IN TOM PALMER'S Foul Play, a devious football chairman hatches a plot to kidnap his star striker and get rich on all the publicity. “The club would have made millions out of merchandise and promotional opportunities,” Sir Richard Gawthorpe says. With Andriy Shevchenko wasting away in Chelsea's reserves, you don't want to be giving them ideas.

Foul Play is the first in a series from Puffin about Danny Harte, teenage football fan and daring amateur sleuth. Further adventures presumably depend on how this one sells, and that cannot easily be estimated because the book is aimed at that reluctant reader, the schoolboy.

Dragging him away from the PlayStation or the park to sit down with a book is a feat that not even Harry Potter, for all his magic spells, has been able to pull off to a degree that satisfies the country's educators or parents.

Now football is making a concerted effort to coax these boys into the habit of reading, which is no small irony given that the game is hardly associated with learning. As Michael Owen once said: “I think I have tried to read seven or eight books. Some last one chapter, some last eight. But I have never read a whole one.” And he is one of our brighter sportsmen.

Like millions of small boys, Owen would sit in his classroom and gaze out to the football field, spinning fantasies of greatness. Such daydreaming did not do much for his education but, rather than fight the preoccupation with sport, publishers are now trying to work with it. The hope is that if boys can be drawn to literature through football, perhaps it will open them up to the joys of reading, full stop.

We should note that this is not a new idea. Brian Glanville, the doyen of football journalists, wrote Goalkeepers Are Different back in 1971, a classic sporting novel (if that is not a jumble of contradictions) told through the eyes of Ronnie Blake, a rising young apprentice.

Glanville's book was still being published almost 30 years later but only now comes a concerted effort to use football as a force for good in literacy. The Premier League has been running a Reading Stars project, with clubs and players promoting individual works and libraries. Yes, some footballers can and do read.

Palmer, involved in the Reading Stars programme for several years, branched out to create Danny Harte, Football Detective, and he is not the only children's author to be tapping into our national game. Dan Freedman, formerly the editor of the Football Association's website, is two books into his own series.

“It was when I wanted to buy a present for an 11 year-old football-mad boy that the idea to write this book actually struck,” Freedman says.

“There didn't seem to be a football novel for kids. I couldn't understand it.” So he created Jamie Johnson and wrote The Kick Off and, now, Shoot to Win, with our schoolboy hero battling against the bigger kids to make it to the big-time and the professional leagues.

Having mixed intimately with the real England stars in his previous job, Freedman will have some hair-raising grown-up stories to tell us when Johnson grows into a fully fledged international but for now the pure joy of the sport comes first, second and third, with a bit of gentle girlfriend interest thrown in.

More ambitiously, Foul Play features kidnaps and robberies as 14-year-old Danny finds himself taking on far more than he bargained for when he attempts to stake out some burglars. It is an excellent, fast-paced detective novel that concludes with Danny receiving free tickets to see England in the World Cup finals. “You can see us win it,” Sam Roberts, the country's goalscoring hero, tells him.

Well, what is the point of a novel if not to take us somewhere far beyond the realms of reality?

Foul Play by Tom Palmer
Puffin, £5.99; 176pp Buy the book

Shoot to Win by Dan Freedman
Scholastic, £4.99; 153pp Buy the book

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