The book traces football’s alternative championships from the very first international match in 1872 via more than 800 title matches, involving legendary teams and footballing minnows, classic finals and forgotten friendlies, celebrated players and unsung heroes.

As it happens, Japan are the current Unofficial Football World Champions, having taken the title from Argentina back in October. However, the Japanese play South Korea on Wednesday in the latest Unofficial Football World Championships (UFWC) title match. You can read more at the UFWC website.

The English edition of Unofficial Football World Champions was published in January, and is available in paperback from all good bookshops, including Amazon.co.uk, and it’s also on Kindle. There’s more information about the English edition here, and you can order it using the links on the right.

Harold ‘Hal’ Graham was a 27-year-old science graduate from Buffalo who had been working for the Bell Aircraft Company as a test engineer for just over a year when he was selected to be the first man to pilot the rocketbelt – the iconic flying jetpack created by engineer Wendell Moore.

It would be Graham’s first taste of flying. He was not a registered pilot, and the only machine he had previous experience of driving was a car. He was, however, a rocketbelt fan, having grown up with Buck Rogers comics and Commando Cody serials. When Bell began to ask around for a volunteer to fly the rocketbelt he had no hesitation in applying for the job.

Graham’s first tethered flight took place in March 1961. These flights took place in a large aircraft hangar. The rocketbelt was suspended from the ceiling, and small amounts of thrust were used to generate moderate lift. 36 tethered flights later, it was time for the safety ropes to come off.

The very first untethered rocketbelt flight took place at seven in the morning on 20 April 1961. A 20-man Bell crew gathered at an empty clearing near the Bell plant on Buffalo’s Niagara Falls Boulevard and opposite the Niagara Falls Municipal Airport, which had been specially closed for 30 minutes. The crew ran through a detailed checklist in preparation for the flight.

Then Graham, wearing a black rubber suit, white helmet, work boots, and goggles, released the throttle in a short burst to check the propulsion. All seemed fine. Again he released the throttle, this time successfully lifting the belt around 18 inches from the ground in a thick cloud of steam, and piloted it in a straight line at a speed of around ten miles per hour.

The noise was incredible – an explosive roar of gas as loud as a pneumatic drill. And visibility was poor – almost zero according to Graham – due to condensation created by the rocket exhaust.

On the first free rocketbelt flight Hal Graham flew for 13 seconds and covered a distance of 112 feet – eight feet less than the Wright Brothers had covered in their inaugural flight. It was nevertheless a thoroughly triumphant debut.

Following the success of the test flight, Bell executives were keen to unveil the remarkable device to the public. After 28 test flights, Wendell Moore was satisfied enough to agree to a public demonstration.

The first public rocketbelt flight took place at Fort Eustis, Virginia, on 8 June 1961 at a demonstration of new technologies. Light bulbs flashed and film reels rolled as Graham piloted the rocketbelt into the air, legs swinging below him. Against a backdrop of Air Force planes, Graham maneuvered the rocketbelt over a truck, and higher into the sky. He flew to around 15 feet, and then descended, bouncing slightly as he landed on his feet. Graham then offered a salute.

After removing his fire suit, Graham was mobbed by the press. Microphones were thrust into his face, and pencils jotted down every word he said. Bell officials handed out press releases which began, ‘Harold M Graham is believed to be the first man to fly with back-carried rocket equipment.’

The story made the front pages across the US. The New York Times headline read, ‘Portable army rocket propels man 150 feet in 11-second test flight.’ Life magazine said, ‘Graham was strapped to a hydrogen peroxide-fuelled rocket. The Army hopes it will someday make all foot soldiers look like Buck Rogers.’

One week later, Graham demonstrated the rocketbelt on the front lawn of the Pentagon in Washington DC in front of a huge crowd of military personnel.

Then, in October 1961, Graham, Moore and the Bell crew travelled to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to participate in another military demonstration, this time as part of a display of combat readiness. The demonstration was performed in front of a notable guest of honor – President John F Kennedy.

Graham, wearing a US Army uniform, took off from an amphibious landing vehicle, flew across a pond in a spray of water, and landed 14 seconds later on a sand embankment in front of JFK. Graham remembered to salute but forgot to depressurize the belt in the excitement of the moment, although he managed to remain on the ground. ‘Mr Kennedy was described by an Army Officer sitting near him as “wide eyed and open mouthed, just like a kid”,’ reported the Buffalo Evening News.

The public interest and publicity surrounding Graham and the rocketbelt generated much correspondence. Letters requesting public appearances began to flood the Bell offices. One man wrote to Bell requesting the use of the rocketbelt in order to claim a $1 million treasure trove that, he claimed, he could only reach with the use of the belt. Suspicious Bell executives turned the request down.

Although Hal Graham could now proficiently fly the rocketbelt, he was still not a registered airplane pilot. In November 1961 he decided to do something about that. He began to take flying lessons, and qualified for his pilot’s license in July 1962. That year also saw the debut of the B-Series rocketbelt. The new belt was engineered to reduce weight, and, as rocketbelt pilot, Graham was kitted out in a brand new bright yellow flight suit.

But Hal Graham’s short career as a rocketbelt pilot was coming to an end. During an ill-fated demonstration at Cape Canaveral, Graham fell 22 feet, landed on his head, and was knocked unconscious. He survived the crash, but decided to get out of the rocketbelt business. Graham made 83 untethered rocketbelt flights during his time at Bell, but he left the company in 1962 to pursue his new love of flying traditional aircraft. He set up his own one-man, one-plane charter flight company in Crossville, Tennessee.

Hal Graham died in Nashville on 22 October 2009, aged 75.

Watch Hal Graham fly the rocketbelt (YouTube)
Read The Rocketbelt Caper

Read the full story at The Guardian.

The first thing that struck me when wandering around the Earls Court venue was that it seemed so much busier than last year. Aisles seemed narrower, with more stands squeezed in, and it was difficult trying to negotiate a route past slow-moving foreign delegates and publishing assistants trundling heavy trolleys full of book proofs. Perhaps the recession had forced more of the book trade to venture out in search of the big deal that might keep them afloat for another year.

Something that quickly becomes apparent as you wander past the many thousands of books being whored is that few of them will actually sell. For a start, there are far too many of them. Most will not find space on the bookshelves and in the review columns, and will remain unsold and unread.

Also, content is far less important than profile. Big announcements are made about new books from Chris Evans and Dan Brown. They will sell because they are by Chris Evans and Dan Brown. Somewhere among these bustling aisles could be the greatest book ever written but, unless it has a big name attached, those in attendance will bustle on by.

And then, of course, there are the many books on display that don’t deserve an audience – those that are ill-conceived or badly produced, and those with such a ridiculously niche appeal that you feel the author could have satisfied all potential demand by printing a single copy on an A4 desktop printer.

The entire output of one American publisher, who I won’t name, falls into this category. I’d spoken to him last year, and initially felt sorry for this old chap with his boxes of unsaleable cheaply-produced Sherlock Holmes rip-offs, until I found out he was a vanity publisher, charging authors to publish their work AND encouraging them to spend thousands of dollars travelling to London to needlessly attend the fair.

The LBF is best avoided by writers – unless they have the thickest of skins. The prospect of finding hundreds of publishers – plus numerous agents, distributors and other book industry bods – gathered together under one roof might seem tempting, but authors hoping to generate interest in their unpublished manuscript or self-published novel will almost certainly receive the shortest of shrift.

Stepping outside to enjoy the sunshine at lunch time I was approached by an author who was touting a frighteningly militant expose of the medical industry, a shoddily-produced self-published copy of which she brandished in front of me. Luckily I was able to defend myself with my press pass, explaining that I had no clout whatsoever within the industry.

Last year, while wearing a publisher’s pass, I had been accosted by an author selling a raunchy memoir of his time as a male stripper. I politely made my excuses, and he handed me his business card – which featured a colour photograph of his penis. I passed his details on to a colleague.

This year I was interested to see James Patterson signing copies of a book that he has not even written. His name is on the cover of 8th Confession, in HUGE LETTERS. Underneath, in much smaller type, it says “with Maxine Paetro”. Patterson came up with the plot, apparently (“Unconventional cop juggles personal problems while playing cat and mouse with inventively gruesome serial killer? Kerching!”). Paetro, who actually wrote the thing, was not at the signing session.

Tech-wise, aside from ebook stuff, of which there was lots, I was interested to take a look at the Espresso Book Machine, an on-demand book printer about the size of an office photocopier that produces individual paperback books at a speed of 100 pages per minute. The final quality was impressive – perhaps not quite as good as a well-produced paperback, but certainly good enough to suggest that this might represent the future of retailing backlist books. Blackwell’s are the first UK retailer to get onboard, and the chain’s first Espresso machine can be found at its Charing Cross store.

Grumble-wise, I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside the LBF for undetermined reasons, and for the second year running I left with no decent free stuff. Everyone else, it seemed, was leaving with cotton shoulder bags stuffed with proof edition blockbusters, promotional t-shirts and, for all I know, shiny new Sony Readers. I left with some unwanted flyers and a digitally-produced copy of the Koran.

This week I received an email about a football novel I began writing a couple of years ago. It received some decent feedback from agents, but remains unpublished. It got me thinking that maybe I should polish the novel up and give it another push. It also got me thinking about football fiction in general.

Football non-fiction books regularly bother bestseller charts and literary prize shortlists. Yet the number of good football novels in existence can be counted on the toes of two left feet. With the beautiful game so enduringly popular this doesn’t seem to make sense.

Translating the thrilling unpredictability of any sport into fiction is undoubtedly quite a challenge, but there are scores of great novels about boxing, horse racing, even golf. American sports have been particularly well served by novelists, with Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel The Natural regarded as one of the best of the bunch. Of British sports, perhaps rugby league can claim to have inspired the best novel – the muddily realistic This Sporting Life by David Storey.

To clarify, when I talk about ‘football novels’ I mean novels where football and footballers are central to the plot. So I’m not counting the likes of John King’s Football Factory or Will Buckley’s The Man Who Hated Football, both of which feature the sport without really being about it.

I’m also going to neatly sidestep novels ‘co-authored’ by ex-footballers like Terry Venables (They Used To Play On Grass) and Pele (The World Cup Murder), and singly-authored by Steve Bruce (a trilogy – Striker!, Sweeper! and Defender! – starring Bruce’s cunningly-named murder-solving alter-ego ‘Steve Barnes’). So what’s left on the bookshelves?

The most obvious recent effort of note is David Peace’s excellent The Damned Utd, a fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s 44 days in charge of Leeds United. It’s a fine piece of work – probably my favourite novel from any genre of the last few years – although as a ‘dramatisation’ of real events I’m not sure it completely satisfies our need for made-up football action.

The Back Page, in Newcastle upon Tyne, is the now the largest sports bookshop in the world. In any given week it will sell hundreds of football books, but very few of them will be novels. ‘The only one people come in and ask for is The Damned Utd,’ says co-owner Mark Jensen. ‘I’m not sure whether football novels don’t sell well because not many are published, or whether not many are published because they don’t sell well.’

So there aren’t many good football novels about, but there are a few that every fan should have on their shelves. One is JL Carr’s 1975 effort, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup. Although technically more novella than novel at just 150 pages long, it’s a charming tale of non-leaguers triumphing against very long odds, told in matter-of-fact style in the form of a club history. Carr was a former amateur footballer, and his novel feels wonderfully authentic.

Hunter Davies’s Striker, from 1992, is another good read, presented as the warts-and-all autobiography of Joe Swift, a flawed footballing genius who finds – then loses – fame and fortune via Spurs, England, and Europe. There is more than a hint of irony in the fact that Davies later ghosted Paul Gascoigne’s autobiographies. In the novel, Bobby Robson calls Joe Swift ‘daft as a brush’. ‘Yes,’ clarifies Swift, ‘he said that about me long before he said it about Gazza.’ My paperback copy of Striker has a Spot the Ball competition on the back, which only adds to the book’s appeal.

But my favourite, and perhaps the very best football novel, is a book published by Puffin and aimed at younger readers. Esteemed sportswriter Brian Glanville’s Goalkeepers Are Different, published in 1972, is the thoroughly convincing tale of the rise of young keeper Ronnie Blake. Like Striker, Goalkeepers Are Different is presented as an autobiography. Blake plays for fictional first division side Borough, but comes up against real opposition teams and players. It feels like an authentic glimpse into the life of a footballer in the early 70s, a boy’s own adventure set in an evocative world of studs, mud and sideburns.

Goalkeepers Are Different is fantastic, but it was written 35 years ago and is now out of print. Surely, writers, publishers and agents, there is room on our bookshelves for another great football novel or two?

If you want a taster of my football novel, Muddy Boots, there are some sample chapters posted at Authonomy.com.