ANATOMY OF MANCHESTER UNITED

(W&N £9.99)

‘ NO GAME follows a simple path. Football is not always fair,’ observes the award-winning football writer Jonathan Wilson.

In his latest book, he considers the beautiful game through the prism of one of the most celebrated UK clubs of all time — Manchester United.

Drawing on match reports, interviews and video footage, Wilson undertakes a close analysis of ten landmark matches, beginning with Man U v Bristol City in April 1909, and ending with its fixture against Crystal Palace in May 2016.

These are not necessarily the team’s best games, he explains, but ‘they highlight wider trends, or lie on the fault lines of history, marking the end of one era or the beginning of the next’.

As the new season begins, Wilson’s book gives fans the chance to ‘go beyond the white noise of instant judgments to discover why what happened, happened’.