Ugly truths about the beautiful game

Saturday 2 June 2012

John Sweeney (the journalist, if you remember, who achieved notoriety for losing his temper with some Scientologists) had a tough time getting this book into print.

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alastair mabbott

The original version should have been published five years ago, but was held up by fears of libelling Rooney's agent, Paul Stretfield. Then, once Stretfield's credibility was officially in tatters, Rooney's own lawyers managed to hobble the book by persuading WH Smith not to stock it.

All this is ironic, as Sweeney is fulsome in his praise of Rooney, taking time to argue why he could justifiably be called a "genius". Yes, he does describe his subject as a "moral idiot" with "the mind of a duck", whose life is "the most vacuous media soap opera of modern times", but the fact remains that he has come to praise Rooney rather than bury him.The brilliant thing about this book is that it is only partially about Wayne Rooney. Sweeney's real concern is the world Rooney has been forced to engage with to have a career: the scandal that, during his spectacular rise, the greatest footballing discovery since David Beckham was found to be only one degree of separation away from gangsters. The kind who kill people.To show how this came about, Sweeney takes us back to "a murderous turf war that started in his home city [Liverpool] when he was just nine years old", but that is only part of the story. This world is morally dubious at every level. While British football is bought up by "rich merchant capitalists", there are lying coppers, bent lawyers and dodgy agents operating with virtual impunity ... and The Sun, manipulating Rooney in a painfully transparent attempt to win back the sales it lost after Hillsborough.Writing with the kind of ferocity and iconoclastic japery that's refreshingly incongruous in this context, Sweeney has used the medium of the celebrity biography to savagely indict both the parasites infesting 21st-century celeb culture and the bland hagiographies which ignore the dark side of the business. More in tune with the times now than if it had kept its 2005 publication date, this is the kind of biography we not only need, but deserve.WAYNE ROONEY: BOOTS OF GOLDJohn Sweeney, Biteback, £8.99

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Ugly truths about the beautiful game

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