The Last Amateur and Other Stories

by Ian Plenderleith

254 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

My latest book (published September 2025) is another collection of football short stories, The Last Amateur (Halcyon Publishing), and is "inspired by the amorality, the greed, and the somehow still irresistible allure of the modern game", to quote the cover blurb. It follows my book about being an amateur ref (Reffing Hell, 2022) and my counter-Hornby supporter's memoir The Quiet Fan (2018). That book was preceded by my historical analysis of the wildly entertaining North American Soccer League of the 1970s - 'Rock n Roll Soccer', which was published in the UK by Icon Books in 2014, and by Thomas Dunne in the US in 2015. My debut was back in 2001, For Whom the Ball Rolls (Orion Books), my first foray into football fiction.

The rest of my life has been spent playing, coaching, reffing, watching and reporting on football, with occasional interference from family and friends.

Reviews

[Lean]

A lovely style of writing that kept me engaged. A mixture of the fantastic and real life. I loved the first story and a later one addressing dementia. But they were all a pleasure to read. I tried to limit reading to one a day to give me time to process them, but didn't always succeed...