Time was when a sporting autobiography would land with a dusty thump on a sports editor's desk and wait its turn for review.

Not any more. The launch of Kevin Keegan's book this week was a commercial juggernaut which rolled through the City and finished with a forum sponsored by the Times and Dillons in Westminster's Methodist Central Hall.

There, heads of state oft are sighted, but last night the great, cavernous temple was given over to the state of Keegan's head; 500 people turned up - and paid, too. It was £10 a ticket, which included £2 off the price of the book.

The publishers, Little Brown - indeed all publishers - had already been struck dumb by the success of Kenny Dalglish's biography, which sold over 200,000 copies.

Some 120,000 prints of the Keegan are already on their way to the shops. No longer the cosy chat and glass of wine in a cramped literary agent's office. This was more a pageant than a book launch. How the Booker Prize winner would love to shift 120,000 copies in a day.

How every struggling novelist would swoon at the thought of taking a pew in front of the vast Methodist organ and addressing the congregation on matters visceral. Keegan's weighty discourse is described in the official blurb as "the sports book of the decade".

Don King couldn't have put it better.

What the success of books like this shows is that there is a desperate need for fans to commune with their idols away from the bull ring of daily media coverage. That they are mostly fed a bucketful of platitudes and evasions doesn't seem to put them off.

But the Keegan book is not that. It is the sweet singing of the kettle of all those boiling pressures that life at Newcastle built up. One chapter is headed "Riding the black and white tiger". Keegan talks of the club creating "a monster" which needed constant feeding and attention. That monster was the flotation of Newcastle United plc for £200 million, an event that finally came shortly after Keegan's departure as manager.

What irony, then, that the messiah's first stop yesterday was the Blomberg building, where City traders fidget and fret in front of screens. Keegan now knows a thing or two about commercial pressures: he says his salary was stopped 24 hours after he walked out on Newcastle.

Last night Keegan recalled the days when he was turned down by Coventry and Doncaster, where he found a job in a tap factory, before joining Scunthorpe, where, he said, "they announce the crowd changes to the team".