"Football as a gateway into books"
Football and reading are two of my favorite things. But regardless of my personal love for them, football and reading combined have the potential to bring about very positive changes.
A few months ago, Bradford City AFC announced a partnership with Awesome Books to leverage the passion for the sport to inspire the habit and the love of reading. Both organizations align in their values of community, education, and sustainability. The club is nested at the heart of the city – which in turn is included in Brontë country, where the Brontë sisters were born, lived, and wrote – bringing together children and their families.
This partnership seeks to ease access, putting books directly into the hands of children and families to help create new habits, new interests, and new opportunities. This extends to young players too, as the under-18s team received ‘Mystery Book Packs’ to inspire more teenage boys to read. Initiatives like this couldn't be more important right now, as 2026 is the National Year of Reading in the UK, a nationwide campaign led by the National Literacy Trust to help more people rediscover the joy of reading.
And the story of football and reading in this part of England is not new. When Bielsa was the manager of Leeds United, he implemented reading sessions among the players called ‘Reading is Freedom’. Adam Forshaw, former Leeds United midfielder, recalled in an interview to The Athletic two years ago:
“We’d sit in a circle and read passages ourselves. So we’d all read the same book and then we’d break it down, what it meant. A lot of times he (Bielsa) would give us homework, it might be an article and then the next day we would sit in a meeting room and talk about the meaning of it. We just hung off every word he said. We thought he was a genius.”
Regardless of Bielsa’s recent performance with the Uruguayan National Team, his approach was far from far-fetched. Professional footballers have immense power to influence and inspire, and they need to be mindful of it. They can influence fans, and particularly youth, to gamble online, but they can just as easily inspire a transformative new habit: reading.
Look at what happened in Brazil a few months ago when a footballer went viral with his book recommendations. Atlético Mineiro midfielder Gustavo Scarpa reviewed his readings (which included classics by Tolstoy and Kafka) on social media, prompting several of those titles to become best-sellers on Amazon. His club embraced the idea and built upon a fan’s initiative to create “Galeitura,” promoting not just the habit of reading, but analyzing books together.
To quote Awesome Books in their campaign with Bradford City AFC: “It’s about using football as a gateway into books. [...] A book can be a starting point. It can spark curiosity, build confidence, inspire ambition and open doors that might otherwise have remained closed.”