The Secret Footballer has been writing for The Guardian for the past 18 months. All that is known publicly is that he is a current or former Premiership soccer player. In his various missives for the newspaper he has proven to be both insightful and outspoken in pulling back the curtain for Joe Public as to what life in top level football is really like.

2012 saw The Secret Footballer (TSF) publish a book, I Am The Secret Footballer – Lifting the Lid on the Beautiful Game. It runs through a neat ten chapters, going through his views on managers, players’ relationships with fans and agents all the way through to a fascinating ending that deals with everything from his own mental troubles to the massive tax bills issued recently to top level footballers by Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue Service.

Paul Johnson, Deputy Editor of Guardian News and Media, writing in the book’s introduction, says “it may be that some day he will decide to reveal himself as the author. But to write as he does, in such detail about the game and the people in it, would be impossible out in the open. His club(s) wouldn’t like it, and would probably cite beach of contract. His agent wouldn’t like it and his manager(s) would be somewhere on the other side of incandescent“.

Johnson is almost certainly 100% correct, in fact it’s probably a cast iron guarantee. In football’s cosy little world this player could be quickly ostracised, tagged as being a troublemaker or traitor, guilty of betraying the omerta of the dressing room. Today’s media-driven, celebrity-obsessed society would fire up the scandal and happily fan the flames each time TSF played against a club, player or coach whom he had named in some way in the book.

And it’s a good read.

“There are plenty of footballers’ partners who turn a blind eye to indiscretions because they know that the life they enjoy would disappear if they walked out. I know wives who have walked in on their other half when he’s in full swing, gone shopping, come home and had his dinner on the table as if nothing had happened. They simply cannot do without a designer wardrobe, two weeks in Dubai and half of Tiffany’s every Christmas and birthday, and so look the other way.”

A holiday read.

“My friend [now a current England international], who, it has to be said, is a handsome bastard, was sunning himself at one end of the swimming pool and he noticed the wife of the other player slip into the water at the far end. After he had caught her eye a couple of times she made a beeline for him. When she was close enough, she wrapped her legs around him. All the while, her husband was asleep on a sun lounger under a shady tree. My friend even brought out his mobile phone to show me a few of the picture messages she’d sent him after their return.”

Easily readable in a weekend or perhaps in one go on a particularly wet Sunday.

But it’s perhaps worth putting some context around its revelations. I Am The Secret Footballer is, as mentioned, a decent page-turner but there’s few enough tales in there that one wouldn’t have already surmised from keeping a close ear to the game and a distant eye on the red tops and the Sky News ticker.

After all, in the year 2012 sports fans are perhaps the least shockable they have ever been.

Cricketers no longer walk; they will now sometimes even claim a catch they know full well bounced into their outstretched hand. Baseball’s home run records are forever tarnished by association with drugs. Snooker, game of bow ties and calling a foul push on oneself, has gone through match-fixing scandals. Golf, bastion of tweedy tradition and argyled integrity, endured their poster boy being unveiled as having a longtime string of willing sex partners outside of his marriage. Athletics and cycling are viewed as battles of the chemists; soccer demeaned as the realm of preening poseurs who’d fall over quicker than a tipsy hippo on an ice rink.

We are not, for example, living in the sepia-tinted days of mid-20^th century USA where sports stars were untarnished heroes to a man; Atlases all.

Illinois, 1959. Jim Brosnan, pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, decided to keep a personal journal of the 1959 Major League Baseball season. It was his twelfth season as a professional ballplayer.

In 1960, he published “The Long Season“, one of the first insights into professional sporting life; stories of “sweating out” a new contract in the offseason (in 1959, professional athletes in America still had other careers in the offseason. Brosnan’s was with the Meyerhoff advertising agency. He had to call home regularly to see if a new contract was in the mail, even though he was a successful player. This was before free agency or anything approaching what one now recognises as the standard rights of a professional athlete.), of spring training in Florida and through the season to its end in October.He used the real names of team mates, opponents, managers and team owners. He relayed entire conversations from the clubhouse and the diamond and generally took a wry look at everyday life in the game. He was one of the first to bring the reader inside the world of pro sport.

That was one thing.

Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four“, in 1970 was quite another.

Bouton was a pitcher for the now-defunct Seattle Pilots. They were an expansion ballclub that would remain in Seattle for just one year, later to move to Milwaukee to become the Brewers. Like Brosnan, Bouton kept a journal throughout the season, as well as the months before and after. He talked every night into a tape recorder and by the end of the season his editor, Leonard Schecter, estimated that their typist, Miss Elisabeth Rehm, had rattled out out the equivalent of 450,000 words of “double-spaced Bouton”.

Unlike Brosnan, Bouton did not paper over the coarse reality of what Major League Baseball life was really like. He went balls out.

‘“Shitfuck”, he said, using one of [Schultz’s] favourite words (‘fuckshit’ is the other).’ 

And baseball hated him for it.

He introduced 1970 America to “Beaver-Shooting”, the ballplayer pastime of spotting attractive, less-than-fully clothed woman via variously complex and clandestine means, whether drilling holes through hotel room connecting doors to peek at stewardesses changing or running under the stands of a minor league ballpark to look up the skirt of a young lady pointed out by a keen-eyed beaver-shooting teammate.

Bouton talked candidly about “greenies”, baseball’s cutesy word for amphetamines, the traditional drug of choice among MLB players getting through a long season.

May 21: ‘We’ve been running short of greenies. We don’t get them from the trainer, because greenies are against club policy. So we get them from players on other teams who have friends who are doctors, or friends who know where to get greenies. One of our lads is going to have a bunch of greenies mailed to him by some of the guys on the Red Sox. And to think you can spend five years in jail for giving your friend a marijuana cigarette.’

June 10: ‘At dinner Don Mincher, Marty Pattin and I discussed greenies. They came up because [Bouton’s fellow pitcher] O’Donoghue had just received a season suppply of 500. “They ought to last about a month”, I said.’

Bouton didn’t shy away from anything. He addressed race among teammates (in 1970 USA this was a big deal), slagged off guys who weren’t blessed with supreme intelligence (as well as poking fun at those who were unusually bright for ballplayers) and got stuck into the coaching fallacies of the age. All were named and shamed. He laid it all out on the line, providing an unvarnished (and hilarious) view of a year experienced by a sportsman who had by that stage become just another mediocre ballplayer, shuttling between the major and minor leagues even in that same season.

Ball Four was released in 1970 to a storm of controversy. Where The Long Season had, to an extent, pushed open baseball’s clubhouse door just a crack to let the world have a little peek inside, Bouton had kicked it in and smashed that door to smithereens.

Bowie Kuhn, MLB’s commissioner at the time, tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying that the book wasn’t true. But it was. All of it.

Bouton had written, with helpful editing from Schecter, a legitimately great sports book, so important that it was since included in Time Magazine’s top 100 non-fiction books of all time.

Jim Bouton played that full season in 1970 after Ball Four’s publication, enduring the barbs, taunts and ostracisation from the many in the game who were furious at both his writing the book and his inclusion of their names in it.

It was 1998, all of 28 years later, before the New York Yankees finally gave in and invited Bouton to their annual “Old Timers Day”, such was their pique at Bouton, former Yankee pitching phenom, putting the realities of baseball into print.

One of the reasons why Ball Four was such an important publication was that it forever changed the relationship between ballplayers, sportswriters and the American sporting public.

Before its release there had been a familiar, cosy relationship between players and sportswriters with unwritten but well understood rules about what could and could not be written about in the next day’s newspaper. The sports hacks had to that point been the guardians of the gateway between public and ballplayer and, short of a chance bumping of Joe Citizen into Mickey Mantle on a drunken night in Toots Shor’s (famous Manhattan celebrity drinking haunt), the average fan would never know the difference between reality and the stylised, apple-pie descriptions that they’d always been fed.

After Ball Four, this cosy cartel was grievously damaged. The public had been shown a glimpse of another world, one more honest, interesting and entertaining, and they wanted more.

Which brings us back to The Secret Footballer. This is not 1960 or even 1970. Not even 1990. Indeed 1990, year of Nessun Dorma and the tears of Gazza in the World Cup in Italy, is closer to Ball Four than it is to today. It’s now 42 years since the release of Bouton’s tome and in that time we’ve already seen plenty of glimpses of events similar to that which The Secret Footballer describes. Are they exactly the same stories? No. But they’re in the ballpark.

Between 24-hour news channels desperate for news to fill airtime and the back pages of the tabloids (not to mention the front pages) the sports public has in recent years been exposed to lurid descriptions of Premier League spit-roasts, a player stubbing out a cigar in a team-mate’s eye, players visiting prostitutes (both allegedly under-age and of grandmotherly years) and more.

So when TSF describes mad, money-burning trips to Vegas, the eyebrow doesn’t raise; similar sighs are emitted at revelations that footballers sometimes move clubs purely in order to make money. And apparently there are both honest and crooked football agents. Although entertaining and smartly written, none of this is shocking. And it is certainly not “important”.

But there is importance in this book.

Where The Secret Footballer really scores is when he ventures inside the mind of today’s professional soccer player.

“Football can go one of two ways: either you embrace every part of it and it becomes your life; or, and this is the case where I am concerned, you rebel against certain parts of it and you end up being consumed by hate, guilt, anger and bitterness…

“Depression had always been there, but it took football at the highest level to really bring it to the fore. Once, I could ignore the catcalls from the stands, but it got to the point where I didn’t want to take that abuse any more and I’d answer back…

“Today, aided by 15mg of mirtazapine and 20mg of citalopram every morning, I am a completely different person. I still have bad days, but I don’t wake up dreading the day ahead, I don’t look out of the training ground window wishing I could be as far away as possible and I don’t look at every single task as if it were the equivalent of climbing Everest.”

Even in the world of sportspeople communicating directly with fans on Twitter and the constant news drip fed by constant sports-celebrity-surveillance, the internal machinations of a sportsman’s mind are still his own private kingdom. TSF brings us into that kingdom with some painfully honest revelations about both his past and present mental state.

This insight he provides is valuable and potentially important in its own way; a young person, even a young professional player, in turmoil because he’s just not “happy” the way he thinks he’s supposed to be, perhaps reads a TSF passage and at least feels for a brief second that he’s not alone. In light of recent sporting bouts with depression, some ending with tragic finality, this alone makes this book valuable for giving the reader a glimpse of TSF’s troubles, his worries and his fears whether rational or not.

Comparing it to a book written over 40 years ago that genuinely scandalised a sport and its public while changing sportswriting for ever is perhaps unfair, but that’s the bar that has been set.

This week, when asked if he had ever considered publishing Ball Four in 1970 either anonymously or under an assumed name, Jim Bouton told me “I never contemplated keeping it a secret”. Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of the book’s publication he was already working on a follow-up. It probably reveals something of Bouton, both in terms of his character and sense of entrepreneurship, that in early 1971 he published a sequel entitled I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.

Secret Footballer, there is time for your sequel.

And next time, go balls out.

Unmask thyself.