring threads. The ‘band of
brothers’ mentality that emerges is built on a mutual world of
uncertainty, frustration, and ‘recurrent rejection and renewal’.
Each chapter is cleverly connected to the next to reflect the fluid
nature of the managerial merry-go-round… As a series of individual
portraits, Living on the Volcano may seem like a book to dip in and
out of. However, in doing so, there’s a danger of missing the power
of the overall narrative. Bookended by former Torquay manager
Martin Ling’s emotional story, this is a book about people and what
it takes to do their intoxicating and exhausting job. Just as with
The Nowhere Men, Calvin gets to the personal core of an impersonal
industry
*Of Pitch and Page*
Brilliant stuff
*FourFourTwo Magazine*
an eye-raising insight into the realities of life in the dugout
*The Times*
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