IF you have listened to the wildly successful podcast then you will probably have a good idea of the sardonic tone which runs through The Guardian Football Weekly’s first foray into literature.

No aspect of the beautiful game is safe as Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning and a crew of some of the finest football writers around conspire to bring us a good old-fashioned football annual, or at least a sideways look at the kind of thing you’d be given every Christmas from an uncle or auntie bereft of inspiration.

If, like me, you delight in the cartoons of David Squires, or would happily have seen Ben Fisher stretch out a feature on the Car Parks of British Football over more than two pages, then don’t be surprised if this book ends up propped up next to your pile of presents in a few months.

Every football journalist has a back catalogue of scrapes and anecdotes, and one of the podcasts strengths is being able to weave them into genuinely entertaining football discussion and still feeling relevant. Some of those tales are revisited in this book, including Barry’s ‘Munich Incident’ and the time Elis James inadvertently became world famous for turning down an interview on Radio Four.

Football Weekly has always captured the zeitgeist – and though doing it in annual form is trickier, there are some lovely skits on The Athletic’s infamous long-reads and the cult classic feature You Are the Ref which are well worth investigating.

Sure, a few of the features creak in written form, and sure, two two-page board games ‘Joao Havelange’s Moral Maze’ and ‘Snakes and Blatters’ are a bit of a luxury, and even an ardent Southampton fan might struggle to get through ‘Bednarek or Vestergaard?’ a quiz aimed to distinguish between the Polish and a Danish defenders.

But Football Weekly – like a lot of the Guardian’s coverage – revels in its nicheness. Put it this way, the last two pages of a 110-page book are devoted to ‘Classifieds’ one of which advertises: “One forehead, barely used. T Brooking, West Ham’. The streets don’t forget.

From a strictly Bolton Wanderers standpoint the highlight is a delightful full-page pastiche of Ocean’s Eleven. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it looks great.

It’s sarcastic, it is silly, it is rather enjoyable, and it is £12.99 from all good bookshops.