The Best Sports Books of 2024

20 great sports books published this year

The ‘All Sports Books’ newsletter took an unplanned extended hiatus this year, but we are back and ready to resume regular sharing of our love for great sports books.

The annual roundup of Best Sports Books of the Year is always a popular one - and hopefully helpful for finding Christmas gifts for the sports book lover in your life, or for yourself of course!

🏆 The ‘All Sports Books’ Sports Book of the Year

🎾 The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation and the other 99% by Conor Niland.

William Hill beat me too it, but there can only be one winner this year. The Racket is destined to be an all-time classic and a genuine contender for best ever tennis book. Niland, Ireland’s best ever tennis player, wonderfully captures the trials and tribulations of life on the tennis professional circuit for those outside the top 100 in the world. It’s funny, tragic, compelling and exceptionally well written. Deserves all the praise it is getting.

Then Best ⚽ Books

I’m clearly a sucker for books about football in other countries. I’ve avoided the best selling and excellent efforts by Miguel Delaney and Ian Graham to focus on three books that each zoom on football in a particular country. My three choices this year

⚽ Narcoball: Love, Death and Football in Escobar's Colombia by David Arrowsmith. An exploration of Colombian club football during Escobar's rise and fall. This is a fantastic read - part true crime, part football history.

⚽ Played in Germany: A Footballing Journey Through a Nation's Soul by Kit Holden. I loved Holden’s last book on Union Berlin and this is just as good. A deep look at Germany through it’s region’s football culture.

⚽ Bring Me That Horizon: A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football by Miguel Lourenço Pereira. A gem of a book on a country with a vast football history. Entertaining and enlightening . A gem.

Three Great Basketball Reads

🏀 Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty by Scott Howard-Cooper. This book is an absolutely supurb piece of sports writing. Vivid, detailed, compelling. A sensational book.

🏀 Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon by Mirin Fader. If you have read one of Fader’s interviews you now how good a storyteller she is. Hakeem is a fascinating subject and this is a great book.

🏀 The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson, and the Hidden History of Hoops by Jack McCallum. Everything McCallum writes is a must-read book and this is no exception.

My favorite 🏈 reads this year

🏈 The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution by Michael Silver. Any other year and this would have been my book of the year. A fantastic overview of football’s evolution in recent years through the Shanahan and McVay coaching trees. Great storytelling and explanations of tactical evolution. Sports writing at its finest.

🏈 Out of the Darkness: The Magic and Mystery of Aaron Rodgers by Ian O'Connor. O’Connor’s biographies are always a must-read and whether you like or loathe Rodgers he’s undeniably a fascinating sportsman.

🏈 The Price: What It Takes to Win in College Football's Era of Chaos by Armen Keteyian and John Talty. Weaves disparate threads into a comprehensive overview of college football at a turning point which promises to change the game in ways yet to be seen.

🏈 The Lions Finally Roar: The Ford Family, the Detroit Lions, and the Road to Redemption in the NFL by Bill Morris. A fantastic book on the history of what was the worst franchise in NFL for so very long. Particularly fun reading it at as the Lions reach heights unimaginable during the long grim days covered by Morris.

Two Baseball Books I Loved

⚾ Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O’Brien. A great bio of a complicated man. Rose was a remarkable competitor, a fascinating but flawed man.

⚾ The Last of His Kind: Clayton Kershaw and the Burden of Greatness by Andy McCullough. A wonderful book that reflects on both a remarkable career and what it takes to stay at the top of a sport for so long.

I also am really looking forward to A Baseball Gaijin by Aaron Fischman but just haven’t gotten to it yet.

Two 🥊 Reads

🥊 Then The World Moved On: The Brutal Truth Behind the Baer-Campbell Fight by Catherine Johnson. A remarkable work of history that pulls no punches in setting the record straight on Max Baer’s vicious killing of Frankie Campbell

🥊 Death of a Boxer by Pete Carvill. A meditation on the nature of boxing that asks why people do it, what it does for and to them.

Two important books that pull no punches

Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe by Irvin Muchnick. A devastating expose of the abuse in USA Swimming and the horrific failures to disclose and prevent it continuing.

The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game Nathan Kalman-Lamb & Derek Silva. A convincing argument that college football is unsavable and its true costs laid bare. Interviews with college athletes are very compelling.

Is Wrestling a Sport? Either Way, These Two Books Are Great

🤼 Macho Man: The Untamed, Unbelievable Life of Randy Savage by Jon Finkel. Can’t think of a better combo of subject and biographer than the WWF icon and the always entertaining and uplifting Finkel. Just a very fun bio.

🤼The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania by Brad Balukjian. A really fantastic book tracking down wrestlers from an old wrestling card. Balukjian is a great, and honest, writer who combines his personal nostalgia with the wrestler’s own stories into a compelling read.

And one last book I really liked

🏎️ The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. A fascinating history of the business of F1 told through the stories of its’s most interesting characters.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with the list of 2025 sports books to look out for and have some great plans for more regular newsletters next year. Stay tuned and happy reading.