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Synopsis
Celtic Football Club has always told its story through its centre-forwards. The number nine at Parkhead is not a squad number but an inheritance — passed from one generation to the next, weighed against every man who wore it before.
The Immortals follows that line from the club's Irish-Glaswegian beginnings through Jock Stein's Lisbon Lions, the near-ruin of the early nineties, Fergus McCann's rescue, and on into the modern era. Along the way it takes in the Curse of the Ten, the boardroom battles, and the 135 players the support have chosen to remember.
It is a football history written as a group biography: the goals matter, but so do the lives around them.
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From the opening chapter
Celtic Football Club has always told its story through its centre-forwards. The number nine at Parkhead is not a squad number but an inheritance.
Author’s notes
Counting the nines
The book began as an argument. Who, exactly, belongs in the line of Celtic centre-forwards, and who only thinks they do? Once you start counting the nines you find you are not counting players at all — you are counting decades, boardrooms, emigrations and grief.
Most of the research was done the slow way: match reports on microfilm, supporters' fanzines, family recollections that contradicted the record and were usually right. The hardest chapters were the ones about men still living, where the myth and the person had drifted apart.
The 135 names in the finished book are the ones the support kept. That was the only rule.
2018
First list of centre-forwards written out longhand; the argument that started it.
2019–2020
Archive work — match reports, fanzines, club records, interviews with families.
2021
Manuscript delivered to Pitch Publishing; the Curse of the Ten chapters rewritten twice.
2022
The Immortals published.
Reader’s guide
Questions for book clubs
- 01
The book treats the number nine as an inheritance rather than a squad number. What does the shirt seem to demand of the men who wear it?
- 02
How does the club's Irish-Glaswegian origin shape the way its heroes are remembered?
- 03
The Curse of the Ten is written as much about fear as about football. Did that reading convince you?
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Published by Pitch Publishing, 2022.
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