When a book deal turns into a sending-off

Last week, Leeds United manager David O'Leary was sacked. His dismissal was not, it is thought, unrelated to the publication last season of his book Leeds United on Trial. Jaap Stam, whom O'Leary was rumoured to be pursuing, will have shaken his head in sympathy.

His own book, Head to Head, is believed to be the reason that he was sold by Manchester United last season.

O'Leary became the third person to lose his job in football as a more-or-less direct result of a book. Glenn Hoddle's 1998 World Cup diary, ghosted by none other than the FA's David Davies, got him into hot water. No wonder that this year, when publishers were invited to bid for David Beckham's diary of the World Cup, the FA remembered the debacle from last time and called the whole thing off.

Football players and managers get paid a lot of money for their books - O'Leary was apparently paid £100,000, much of it funded by the sale of serialisation rights. There is far more money in football books than even five years ago, as sales have risen with the quality of the (ghost)writing. "The money made available to sports books is, for the right personality, larger than it has been," says Jonathan Harris, literary agent to Terry Venables, Geoff Hurst and Bobby Robson. But for well-paid football people there's not so much money that it can ever compensate for unemployment.

It used to be a simple thing, the football book. You had a glorious career, someone ghosted your turgid memoir, a few fans bought it, and that was the end of it. Some simply wanted a nice little memento of former glories. They never actually read the thing, let alone wrote it.

Pat Nevin bamboozled his Chelsea teammate Kerry Dixon with long words he'd found in Dixon's autobiography. Stam plainly didn't read his, or his lawyers didn't tell him how dangerous it was to allege that there were irregularities when Manchester United signed him. Others, like O'Leary, develop a hubristic desire to get something remuneratively off their chest.

"Given that the book was written by David Davies," says Ian Marshall, who publishes sport books at Hodder Headline, "Hoddle can consider himself the unluckiest of the three. Stam probably wasn't focusing as much on what was in there as he should have done.

"O'Leary's was a story people were interested in but it was always going to be a risky venture. The golden rule seems to be for managers that they shouldn't be revealing secrets from within the changing room because they are in danger of losing the confidence of their players."

"I can't understand why they do it," says Rachel Cugnoni of the Yellow Jersey sports imprint. "They must have agents who say, 'This is the next stage in building up your personality profile.' But they do get a lot of money. My feeling about every ghosted autobiography is that publishers ring round newspapers and find out how much they are going to get for the serial.

"When David O'Leary says he wasn't paid for the serial he seems a little disingenuous. Unless his agent didn't tell him."

We now await the autobiographies of Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane. They each have a certain amount to get off their chests, for which they will be handsomely rewarded.

But after what happened to O'Leary, Stam and Hoddle, will they now be quite so forthcoming?