Deadline Day

Football used to be a sport. Then it became a business. Now it's a whole industry.

For three months every year football clubs buy and sell human beings. People who are so good at their job that others are willing to pay millions and millions of pounds to work with them, and for good reason; the right deal can help you win football's top prizes while the wrong deal can cost you your job and bankrupt your club. It's a fast-paced, at times murky and cutthroat world worth billions - and Jim White and Kaveh Solhekol have been at the heart of it for decades.

In Deadline Day, Jim and Kaveh, two leading transfer market experts, take us behind the scenes of this uniquely tense and secretive world where the winner takes it all. They uncover what really happens in this game within the game where everything is for sale at the right price. And that's a price that's being paid by some of the richest people and countries on the planet, including billionaire US investors and Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia who have money to burn.

Jim reveals what led him into journalism, and specifically what it takes to break the biggest stories and make it in the footballing world. Featuring a colourful cast of iconic players, managers, agents and owners - such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane and Sir Alex Ferguson to name a few - Jim recounts some of the most game-changing deals in history, as well as the ones that got away.

Perceptive, entertaining and dynamically told, Deadline Day addresses some of the big questions facing the game in a definitive, never-before-told inside story of football's transfer window.

About the Author

Jim White writes on sport for the DAILY TELEGRAPH , presents Scottish Television's Champions' League coverage and is movie critic of WORD magazine.

Jim White was brought up in Manchester, educated at Manchester Grammar School and on the terraces of Old Trafford. After a degree in English at Bristol University, he became a freelance magazine writer specialising in pop music, before joining the launch team at the INDEPENDENT in 1986. Ten years later he decamped to the GUARDIAN, before taking a right turn to the TELEGRAPH in 2003. He has worked extensively for both BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 (winning a Sony Gold Award in 2001) and for BBC television (including a stint as reporter on BBC2's Travel Show) and has written and presented a number of television documentaries, including an RTS-nominated examination of the Jose Mourinho 'phenomenon'.

He has also published several books about football issues, including the award-winning ARE YOU WATCHING, LIVERPOOL?, the inside story of Manchester United's 1993-94 season.