'Football in the 1880s was an unruly,  rough, and often dangerous game. To curb the state the sport was in, William McCrum proposed a new and drastic sanction. He called it a penalty kick.'

In 1891, a contentious new measure against an excess of foul play, Rule 13, was proposed to the FA by an amateur goalkeeper from County Armagh. 'The Irishman’s Motion' modernised the world’s most popular game. Today – in the shootout – Rule 13 continues to influence the sport through its astonishing psychological grip on our imaginations.

A tale of sportsmanship, chance and obsession, The Penalty Kick explores both the addiction of risk, and a doomed father-son relationship that could have been torn from the pages of a late-Victorian novel, inspired by the edgy, ruthless and egalitarian spirit of Northern Ireland.

'McCrum displays a lightness of touch and an artfulness that make The Penalty Kick a singular addition to the body of writing on this subject.' 

'McCrum was the millionaire son of an Irish linen merchant, a high-stakes gambler, and a Corinthian. He also invented the penalty kick . . . His story is now available in this gorgeous Notting Hill Edition. Written by Robert McCrum, the great-grandson of the trailblazer, it is beautifully and carefully stitched together, switching from family history to psychological study without missing a step or giving you pause to put it down.'

'An extraordinary family history – one of luck, love, disappointment and the tyranny of class and generational expectation.'

'The story of three generations of the McCrums is affecting and full of compelling details.'

'A fun little book, stuffed with pensées on the peno.'

Robert McCrum is a writer whose most recent book, Shakespearean, was published to great acclaim in 2021. He is also the author of Wodehouse: A Life (2004) and a classic memoir My Year Off. As editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, he published Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore and Milan Kundera, among many others, and was subsequently literary editor of the Observer from 1996–2008.