"When we first meet Gerry Logan he is an inside-right playing for a minor First Division club, Jarrow City, and it is in Jarrow that he meets and marries Mary after her divorce from a local businessman. But Jarrow is not big enough to hold Gerry, a footballer of brilliant natural gifts and unusual intelligence. He comes to London, and at Chiswick United establishes a unique relationship with Lionel Stone, the club's manager, and the only man in football he ever really trusts.
After Stone's dismissal Gerry seeks further fame in Italy and in Rome is plunged into a mad Renaissance world of plot and counterplot..."