The more the world of football has been inflated, the more it has floated from reality and become detached from the supporter.
Hence the growing desire, even a need, for the fan to peer into the dressing-rooms, look out over the training pitches and eavesdrop not just on the gossip but be apprised of the personalities who glide in 2D across their TV screens.
The sports book story of 2014 was not the entertaining ranting of Roy Keane (after all, he has already co-operated on one autobiography back in 2002) or the bleating of Kevin Pietersen.
It was that writers were not only determined to look into the nooks and crannies of football but that they were encouraged to do so. The most spectacular of these investigations is Pep Confidential by Marti Perarnau (BackPage Press, £14.99). This is the story of Guardiola's first year at Bayern Munich and the author has the sort of access that causes the jaw not only to drop but bounce off the floor.
Perarnau follows Guardiola onto the training ground, into the dressing room, onto the team bus and even into the club restaurant. He emerges with not only a portrait of Guardiola that is undoubtedly authentic but he provides an insight into how huge clubs operate and how even the greatest of players are beset by neurosis.
Mental disorders are an integral part of O, Louis by Hugo Borst (Yellow Jersey, £9.99), part love letter to, part bitter indictment of Louis Van Gaal, manager, egotist and obsessive. Borst, a Dutch journalist, was once a friend of his countryman but they had a falling out that was both predictable and enduring. He is almost as merciless on Van Gaal as he is on himself in a confessional memoir. However, the manager of Manchester United emerges brilliantly in all his glory and fallibility.
Vulnerability and hurt are at the heart of Alan Pattullo's marvellous meditation on the mundane sins and limited triumphs of a footballer whose underachievement serves almost as a national emblem. In Search Of Duncan Ferguson (Mainstream, £18.99) is meticulous in its recreation of Ferguson's past but beguiling in what it reveals of personal and national character.
Pirlo (BackPage Press, £9.99) is also marked with an individuality that is enhanced by a superb translation that retains a distinctive Italian voice. It is worth the gate money alone for Pirlo's description of how he learned to take a free-kick.
All the above combine to bring the supporter nearer to the play. Beneath the sphere of swirling hype there are stories to be told. Borst, Perarnau, Pattullo and Pirlo comprise a midfield four of energy and insight.
The best book outside football was an investigation into a darkness far from the field of play. Anna Krien's Night Games: Sex, Power And Sport (Yellow Jersey, £12.99) is a clear-eyed account of the trial of an Australian Rules footballer who is accused of rape. It is, crucially and importantly, a reflection on the power of sport and how it has the diabolical capacity to imperil the very souls of both participants and followers.
There is, of course, much of the devil in Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson (HarperCollins, £9.99). Its repeated brutality, its sexual excesses and its gaudy, drug-fuelled behaviour eventually produce a concussive effect on the reader. One is bruised, even fatigued long before the end. However, it is woundingly honest, with Tyson revealed, unsurprisingly, as a damaged human being but also as a character who finds rehabilitation elusive.
He asks for no pity, is stridently defiant about his rape conviction, protesting an innocence that is absent from all of the other pages. It has all the signposts of the misery memoir, the journey beginning with a spectacularly dysfunctional childhood. It escapes cliche with the aid of Tyson's frankness and the drama of a life badly lived.
It is complemented by the curious but compelling Scream: The Tyson Tapes (Short Books, £14.99). Edited by Richard Williams, this is an oral history of the heavyweight champion's life compiled by the late Jonathan Rendall, a writer of devastating originality. It reveals Tyson as much victim as bully but is devoid of special pleading or hand-wringing. It is a fine, if flawed legacy from a brilliant writer.
The revolution in the popularity of cycling is reflected in the surge of books on the sport. Two shot ahead of the peloton in 2014. The Breakaway (Simon and Schuster, £20) is a farewell letter to competitive cycling penned by Nicole Cooke, a world and Olympic champion. Amongst its considerable qualities, it asks pertinent questions about the coverage of women in sport.
Richard Moore's Etape (HarperSport, £20) is a simple idea, convincingly executed. Moore revisits stages of the Tour de France that have a personal resonance or have been enshrined in public legend. His reportage is assiduous but the writing is fluid. The result is a series of essays that both burnishes the past and destroys myths.
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