Oi, Ref! ( A novel about love, hate and football) - Joseph Gallivan (Sceptre)
Tommy Burns (not the manager of Reading) is a Premier League referee. And a doctor. And an Aston Villa fan with a slightly dodgy past. Not as bad as his old friend Mark, though - you wouldn't have wanted to clash with him before or after a game at Villa Park. So when Mark gets in touch and reveals he is now a priest, and Tommy is suspended from refereeing duties, Tommy is forced to confront his troubled soul.
Okay, it's not about the World Cup but one of the few decent grown-up football novels ever written. Go and look at his website, it has a couple of chapters from the book. http://www.cosmoweb.net/~joseph/jghome.htm

Perfect Pitch 1 - Home Ground, edited by Simon Kuper (Review)
Collection of original football writing inspired by a Dutch magazaine called 'Hard Gras'. Home Ground kicks off with 'Dying with Diego', Jimmy Burns' paranoid account of a trip to Argentina he made after writing a biography of Diego Maradona that was not well-received by the disgraced genius. There's an examination of the way Eric Cantona changed the English game by Jim White, a story by 1986 World Cup winner Jorge Valdano, an eerie profile of Marco van Basten and a diary of Euro 96 by Simon Kuper to which this site owes more than a little in terms of inspiration. Every piece is well-written, insightful and avoids the worst cliches of football writing that Simon Kuper sums up as 'I stood on the terraces at Hartlepool for years and we always lost and it rained.'

Perfect Pitch 2 - Foreign Field , edited by Simon Kuper (Review)
A World Cup 1998 version of Perfect Pitch 1. A few of the pieces disppoint, trying too hard to find a fresh angle on essentially uninspiring subjects, or creating would-be satirical fiction out of reversing an expected situation. Still, there is an excellent profile of Ronaldo, an insight into Gary Lineker as he tours Argentina trying to secure an interview with Maradona, and most memorably Hugo Borst's orgasmic appreciation of Dennis Bergkamp.

A Book of Two Halves. Football short stories, edited by Nicholas Royle (Gollancz)
The 1996 anthology of 23 football-related stories (and some of John Hegley's embarrassing poems) including a fair amount of time-wasting, but some moments of superb skill and devastating attacking movements. At the risk of being predictable, I'd go for Irvine Welsh as man of the match, for his 'The Best Brand of Football.' Iain Sinclair's 'Hardball' is exhilarating and there's a fine performance from Graham Joyce. The quality drops off in the second half, with some downmarket ladspeak and fanciful scenarios involving aliens in the World Cup.

The Agony and the Ecstasy. New Writing for the World Cup, edited by Nicholas Royle (Sceptre)
Follow-up volume to A Book of Two Halves and a better all-round collection. Divided into sections emphasizing the negative and positive aspects of the game, probably because the subject demands more focus and World Cup stories are likely to have more resonance with the reader. Many favourites, including Ben Richards examination of Chilean football to Graham Joyce's 'As Seen on Radio', which tells the 1966 World Cup through the eyes of a trio of teenagers on a boring holiday in Rhyl.
One joke stories like 'England's Shame by Geoff Nicholson (if drugs were legal, what would various countries choose?) wear thin pretty quickly. A few of these writers shouldn't have made the squad perghaps, but a unique collection, and I look forward to another one in time for South Korea and Japan 2002 or whatever they are going to call it.