Bristol Rovers legend Ian Holloway spoke to Bristol Live about his new book ”The (Mostly) Football World According to Ollie’Sport
Daniel Hargraves Bristol Rovers reporter
13:00, 09 May 2025
Bristol Rovers legend Ian Holloway has released a new book(Image: George Wood/Getty Images)
Bristol Rovers legend Ian Holloway has released a new book, ‘The (Mostly) Football World According to Ollie’, where the Kingswood-born football icon provides his takes on over 100 topics, covering everything from VAR to the Saudi Pro League and current affairs outside of the game.
Holloway, widely known as ‘Ollie,’ came through the youth ranks as a player at Bristol Rovers and enjoyed three separate spells with the Gas during his 19-year playing career. The final three years of his tenure saw him take up the role of player-manager before hanging up his boots in 1999 having played over 400 times for the club and continuing as manager full-time.
The 62-year-old has enjoyed a managerial career that has spanned over nearly 30 years, including reaching the Premier League with Blackpool in 2010. He now finds himself as manager of League Two side Swindon Town, who will come up against Rovers next season following their relegation to the fourth tier. Holloway spared some time to discuss his new book with Bristol Live in his office at the County Ground.
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“So I know a bloke called David Clayton who has written my other books,” the Gas legend explained on the process of putting ‘The (Mostly) Football World According to Ollie’ together. “He’s my ghost writer, so to speak, and we’ve become great friends. I love the way our conversations over the phone…that’s how I write it. I’m not very good at spelling. I wasn’t very clever at school, but I speak and I talk and he records it and he writes it as if I’m writing it and as if I’m saying it, then I can read it back and he’s so me, it’s unreal.
“We have these conversations, so he’ll ask me something and we go off of script, we go off of football. So he went, ‘Ollie, do you mind if I record next week?’ So I went, ‘what do you mean?’ He said, ‘I really find them funny and I’d love to hear them back, but I also believe we might have a book’. I said, ‘don’t be stupid. You can record it, but there’s no book in here’. It’s all so random.
“He came up with four or five topics. I said, ‘don’t tell me what they are, we’ll just talk about it’. So he’s recorded it, wrote it, sent it off to someone, came back and they wanted to do a book about it. That’s my mind; he’s got inside it. He’s had conversations with me and the funny thing is the people I’ve spoken to already are the ones who interview me every week and they know that I will ramble.
“So he’s got these people interested. We’ve done a book and because I read it back, I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s weird, it’s random and I thought a book started with the start of the story, middle and end and when you put the book down, you can’t wait to see what’s coming next. Well, in a funny way, this book is so random, you don’t know what’s coming next.
“He’d let me wander,” Holloway added. “He asked me a question and he just sat back and recorded it, and then what he had had to do was go through hours and hours of me talking gibberish and make sense of it, and I think he’s done that. If there was a bit of it I didn’t like or I didn’t say that, or he got that slightly wrong, I would correct it.
“He’s a very different person to me. His skillset is not my skillset. I swear I had dyslexia, but no one helped me at school all those years ago. Things would come off the bottom of the page and I couldn’t read very well. So my brother was nine years older and he used to read to me brilliantly.
“We’re all good at different things, aren’t we? And if you can maximize your own skillset, then you can fit in somewhere, and this is life and this is me, and I’ve always been very outspoken. Even being as small as I am because I think it’s really important.
“Obviously having deaf children who can’t speak, so I’ve seen that side of things. How important words are and owning them probably made me even more like I am.”
Even in a 25-minute conversation, Bristol Live got a first-hand glimpse of some of the ramblings in the book as Holloway covered topics ranging from Elon Musk, Queen Elizabeth, pork pies and his affection for animals, particularly his chihuahua.
The 62-year-old has already published two autobiographies – this certainly isn’t one of them.
It is described as “a book like no other from one of the beautiful game’s most charistmatic managers” as Holloway covers a random cocktail of topics such as eccentric kit men, ghosts, tea ladies, UFOs and memorable football moments.
The inclusion of the word “mostly” in the title covers the fact that it isn’t just football that the current Swindon boss discusses.
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“I try not to do politics, but politics is all over us at the minute because they’ve lost our trust, haven’t they,” Holloway declared. “All of them. So it’s wrong. Leaders should lead.
“It had to be mostly, because with my team, we do it, we review it and we redo it and I need to find ways to get the new generation into what I’m saying. So I might need to drag someone out of some other sport, some other world thing, and have a meeting about it, and then talk about it and get you to understand what I’m trying to say.
“I use all these things to try and get them to understand what I’ve learned in my lifetime from the wonderful people I had in my life who live through a war who, because I was brought up by a totally different generation. So I still respect that and I want them to carry on. I believe the new young ones will listen. But if they’re not going to have you then they’re not going to do it. They’re not like, ‘we must do that’ like we were when I was growing up.
“My meetings are unbelievable, because you never know where they’re going and that’s why I’m like it. This book works for me because he asked me all these things on all these topics and I also don’t make it just about football.
“Life’s incredible. Your body is amazing; it can do almost anything. Repairs itself. I wish I had a car like my body. But your mind can stop you. It’s all terrible so what you’ve got to do is get over that, tell your mind to shut up, and move on. So I try and use examples where people have done that in the world.”
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