Dead Ball is a brutal, lyrical howl of rage from a man who’s lost everything: his son, his club and his place in the world.
Set in a decaying post-football town, it blends revenge fantasy with unreliable memory, stadium ghosts and blood-stained nostalgia.
This is not a sports story. It’s a litany, a last chant from a man with a scarf and a score to settle
"Merebridge Till I Die"
Literary Football Noir, Psychological Unravelling, Unreliable Narration
A football club is dead, and someone must answer for it. In a dying English town, a grieving father and former fan keeps a private list of names of players or managers, of those who betrayed everything the club stood for.
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Directors. Agents. Broadcasters. They’re all on there.
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​Told through the voice of a bitter, unravelling and wholly unreliable narrator, Dead Ball is both a confessional and a revenge memoir. As he recounts the club's destruction, his spiralling grief merges with fury, ritual and memory.
What begins as a personal eulogy descends into something darker, a document of intent. A kill list and a blueprint for murder.
Target Market:
Dead Ball is aimed at readers of literary noir and transgressive fiction who are drawn to psychologically intense character studies, biting social commentary, and uncompromising prose. It will appeal to those who want their crime fiction politically loaded, their satire razor-sharp, and their anti-heroes nihilistic, articulate, and terrifyingly plausible.
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This novel is for readers who understand that radicalisation is rarely sudden, that grief can curdle into violence, and that modern culture, football included, is no longer sacred, but branded, hollowed out, and sold back to us at premium prices.
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Dead Ball is not a whodunnit. It is a psychological spiral charting how loyalty curdles into obsession, how community collapses under capitalism, and how ordinary men become monsters while the world watches or worse, claps.
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It is for readers who admire Bret Easton Ellis’s detachment, Irvine Welsh’s fury, and the social despair of David Peace, but want those sensibilities aimed squarely at the commodification of football and the death of working-class identity in the modern UK.
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Comparable Titles:
Comparable in tone and ambition to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Dead Ball explores how violence becomes ideology and how alienation finds release in performance and spectacle.
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It also shares thematic ground with David Peace’s The Damned Utd and Red Riding Quartet, particularly in its exploration of working-class identity, rage, and systemic collapse, filtered through a footballing lens.
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Like J.G. Ballard’s Millennium People, it charts the path from quiet disillusionment to homegrown domestic extremism, with articulate madness slowly overtaking the rational self.
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It owes stylistic and cultural debts to Daz Spencer Lovesey’s Sick Love, with its poetic transgression and uncompromising sense of class warfare, and to the film Dead Man’s Shoes, for its blend of loyalty, grief, and retribution at the edge of social invisibility.
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Dead Ball will resonate with readers who see football as something that makes a community and where a club becomes part of the DNA of a town. It will appeal to those people who pump their hard earned money into being part of something, only for financiers, hedge-funds and sports-washing nations to come along and pillage their club and call it progress. If you think the soul's gone out of football and you're sick of the bullshit crypto shilling and betting ads, sick of the dodgy chairmen that should be in prison for fraud, not on a yacht in Monaco, this is for you. All of you.