‘Football was a culture war long before Trump came along’

There’s a self-aggrandising element to books about American football that can grate pretty easily, unless your tastes run to towering pomposity and overwritten hypocrisy.

To judge by the bestseller lists this is a more attractive combination than you might think, but a useful corrective is Mark Leibovich’s outstanding Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times, currently sitting comfortably in my top five sports reads of all time.