The Dynamo Football Bookclub
The Dynamo Football Book Club is the podcast for football fans who love a good read. Each week, we dive into books by and about footballers — from autobiographies and biographies to ghostwritten epics and hidden gems. If Vardy’s vodka, Maradona mayhem, or the Cruyff kidnapping are your thing,, we’ve got you covered. We read em, so you don’t have to (although some of em you really ought to). The episodes are not tied to the match day cycle and can be listened to any time and in any order. Expect a lively chat, deep dives and a good old larf, har har. 🎙️ New episodes every week. ⚽️ Great for fans of football history, sportswriting, player memoirs, and podcast book clubs. ♬ Music by the wonderful Darragh Fenlon. *formerly the Ademola Bookmen Podcast.
Episodes
🗽⚽️🔥 In Episode 55, join us for the story of the New York Cosmos, as told by Gavin Newsham in his book Once In a Lifetime 📖🎙️
The Cosmopolitans, to give them their full name, burned fast and bright ✨🔥 from 1971 to 1985, lighting up the North American Soccer League ⚽️🌍. They were — to borrow a line from the book — the best thing and the worst thing to happen to the NASL 📈📉.
In Injury Time 24, we take Sean Dyche’s advice and play the lookalikey game 👀⚽️ — the game he once said makes the world go round.
It may not be that integral to the earth’s orbit, but it sure is fun
Thanks Sean Dyche / Mick Hucknall / Chris Evans 🙏
Please do listen and like (in that order 😉)
Available wherever you get your pods 🎧
🚀📉⚽️💷🎙️
In Episode 54, we review Keith Gillespie’s How Not to be a Football Millionaire.
A Class of ’92 graduate alongside Becks and co., Gillespie enjoyed a solid career at Newcastle, Blackburn, and a handful of other lower-league clubs. The book charts his rocket-propelled rise 🚀 and his lamentable fall 📉.
Capped 86 times for Northern Ir...
In our increasingly polarized world, what a tonic it is to think about where the footballers we so admire fall on the political spectrum. We can even go one further and consider who wins when the footballer conservatives take on the game's SJWs?
Tune in to Injury Time 23 of the Dynamo Football Bookclub and find out which ideology was best all along. Or at least best at football...
Available wherever you get your pods.
In our first episode this year, we review our first football novel, David Peace’s The Damned United 📖⚽
Having already reviewed both Clough and Taylor’s autobiographies, this was Alistair’s way of cramming in more Clough 😄
The book has been described as the best novel about football 🏆📚 — a fictionalised account of what happened during the 44-day reign of C...
To mark the festive season 🎄, we discuss some of the weightier religious and historical topics 📜✝️ such as the cause of Herod’s death ☠️ and the schism between the Catholic and Protestant churches ⛪️⚔️⛪️. Yes indeed, it’s a Christmas 5-a-side ⚽️🎅.
Join us as we find ever more tenuous and tangential ways 🧵🤔 to connect top footballers to the 25 December 🎁🎂 and find out if Al can get ...
Pour yourself a very very large glass of wine 🍷, sit back 🛋️, and enjoy Episode 52 of the Dynamo Football Bookclub.
This week, we are taking a lesson in humility from Big Sam Allardyce. 📘
The Premier League’s original innovator turned reactionary, Big Sam elbowed his way up and down England as a player before becoming one of the most noteworthy managers of...
We are skin deep in Episode 21 of the Dynamo Football Bookclub’s Injury Time looking at footballers’ tattoos. 🏉🖋️
From numerology with Sergio Ramos 🔢 to Richarlison’s tattoo tribute to team mate and all-around good guy Neymar 🇧🇷✨, there is quite a lot to talk about.
Will Johnny take up Al’s offer of a five-figure sum to get a tattoo of Al’s face? 🤔💰😬
...In Episode 51, we’re back with the Oranje 🇳🇱 as we dive into Basta, the autobiography of the one and only Marco van Basten.
The rather oddly nicknamed “Swan of Utrecht” 🦢 rattled in 242 goals and swept up everything in sight:
three Eredivisie titles 🏆, four Scudetti 🇮🇹, two European Cups 🏆🏆, and not one, not...
It’s injury time on Injury Time ⏱️⚽️
In Episode 20, we pay homage to all those fine fellows whose careers were brought to a premature end due to injury 🤕💔
From the most famous (David Busst) 😬 to some of the more obscure and unlikely — including the goalkeeper who ended his career up a tree while rescuing a cat 🧤🐈🌳
There is ...
🎉 EPISODE 50! 🎉
We’re celebrating our half-century in style — that’s right, it’s Denis Wise’s autobiography 😏📖⚽️
Wise is one of the three musketeers of English football books. Along with Glenn Hoddle and Steve McMahon, he somehow appears in everyone else’s autobiography — and almost no one ever has anything nice to say about him 😬😂
But rat...
🎶 “It’s not time to make a change…” 🎶
It's time to sit back, relax, and enjoy our Father & Son 5-a-side Draft!
Welcome to Injury Time 19 — the Scott Gemini Nepo Baby Special 👨👦⚽️😂
This week, we’re drafting the sons of footballing legends to face off on the pitch. It's rich pickings indeed 🤌💎
Turns out a lot of footballe...
⚽️ “Episode 49: Reboot – The Michael Owen Story”
Is Michael Owen football’s oddest ball of all? 🧐
From the helicopter highs of that goal against Argentina 🚁⚽️ to the hamstring horrors that followed (quite a lot of them 😬), Owen’s career was a tale of glory, pain, and lots of grudges.
In this week’s episode, we dive into Reboot, Owen’s att...
☁️ The clouds have lifted over Old Trafford since the weekend with United’s smash-and-grab win down at Anfield — but has the storm truly passed? ⚡️
United’s failures on the pitch in recent years have only been compounded by the uncanny ability of their former flops to reach new heights away from the stifling drag around the Theatre of Dreams 🏟️.
In this epis...
⚽️ Episode 48: A Season with Verona — Tim Parks and the Tifosi 🇮🇹
After the drama of our last episode, we’re staying in Italy with another unfashionable football club. This time it’s Hellas Verona, a club known as much for its tifosi as for its football 🔵🟡
Back in 2000, British author and horny English teacher Tim Parks embarked on a wild year with the Ve...
It’s 23 November 2002. Luis Figo trots over to take a corner for Real Madrid against Barcelona. Moments later, a severed pig’s head sails onto the pitch — lobbed by a fan of the club that claims to be “more than a football team.”
Once adored, now despised, Figo had become public enemy number one for the Blaugran...
🚨 Episode Drop! 🚨
Almost two years in, and on our 46th book, we think we’ve found the best one yet. Hold on to your hats, because Joe McGinniss’s The Miracle of Castel di Sangro is coming your way.
Alistair had never even heard of it (he blames the title). But have you? 🤔
Back in 1996, tiny Castel di Sangro — a town of just 5,...
⚽ Injury Time 16 is here! 📺🎙️
In this episode, we choose our greatest television lineups. There may be some personal and national biases at play as we pick the best presenters 🎤, pundits 💬, and commentators 🎧. Thankfully, 🤖 AI is on hand to settle the debate and decide whose lineup comes out on top.
Heated arguments 🔥, nostalgia 🕰️, and a few question...
🎧 Episode 46 is out now — and it’s the most Alistair-esque episode yet.
That’s right, we’re doing our best to distract poor Al from events at the City Ground by diving into Psycho — the autobiography of his all-time hero, Stuart Pearce. ❤️🌳
The all-tackling, all-scoring, punk-loving ...
🎧 Injury Time 15: The Mayor of Barnet Fair – Football’s Worst Haircuts 💈⚽
It’s a question as old as the combover: who had football’s worst-ever haircut? From tragic trims to peroxide crimes, we’ve gathered the very worst in a draft showdown that pits one smorgasbord of shockers against another.
There are two routes to hair hell:
- Trying too...
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