Born in Essex, where the football was provided by Southend United, Tim Rich has spent more than twenty-five years covering some of the biggest clubs in the country as well as five World Cups.
After a spell in the North East as the Sunderland Echo’s cricket correspondent and chief sports writer at the Newcastle Journal, he joined The Independent as the paper’s northern football correspondent reporting on the fabulous Manchester United machine created by Sir Alex Ferguson. He moved to the Daily Telegraph in 2005 and returned to The Independent as a freelance.
Old Trafford has featured prominently in Tim’s books. He has ghost-written the biographies of the former United manager, Ron Atkinson, the club’s Russian winger, Andrei Kanchelskis, and edited the memoirs of United’s long time lawyer, Maurice Watkins.
In 2023 he produced On Days Like These, the story of the United goalkeeper, Les Sealey, compiled from tapes left behind after his death. It was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
His first book, however, described a very different club. Caught Beneath the Landslide detailed the decline and fall of Manchester City in the 1990s. Six years after its publication, he collaborated with David Bernstein, the chairman who steered City from the third tier of English football to the Premier League for an insider’s account of the drama, We Were Really There. He has also collaborated with the former Manchester City manager, Brian Horton, on his memoirs.
In 2019, Tim travelled across South America and Europe to write The Quality of Madness, an acclaimed account of the life of Marcelo Bielsa. This was followed by a collaboration with Craig Bromfield, Be Good, Love Brian; an account of how Craig, a drug-dealer’s son from Sunderland, was adopted by Brian Clough. It was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year.
His latest collaboration has been with the former Luton and Tottenham manager, David Pleat, on his autobiography, Just One More Goal.