As soon as I heard the title I rushed out to buy it. A mistake. What promised to be a definitive text on the soiling of The Beautiful Game proved to be just an amusing and cleverly written collection of anecdotes, personal hobby-horses and cheap gossip, all of which lets the real culprits right off the hook. The collection starts off promising enough with a few pointed pages about the man himself; Mr Roman Abromovich. But Henderson offers his readers no real insights into how Abromovich accumulated his billions, nor how he learnt to play the new game of gangster capitalism that replaced the old decrepit Soviet system.

Private ownership of what were once proud community football clubs is at the very heart of what is sick in modern day football but Henderson prefers to be side-tracked by the trivialities of the Beckham’s, the Drogba’s and dear old Georgie Best. Whatever the failings of these and similar individuals, they are surely only the symptoms of the malaise rather than the illness itself. Dirty money is at the heart of the problem but Henderson prefers to skirt around the problem rather than take it full on. Instead he serves up chapter after chapter on the so called villains with names as diverse as Terry Venerables, Ian Wright, Bill Shankley, Wayne Rooney, Robinho, Steve McClaren and Ashley Cole. At the very end, in villain No 50, Henderson does return to more serious matters when he throws the spotlight on Pini Zahavi, the mother of all football agents; the very same agents who have pocketed, we have just learned, some 74 million from the Premier League in just one year. These agents are of course just one part of the bigger web of business interests that have zoomed in, leech like, on our national game. These business interests scour the planet in search of talented youngsters, convert them into saleable commodities, and then set up lucrative deals with whosoever; raking off massive commissions in the bargain. None of this is explored by Henderson with any real conviction.Henderson does rise above the tittle-tattle occasionally, if but briefly, as in chapter 26, when he finally gets around to mentioning Mr Murdoch’s pernicious and increasingly ubiquitous influence on world football. But once again it is not a serious analysis that is on offer, but a rather superficial swipe at the shallow, slick presentation of football on Sky TV. Chapter 1 and Chapter 50 hold together but the other 48 chapters just provide some light Christmas reading. A stocking-filler but no more.