Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold

This is no hagiography. Irreverent, hilarious and surprising, Rooney’s Gold is a tarts-and-all biography of England’s most famous sportsman and the iniquities of some of those who have sought their pound of flesh. This is the story of a boy from the mean streets of broken Britain - few streets meaner than Croxteth in Liverpool - lifted out of poverty by his footballing genius to play for Manchester United and England. Wayne Rooney can be bad-tempered and he can use bad language, but there’s no doubting his passion for the beautiful game - and a basic, street-level sense of fair play. Rough, working class, surrounded by an unlikely crew - including a controversial agent, a crooked lawyer, tarts and gangsters - Rooney’s Gold looks at the characters who have been attracted to the fabulous money Rooney gets for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field. Some of them have tainted his gold. However, in the wake of a disastrous World Cup 2010, further tabloid revelations of his paying prostitutes for sex, and the comically unedifying spectacle of his grotesque contract negotiationsA with Manchester United in October 2010, that Rooney is perfectly capable of tarnising his own gold.