The Last Champions: Leeds United and the Year that Football Changed Forever - Hardcover

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Dave Simpson is a Guardian journalist who writes mainly on music. His first book, The Fallen, was a monumental quest to track down everyone who had ever played in Mark E Smith's legendary band. He is now applying those same forensic and possibly certifiable skills to his football team, Leeds United.

Living in Yorkshire, he has supported Leeds since the early 1970s, man and boy, which has brought about a small amount of pleasure and a great amount of pain. He also wrote for the LeedsLeedsLeeds magazine which documented United's rise and mostly fall from 1998 to 2011.

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Twenty years ago, Leeds United fought off the challenge of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United to lift the First Division championship trophy. A perfect blend of young, home-grown talent and canny acquisitions, pacy defenders, midfield maestros and goal-hungry strikers, they were moulded by visionary manager Howard Wilkinson into an unstoppable force, winning the league just two years after promotion.

Yet 1992 was to prove a watershed for English football. The riches of the Premiership would soon send wages skyrocketing and herald a tidal wave of foreign imports. Players whom 'Sergeant Wilko' had taken from nowhere to the stars would become as outdated as standing on the terraces, supporting your local club. He remains the last English manager to win the league. His Leeds team were The Last Champions.

Dave Simpson has tracked down the bizarre array of characters who were part of those glory years to tell a unique tale of football history. Idols like Lee Chapman and Gary Speed (not to forget Vinnie Jones and Eric Cantona). Vital but unsung players such as Mike Whitlow and Carl Shutt. Wilkinson himself, his coaching staff and the club board, Leslie Silver and Bill Fotherby. All have an astonishing story to tell.

The Last Champions is about a football miracle, when a disparate group of ordinary people became heroes through hard work, organization and fellowship. And it is about the end of an era, after which the game changed beyond all recognition.