Aston Villa Football Club. The Complete History.: 17

From a group of chapel cricketers looking for a winter game in 1874 to the roar of a European trophy lifted in Istanbul in 2026, Aston Villa Football Club: The Complete History tells the full, fact-checked story of one of the founding giants of the world's game.This is the club whose director, William McGregor, invented the Football League itself; who won the League and Cup Double in 1897; who ruled English football for a generation before the First World War; who fell all the way to the Third Division and climbed, in barely a decade, to the championship of Europe on an unforgettable night in Rotterdam in 1982. And it is the club reborn under Unai Emery - back in the Champions League and, in 2026, ending a thirty-year wait for a major trophy.Across more than a century and a half, Alex Ishikawa traces every title, every heartbreak and every hero - Archie Hunter, Billy Walker, Paul McGrath, Jack Grealish, Ollie Watkins - alongside the story of Villa Park, the claret and blue, the Holte End and the rivalries that define the Second City. Meticulously researched and complete to the close of the 2025-26 season, it is the essential chronicle for every Villan and every lover of football history.