THE BLACK BOOK

Secrets from the Heart of Football

More than 50 years at the heart of football. Now Harry Harris, multi-award-winning writer and broadcaster, reveals how the biggest stories really happened

Harry Harris didn't simply report football.

Sometimes, he became part of the story.

Transfers, investigations, secret deals, boardroom battles, friendships, fall-outs and extraordinary relationships with the players, managers, chairmen, owners and agents who shaped the modern game.

For decades, readers saw Harry's exclusives splashed across the nation's newspapers.

What they didn't know was how he got them.

Now Harry opens his legendary Black Book and reveals the stories behind the stories—who talked, who trusted him, who fell out with him and what really happened when the notebooks were closed.

It is the story of a lost world of football journalism: Fleet Street, World Cups, press boxes, hotel bars, personal telephone numbers and relationships built on trust rather than social media.

As Harry told Track Radio:

“It’s not just the story of another journalist telling the stories of the stories he told, it’s how they happened and who was actually behind it all.”

THIS IS MUCH, MUCH MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER FOOTBALL MEMOIR

For more than 50 years, Harry Harris operated where football and Fleet Street collided. He knew the players, drank with the managers, argued with the chairmen, cultivated the agents and protected the sources whose secrets produced some of the biggest headlines in the game.

The Black Book takes you behind those headlines.

Harry reveals how major exclusives were really obtained, how transfers were negotiated behind closed doors and how relationships built on trust could give one journalist extraordinary access to the people running football. Sometimes Harry was reporting the story. Sometimes he found himself becoming part of it.

There are encounters with Pelé, Maradona, Gazza, Sir Alex Ferguson, Bobby Robson, Terry Venables, Alan Sugar, Ken Bates, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Gary Lineker, Bryan Robson, Ruud Gullit and many more.

There are secret meetings, transfer deals, furious telephone calls, friendships and fall-outs, investigations, court cases, bans from football grounds and stories that could only have happened in an era before mobile phones, social media and carefully controlled media access transformed the relationship between football and the press.

Harry also takes the reader inside the great Fleet Street newspaper battles, revealing how fiercely rival reporters competed for an exclusive and how football journalism changed from hot metal, typewriters and telephone boxes to today's instant digital world.

There is laughter and absurdity, but there are darker stories too — corruption, racism, hacking and Harry's deeply personal memories of Hillsborough, the tragedy he witnessed and reported and which has never left him.

Lavishly illustrated with photographs, original newspaper pages, cartoons, press passes and memorabilia from Harry's own archive, The Black Book is more than the memoir of a football journalist.

It is an eyewitness history of more than half a century of football — told by someone who wasn't watching from the outside, but living at the heart of it

WHY READ THE BLACK BOOK?

Because you've read the headlines

Now discover what really happened behind them

HARRY HARRIS' 100th BOOK

Published to mark an extraordinary milestone in one of football journalism's longest careers.

STANDARD HARDBACK — £25

SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION — £75

ONLY 100 INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED COPIES

Once they're gone, they're gone.

PUBLICATION: 1 NOVEMBER 2026

PRE-ORDER THE LIMITED EDITION NOW BY EMAILING DAVE@LEGACY11BOOKS.CO.UK

Testimonials

“Harry’s black book is in my opinion the biggest and best there has ever been from any journalist at any time that I can recall. If you’re not in his black book you don’t count.’”

LORD ALAN SUGAR

“Harry has been around for decades, which means his contact list, is as big as any”

ALAN SHEARER

“Harris’ series on the Bung and Betting stories were examples of popular sports journalism at its best”