What makes the ultimate Sunday League footballer? YouTube star ChrisMD has turned amateur Sunday afternoon kick-arounds into a social media event - and now, for the first time, he's sharing all of his secrets. Join Chris as he reveals the characters, training tricks and top-level dietary regime (greasy sausage roll from the village café) that has got him where he is today. Chris's debut book also includes behind-the-scenes photos from his life as a YouTuber, plus his proudest moments, biggest embarrassments and favourite memories from his years of making videos with everyone from the Sidemen to his own family...

I must admit to not knowing who ChrisMD was when the book dropped through the door, but then I don’t spend much time following football. So, I turned off the gaming channels and headed over to his YouTube site Sirhcchris2010. With over three and a half million subscribers Chris is doing rather nicely for himself so has decided to cash in on his popularity and release a book.

Thrills, Skills and Molehills (176 pages) is a book based around his life and especially his personal obsession, football. Throughout the book there are QR codes, which are supposed to link you to various videos, but at the time of reviewing (two weeks before its official publication date) none of these worked. I’m hoping, for his many fans, that this will change once the book is available in the shops.

In shape and size, the book feels like an annual, not sure if this was deliberate. The contents are printed on decent enough quality glossy paper which is just as well as a lot of the content is either photographs or pictures, this does mean that the actual written content seems to hover about the fifty per cent - less on some pages - but then this is not supposed to be a novel, more of a fun thing to dip in and out of.

The book consists of one hundred and sixty-four short chapters covering such things as Chris’s match day experience, his top five video’s which are accessed through the currently non-working QR codes, the odd quiz and lots of things footbally. The overall tone is light and the more I read the more it felt like an annual for a younger reader, probably late teens.

As the book is based mostly around Chris I’m not sure who outside of his YouTube audience this would appeal to and with the QR codes not working I cannot tell if any or all just send you to his YouTube site.

Still, if only half of his audience buy the book its still going to be a profitable result, but for those more generally interested in football the scope of the book remains too narrow.

5

Charles Packer