ONE HAPPY SPIN-OFF FROM England's failure to reach next summer's European football Championship is that there will be no tell-nothing autobiographies that make our sporting heroes seem as exciting as accountants. We expect too much from our sportsmen and too little from our sports books.

If this year's crop is short on classics, at least there are plenty that do belong in the sports section, rather than on a celebrity shelf alongside Jordan and Kerry Katona.

Sensationalist, score-settling books still appeared as cricketers and rugby players filled the void left by footballers. Lawrence Dallaglio's ghostwritten autobiography, It's in the Blood (Headline, £18.99/offer £17.09), appeared merely days after England's defeat in the Rugby World Cup final and the former captain's final chapter contains some headline-friendly indictments of the coach, Brian Ashton. The timing implied cash-in, but this is lucid, detailed and frank.

So is the year's blockbuster, My Manchester United Years (Headline, £20/£18), the first part of Sir Bobby Charlton's autobiography. Despite the emotional impact of the passages on the 1958 Munich air disaster that killed eight of Charlton's team-mates, his humility and reserve mean that the book crawls more than it zips, but it is sensitive, benevolent and humble in a way that the life story of a modern superstar could never be.

Related Internet Links

• Buy the books

Celebrity festive favourites, part two

More Christmas classics from some of Britain's best-loved celebrities

• Celebrity festive favourites

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: thrillers

• The Times Christmas choice: science fiction / fantasy

• The Times Christmas choice: sport

• The Times Christmas choice: politics

• The Times Christmas Choice: nostalgia

BACKGROUND

• The Times Christmas choice: food

• The Times Christmas choice: wine

• The Times Christmas choice: poetry

• The Times Christmas Choice: photography

• The Times Christmas Choice: Times writers

The same applies to Supercat (Fairfield, £16/£14.40), Simon Lister's authorised biography of Clive Lloyd, the quiet, bespectacled, moustached giant who united and inspired the West Indies cricket team to world domination in the 1970s and 1980s. With the odd stroke of flair, Lister solidly and thoroughly constructs a portrait that does nothing to disabuse readers of their probable preconception of Lloyd: dignified, popular, passionate about cricket. And that's good news — as Andrew Flintoff now realises, better to put a cricketer on a pedestal than in a pedalo.

Lloyd has little in common with Shane Warne except for greatness. Simon Wilde's biography of the Australian spinner, Portrait of a Flawed Genius (John Murray, £16.99/£15.29), is as well-crafted as an over from its subject. Wilde pulls off a risky opening, going inside the mind of an unnamed English batsman facing Warne in an Ashes Test match. The rest is more predictable, but thorough and highly readable.

In Michael Moore's film about healthcare, Sicko, a cynical American comes to Britain and discovers in wide-eyed wonderment how much better things are in a less slavishly-capitalist system. In Up Pompey (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99/ £15.29), Chuck Culpepper tries something similar with football. It's a flattering project, although it forces the author, an accomplished and experienced sportswriter, to appear faux-naive as he discovers the oddities and demands of life as an English fan.

Culpepper's transition from jaundiced hack to diehard Portsmouth loyalist is gentle, funny, self-deprecating and a quietly perceptive corrective to the constant pessimism surrounding our national game. Just as Moore's quixotic view of the National Health Service is hard to swallow, the truth is that English football is not the magic kingdom that Culpepper depicts — but we should thank him for reminding us that our national sport isn't anywhere near as flawed as we sometimes think.

But it's different for fans. Had Culpepper reprised his press-box existence, he would quickly have found that sport journalism can be as much of a grind on this side of the Atlantic. The bored quoting the bland — it's the same whether your currency is wide receivers or wingers.

At least Duncan Hamilton had an interesting subject. Provided You Don't Kiss Me (Fourth Estate, £14.99/£13.49), Hamilton's memoir about two decades spent on the Brian Clough beat in Nottingham, is beautifully written and won this year's William Hill Award. It manages to be both homage and critique, intimate and objective and remarkably cohesive considering the subject's complex and opaque personality.

Mark Hodkinson is a skilled knitter, too. His memoir of growing up in 1970s Rochdale and supporting the town's hapless football team, Believe in the Sign (Pomona, £9.99/£9.49), is a collection of mostly unremarkable anecdotes, yet in his tender hands the whole is greater than the parts. This is sport not as a welcome adjunct to depressing reality but a symptom of it: the football is as disappointing and aimless as life in the town.

If ambition was in short supply in Rochdale, it is not lacking in Tim Harris's household. He has produced a gigantic, sprawling history: Sport: Almost Everything You Ever Wanted to Know (Yellow Jersey, £20/£18). The perfect stocking filler, if the stocking can hold its considerable weight. Start now and you might finish just in time to watch England not taking part in next June's tournament.

Bestsellers 2007

1 Penguins Stopped Play by Harry Thompson
John Murray, £7.99
Coarse cricket goes global in comic classic given added poignancy by the author's early death.

2 Match 2008 Annual
Boxtree, £6.99

3 The Official Manchester United Annual 2008
Orion, £6.99

4 More Than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years by John Major
HarperPress, £25

5 The Official Liverpool FC Annual 2008
Grange Communications, £6.99

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy