“YOU TRICKED ME INTO LEARNING”

How to spread insights into football’s dark secrets: jot them down in a novel

A ‘ holiday read’ is an action- packed thriller or an insightful dive into realworld problems. Deadline is both… and it’s written by Mesut Ozil’s agent.

Featuring deadly rival representatives, a secret cabal of criminal super- agents and a kidnapped daughter, Erkut Sogut’s account reads like Taken crossed with transfer deadline day, only more factual than the former and less boring than the latter. Nor is Sogut from the Steve Bruce school of ‘ writing’, as he tells FFT: “I read so many books about how to write a novel – creating characters, writing locations – and visited courses online.”

But… how do we put this… why? “I’ve always wanted to share my knowledge,” explains Sogut. “My passions in life are teaching and writing, not being an agent. I’ve experienced so much in this business and I wanted to write about what’s really going on. If I do it in fiction, I teach people while they read an enthralling thriller. People die in the story! But you also learn how deadline- day transfers work.”

Nepotism is Deadline’s murky subject. This is the first of three books Sogut has planned; the next are human trafficking in football – he’s already gone to Africa for research – and racism in Germany. On

Deadline, he says, “I name people. I name things that happened. They’re not hidden: with the Fergusons, I got everything from the Panorama BBC documentary. I’m not a whistleblower. I’m bringing some facts together in a fictional story.”

Football fiction has had mixed success. Bruce’s Partridge- esque mysteries, called “a laughing stock” by the man himself, read as if put through Google Translate a dozen times. Philip Kerr’s Scott Manson trilogy stars a sleuthing fixer- turnedcoach- turned- manager- turned- detective who tries to protect his London City FC side from distractions by solving the odd murder. Can Sogut transcend the genre?