Preorder, on sale June 11th, 2026. 

By Tim Rich

A lovingly crafted biography of former England manager Terry Venables telling the story of his playing career, managerial successes (and failures) and fascinating life away from the pitch.

If there was a year when English football exploded into the public consciousness it was 1996. It was the summer when the phrase “Football’s coming home” echoed from car radios, when Alan Shearer and Paul Gascoigne orchestrated England’s campaign in the European Championship that captivated a nation.

At the centre of it all was Terry Venables, managing England in what, remarkably, was his only international tournament. This year, a World Cup summer, will mark  the 30th anniversary of Euro ‘96 – and with it also being a World Cup year, England fever is once again set to dominate the summer.

Venables had resigned before Euro ‘96 had even begun – “to spend more time with his lawyers” fighting a series of disastrous court cases against Alan Sugar, the man with whom he had bought Tottenham Hotspur five years before. It would take a quarter of a century for England to come so close to a major trophy again.

Essex-born Terry Venables was not the most successful man to manage England, but he was unquestionably the most interesting. As a manager and coach, he was startlingly successful. He was 39 when he took Queens Park Rangers to an FA Cup final, 43 when he steered Barcelona to their first La Liga title in a dozen years. An estimated one million people came on to the Spanish city’s streets to welcome the team home from the airport. The tributes on his death in 2023 spoke of a man of enormous achievements who might have achieved very much more.

Venables was a fine footballer; good enough to have made the 40-man preliminary squad for the 1966 World Cup squad and good enough to have won the FA Cup with Tottenham a year later. Yet he was very much more than that. He sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra when he was seventeen. By nineteen he was captain of Chelsea, taking the pop singer, Tommy Steele, with him to training. Five years later, he was a qualified coach, a disciple of the revolutionary methods of Dave Sexton and Malcolm Allison.

Throughout his career Venables has dabbled in every aspect of football, the boardroom and the stage. Had he possessed fewer outside interests, he might have been a more successful manager, but he would have been a less compelling subject for a biography that will paint a picture of this complicated, larger-than-life football legend in full.