Joshua Robinson

Jonathan Clegg

Two veteran sports writers and editors take readers inside the history of the most-watched sports league on earth -- England's Premier League.

How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports

The Club

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Wall Street Journal reporters and authors of The Club, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg tell the riveting saga of how Formula 1 broke through in America, detailing the eclectic culture of racing obsessives, glamorous settings, gearheads, engineering geniuses, dashing racers, and bitter rivalries that have made F1 the world’s fastest growing sport.

For decades in America, car racing meant NASCAR, and to a lesser extent IndyCar, with Formula 1—the wealthiest racing league in the world—a distant third. Fast forward to 2023, and F1 has emerged at the front of the pack powered by a passionate yet nascent American fanbase. The F1 juggernaut has arrived, but this checkered flag was far from inevitable.

In The Formula, Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg tell the epic story of how F1 saved itself from collapse and finally conquered America through guile, fearlessness, and above all, reinvention. With fast cars, big money, glamorous locales, and beautiful people as the backdrop, The Formula reveals how F1’s sudden arrival in the US was actually decades in the making, a product of the sport’s near-constant state of transformation and experimentation. Bringing unique insight and access to F1’s most storied teams and personalities—from Ferrari to Bernie Ecclestone to Christian Horner to Lewis Hamilton—The Formula offers a riveting portrait of the drivers, corporations, cars, rivalries, and audacious gambles that have shaped the sport for half a century.

The end result is a high-octane history of how modern F1 racing came to be—the first book to tell the story of the outrageous successes and spectacular crashes that led F1 to this extraordinary yet precarious moment. More than just a sports story, The Formula is the tale of a disrupter that broke into the crowded American sports marketplace and claimed its place through cash, personality, and a new understanding of what a sport needs to be in the age of wall-to-wall entertainment.

How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest-Growing Sport 

The Formula

One Rivalry, Two GOATs, and the Era That Remade the World's Game

Messi vs. Ronaldo

An excellent recap, with wonderful access and forensic detail on the Premier League's rise to global alpha status... All told with an arch sense of humour The Guardian How did English football - once known for its stale pies, bad book-keeping and hooligans - become a commercial powerhouse and the world's premium popular entertainment? This was a business empire built in only twenty-five years on ambition, experimentation and gambler's luck. Lead by a motley cast of executives, Russian oligarchs, Arab Sheikhs, Asian Titans, American Tycoons, battle-hardened managers, ruthless agents and the Murdoch media - the Premier League has been carved up, rebranded and exported to phenomenal 185 countries. The United Nations only recognizes 193. But the extraordinary profit of bringing England's ageing industrial towns to a compulsive global attention has come at a cost. Today, as players are sold for hundreds of millions and clubs are valued in the billions, local fans are being priced out - and the clubs' local identities are fading. The Premier League has become the classic business fable for our globalised world. Drawing on dozens of exclusive and revelatory interviews from the Boardrooms - including Liverpool's John W. Henry, Tottenham's Daniel Levy, Martin Edwards and David Gill at Manchester United, Arsène Wenger and Stan Kroenke at Arsenal, Manchester City's sporting director Txiki Begiristain, and executives at Chelsea, West Ham, Leicester City and Aston Villa - this is the definitive bustand boom account of how the Premier League product took over the world.

How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport

The Club is the inside story of how English soccer’s Premier League became the wildest, richest, most popular sports product on the planet, "a narrative that is part Great Expectations, part Game of Thrones, in equal measure." (Roger Bennett, NBC Sports, Men in Blazers) This is a sports and business tale of how money, ambition, and twenty-five years of drama remade an ancient institution into a twenty-first-century entertainment empire. No one knew it when their experiment began, but without any particular genius or acumen, the motley cast of billionaires and hucksters behind the modern Premier League struck gold. Pretty soon, everyone wanted to try their luck, from Russian oligarchs to Emirati sheikhs, American tycoons, and Asian Tiger titans. Some succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Some lost everything. Today, players are sold for tens of millions, clubs are valued in the billions, and games are beamed out to nearly two hundred countries, all while the league struggles to preserve its English soul. Deeply researched and drawing on one hundred exclusive interviews, including the key decision makers at every major English team, The Club is the definitive and wildly entertaining narrative of how the Premier League took over the world.

Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg offer a deeply reported account of the intertwined sagas and legacies of two of the greatest soccer players of all time—Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo—examining how their rivalry has grown from a personal competition to a multi-billion-dollar industry, paralleling the stunning rise, overwhelming excesses, and uncertain future of modern international soccer. For over fifteen years, almost any conversation about international soccer has always come back to two players—Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo—undoubtedly the greatest of their generation but with styles, attitudes, and fanbases that couldn’t be more different. For millions of people around the world “Messi or Ronaldo?” isn’t simply a barroom argument, or an affirmation of fandom, so much as a statement of philosophy, of values, of what global soccer is today and of what it will be tomorrow. Now Wall Street Journal reporters and co-authors of The Club, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, unite the stories of Messi and Ronaldo into a single modern epic of global sports, detailing how one rivalry changed both the game and the business of international soccer—forever. Based on dozens of firsthand accounts and years of original reporting, Messi vs. Ronaldo weaves together the stakes, color, and characters at the heart of each man’s story, going inside the locker rooms and boardrooms where their legends were forged and revealing off-field drama as gripping as anything that happened on it. From their contrasting origin stories to their divergent career arcs and their conflicting reputations, these players have built their successes on opposite paths, yet each, in his own way, offers a riveting tale of triumph and excess. Taken together, their story embodies the astronomical growth of international soccer, how social media has revolutionized the power of sports celebrity, and how the desire to capitalize on the billions of dollars these players represent electrified some of the most storied clubs in Europe—Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Manchester United among them—and cost them almost everything. With the 2022 World Cup almost certain to be the last for both of these figures, Messi vs. Ronaldo offers a deeply researched look at their legacy and grapples with the impact that their talents have had on the game for better and for worse. Much more than a retelling of the dual accomplishments of these great players, this is truly a biography of a rivalry, one that has become a crucial lens for understanding the past, present, and future of global soccer.

Jonathan Clegg

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