Before he rode into Fulham last month, Kevin Keegan had written as many full-length books as he had managed, or played for, football clubs. Or rather, his ghost-writers had. His latest amanuensis is Bob Harris, experienced sporting journo, ghost-writer, and presently editor-in-waiting of the long proposed and long postponed daily paper Sport First.

The new book's background and backdrop skilfully rehashes the tale, but illuminates no new corners of the rags-to-glinting-riches story from North-east to North-east via Doncaster, Liverpool, Hamburg, and Southampton.

But what does make it different is the seemingly bitter `now it can be revealed' story of his leaving Sir John Hall and Newcastle United, an injection of hot-under-the-collar blather which has ensured the vital sale of newspaper serial rights. It will also help pay back the large advance fee the publishers forked out. Harris and Keegan have done all the publishers asked of them in this respect. Even written scathingly enough of Keegan's last days at St James's Park to get the book banned from being sold at the ground's club shop, a fact that ensures, thank you very much, even more banner headlines and merrily-ringing tills in all the bookshops of the country.

Mind you, our Kev knows all about banning books. Indeed, burning them in stacks on bonfires in the street - and nothing to do with his sojourn in Germany either. The last biography of Keegan was written in 1993, as he was thrillingly rekindling the dormant football passions at Newcastle, by John Moynihan (Black & White, Collins Willow).

Having agreed to the book, during its preparation, Keegan reneged and on publication (the biog was no hagiography, but showed the fellow in excellent light), announced every copy should be bonfired.

"I want them to burn every copy," and he advised the Newcastle fans: "Don't go near it." Although he duly banned it from the club shop, it remained popular enough that 30 copies were stolen one night from the window display of a city-centre bookshop. Moynihan's book was not ghosted. Nor was another, by the veteran Newcastle writer John Gibson, which Keegan also disowned. The two `autobiographies' in his comparative youth, `with' John Roberts in 1977, and Mike Langley two years later, caught the flavour of the Liverpool team of the time. Then there was no talk of burning copies, and you could only surmise and take the hint from a verse in the (definitely unghosted) book of daft doggerel Gosh It's Tosh, written by his contempory John Toshack: "The pressmen's questions are all the same

Where's your poem for the Derby game?

I tell them, Poems don't grow on trees if you ain't forthcoming with any fees."

Ghosting sports books is a difficult business all round, and has been since W G Grace and his ghost, a worshipping Scot called W Methlen Bownlee, fell out with the Bristol publisher and printer J W Arrowsmith in 1891 when the latter wanted to cut the originally-agreed fee.

Wrote Grace to Arrowsmith before he sailed to Australia on the Arcadia in that October: "You have agreed to supply the book at 6d a copy, and cannot possibly do it properly for this sum. It is not my fault but yours, and how can you suggest that I should forego my royalty I cannot understand . . ." The Doctor's books were the first ghosted sports jobs to disappoint. Neither fish nor fowl. You might say that biography tells, but doesn't know; autobiography knows, but doesn't tell.

In 1985, with his consent, I wrote a biography of Ian Botham. On account of most of the first-person research being somewhat clouded by sessions in various pubs between Somerset and Yorkshire, High, Wide and Handsome, it took on the guise of a panegyric to the great man uttered by various Test and county bowlers and batsmen he had faced or bowled at.

Peter Hayter, Ian's later `autobiographer' (of the runaway best seller and still most successful ever in terms of sales) also had trouble pinning his subject down. They did a lot of the work at Ian's hideaway cottage on the island of Alderney. As with visits to John Arlott in his last years, you had to fly in a little single-engined plane from Southampton, which was inevitably a sick-making and horrendously hairy flight, although returning from a few days with the vinous Arlott or the equally-bucolic Botham at least meant that the journey back was as calm as a millpond, on account of you being as good as unconscious throughout it. Just before his retirement, Graham Gooch asked me to chronicle his lifetime's log. Once bitten, I was not twice shy, I am afraid, and had a go on the understanding that we would split the text, with third-person F K establishing time, place and context, and then first-person GG "telling it exactly as it was".

It worked reasonably well, I think, mostly on account of Graham's neatness and diligence - and by the end, I was not so much working against the publisher's clock, but against Gooch's stream of faxes in his big bold hand as he sent his daily thoughts from his final tour of Australia.

The first soccer life story, apparently unghosted, by the great Billy Meredith (also a founder of the Professional Footballers' Association) was Association Football and the Men Who Made It. His first paragraph put everything in real context for the rest of the century.

"If he is married and has to say goodbye to many of the pleasures of home life, and at the festive time of the year, when everyone reckons to meet round the family circle, he is probably a hundred miles away, perhaps shut up in a deserted seaside resort undergoing special training for the purpose of providing entertainment for the more favoured members of society . . ." Such a downbeat introduction to the life of a football star probably made the publishers determined to court, and pay, the ghosts to cheer things up a little.

In cricket, Jim Laker told a few home truths in his memoir Over To Me (ghosted by the Guardian's Christopher Ford) and for his pains, had his honorary life membership withdrawn (but no books burned in St John's Wood Road). John Snow wrote his trenchantly individual, Cricket Rebel, in 1976 and Lord's would doubtless have done the same thing they did to Laker had they elected John in the first place. Although first-person unghosted `in his own write' does not necessarily mean a better read. Not by any means. For instance, Eric Cantona's metaphysical first-person autobiographical drivel La Philosophie De Eric (Ringpull Press, 1995) was not a patch on Ian Ridley's `unofficial' biography, The Red and the Black, published in the same year.

In Allan Lamb's cheerful run-of-the-mill sign-off last year (ghosted by Jack Bannister), the bland calm of a routine sportsman's memoir was suddenly exploded when Bannister's tape-recorder gave a chapter to Lamb's wife Lindsay. "I hated him as passionately as I loved him, and I felt so strongly I wanted to dig at him, physically if necessary, with my fingernails. I wanted to hurt him, just as he had hurt me . . . I knew I loved Lamby, and still do, but I don't trust him . . . You've got to be strong to marry a glorified travelling salesman." Wow. For one brief chapter Lamb's ghosted autobiography really came alive. It does not happen often. Fair dues to Lamb for allowing it to be published. Had it been Mrs Jean Keegan, our Kev would probably called for all copies to be burned on the streets.