Ex-Charlton and Sheffield Wednesday striker Mark Bright, who is now a BBC pundit, said he didn’t read much as a player.”I neglected reading when I was younger,” he said. “Everything was about football – I just read football magazines Now I read little stories to my boy. Yet, even as the woman who, with her husband, Michael Wynn Jones, is City’s majority shareholder, savoured that piquant flavour of promotion, the whiff of rancid reality floated towards her. Maybe it’s the Canaries’ colourful and unintimidating strip; perhaps it’s their passionate but benign supporters.
For some who were there on an emotional and almost surreal night in Munich a decade ago, it goes back to when Bayern were eclipsed 2-1 by Mike Walker’s team, a motley collection containing the curly-haired midfielder Jeremy Goss, who spawned many imitators among the fans and scored the equaliser and the Uefa Cup tie’s winning goal in the return leg.Whatever the reason, Delia Smith has been the recipient of much goodwill in the last week.

Perhaps it’s because we find it reassuring that one of the nation’s outposts should have consistently supported a high standard of football (which, as someone once said, is because they’re so far east they think they’re playing in the Dutch League). In all 90 per cent of the children taking part said that the scheme had made them want to read more, and 82 per cent of the adults who participated said that the sessions had made their families talk more about reading.The scheme has also found support from former professionals. They offer out-of-school-hours reading sessions where parents and their offspring can join together to read the books chosen by their favourite footballers. The groups are also offered tours of the football grounds and match tickets to encourage them to join.The scheme, co-sponsored by the National Literacy Trust and supported by Arts Council England, was piloted by some clubs last year but has now been extended to all those in the Premiership. Early indications from the pilots show that they have had some effect in switching pupils back on to reading. According to the charity Libri, libraries – which cost more than £1bn a year to run – spend only a 10th of their earnings on books.

The rest is spent on staffing and bureaucracy, which often leads to them being closed at lunchtimes and weekends when people are most likely to be able to visit them.That is not the case with the 40 libraries signed up to the Premier League Reading Stars scheme. If they do, I’m sure they will soon be hooked.”The project may have come in the nick of time for Britain’s libraries, since research published earlier this week predicted that – on present trends – public libraries may well die out by 2020. I hope it [the scheme] will encourage kids to pick up a book. The players in turn select their favourite children’s or adult book, which is then read aloud at special reading clubs, designed to promote family reading, that have been set up at libraries near the 20 Premiership clubs’ grounds .Manchester City and England goalkeeper David James, who chose J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit, said: “I believe that footballers have a responsibility to act as positive role models through schemes like this. Using football as a motivating force to learn, this project will attempt to break down the barriers that may have stopped people reading before.”The Arsenal and England defender Sol Campbell, who selected Beowulf: Dragonslayer by Rosemary Sutcliff, said: “I have spent many hours of my life, including when I was growing up as a kid, immersed in reading a good book.