Stuart Pearce became the face of England's bid to win the 1996 European Championships when his maniacal explosion of joy and relief at scoring a penalty in the quarter-final shoot-out against Spain captured the mood of a nation. England did not win the tournament, but, against a backdrop of the Three Lions song that played from every pub, every bar, every car radio and every open window in that summer, it cemented the renaissance of the game in this country. Alongside his friendships with Paul Gascoigne and Gareth Southgate - including the time the trio were invited on stage by the Sex Pistols - the book details the semi-final against Germany, more heartbreak in the penalty shootout when Southgate missed England's sixth penalty and what the tournament meant to Pearce and to Southgate and to the rest of the country. It is a first-hand account of the summer when football came home for England fans, and when the country lost itself in the joy of a home tournament.

Golf fans will not forget the 39th Ryder Cup in a hurry. Staged at the Medinah Country Club just outside of Chicago, the 2012 event has already gone down as the most remarkable competition in its 85-year history. The American team had home advantage, and a golf course unapologetically set up to suit its own players. Supported by tens of thousands of loud and proud fans, the USA's star-studded line-up dominated the first two days and ended the Saturday with a seemingly unassailable 10-6 advantage. No away team had ever won the Ryder Cup from such an unpromising position. Sunday was singles day, traditionally the forte of American teams. The situation looked bleak, especially when European team member and number 1 golfer in the world, Rory McIlroy, very nearly missed his tee-off time. Yet slowly but surely, the European team - who had top-loaded their line-up in one last throw of the dice - started to turn the scoreboard blue. With inspirational captain Jose Maria Olazabal stiring European blood with thoughts of the late Ryder Cup magician Seve Ballesteros (whose silhouette was emblazoned on the players' sweaters and bags), the tide turned and the previously dominant American players started to crumble in the face of the onslaught. Suddenly European players were holing miraculous putts to win holes out of the blue. Something very special was happening. When German Martin Kaymer sank his putt on the eighteenth green to clinch the point that retained the Ryder Cup, the most astonishing comeback in the event's long and distinuished history was complete. Miracle at Medinah is the compelling narrative of those amazing three days in Illinois, a fitting chronicle of an unbelievable sporting story.

Stuart Pearce became the face of England's bid to win the 1996 European Championships when his maniacal explosion of joy and relief at scoring a penalty in the quarter-final shoot-out against Spain captured the mood of a nation. England did not win the tournament, but, against a backdrop of the Three Lions song that played from every pub, every bar, every car radio and every open window in that summer, it cemented the renaissance of the game in this country. Alongside his friendships with Paul Gascoigne and Gareth Southgate - including the time the trio were invited on stage by the Sex Pistols - the book details the semi-final against Germany, more heartbreak in the penalty shootout when Southgate missed England's sixth penalty and what the tournament meant to Pearce and to Southgate and to the rest of the country. It is a first-hand account of the summer when football came home for England fans, and when the country lost itself in the joy of a home tournament.

Kieron Dyer's memoir, Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late, is the first intimate and unsparing portrait of the failures and excesses of the generation of English footballers made rich beyond their wildest dreams by the post-1990 World Cup boom in the game and the explosion of the Premier League. It shares the same brutal honesty and self-awareness of the bestselling No Nonsense by Joey Barton and GoodFella by Craig Bellamy. In the public mind, Kieron Dyer came to symbolise so much of what was self-destructive about a group of football players known collectively as the 'Baby Bentley generation'. Nicknamed 'The King of Bling' by the tabloid press, Dyer was caught up in many of the scandals that characterised the history of a talented crop of players who promised so much and delivered so little, a generation whose wages and lavish lifestyles began to alienate them from the fans who once worshipped them. The brash young man is gone now, and in his place is the quiet, caring, wise man who was such a favourite on I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here! in 2015. Dyer narrates, in uncompromising detail, how a generation of talented English footballers, taken out of working class childhoods and presented with a world of glitz, glamour, wealth and temptation, failed to cope with the riches that were presented to them and often fell apart. Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late is about a moment in time, a social and historical record of English football at the start of its gold rush. For Dyer, the end of the book brings a measure of personal redemption and peace but for the English game, there is only a lingering sense of waste and regret for an opportunity lost.

Bill Shankly was one of ten children from an Ayrshire mining village. Alex Ferguson was a shipyard worker's son who went on to become a toolmaker's shop steward. Both of them enjoyed distinguished but not outstanding playing careers. Both of them raged against the might of the rich in their early managerial days, and both of course will be remembered as two of the mightiest figures in the history of the English game. There is a rich seam that links the epic lives of Shankly and Ferguson, running between their enemy football strongholds in Liverpool and Manchester. It goes deeper than the myriad achievements of both men - three league titles for Shankly, eight championships and a European Cup for Ferguson. What binds them is their long love affairs with football, which were so consuming that a tragic form of rejection was almost inevitable. Shankly felt betrayed by the club he had built from the ground up in the 1960s, and when he died from a heart attack in 1981 the deep rift between him and Liverpool had not been healed. Equally, with Malcolm Glazer's takeover, Ferguson looks more and more like a man out of his time, a man whose once absolute authority over his players may be slipping. In this riveting dual biography Oliver Holt takes two of football's undisputed greats and shows what made both men tick. In part a celebration of two driven, charismatic and hard-nosed characters, If You're Second You Are Nothing is also a poignant evocation of men not knowing how to let go of the game to which they have given so much.