Tomorrow is the FA Cup Final, the official end of the football season, when Chelsea will probably blow away the remaining ashes of Portsmouth’s beleaguered football club. And it’s one month and counting before the World Cup – the world’s greatest sporting event – kicks off. So I have been thinking about football, and how it relates to book publishing, particularly digital publishing.

I have it on good authority that when he signed for Faber and Faber the poet Simon Armitage put forward a rhetorical question: why he would want to go with anyone else when he could play for Manchester United of the poetry world? I use the word ‘signed’ because I think in many respect authors are like footballers. It’s not a watertight theory but stay with me...

Lionel Messi is (arguably) the greatest player in the world. His demolition of smug, perennial underachievers Arsenal at the Camp Nou recently led to one red top going with the headline ‘Messi-ah!’ Messi is of course one of the star players for Barcelona. And here’s my point: Barcelona PUBLISH Lionel Messi.

In the digital sphere, the question is frequently asked: why do authors need publishers and agents when they can sell their work direct to consumers, albeit as part of an exclusive deal with an online retailer?

Why I think publishers and agents remain completely necessary is the same reason why the top football clubs in the world demand and justify acquiring the best players: the best players thrive in the best teams. A football team gives support (financial, pastoral, logistical), structure, tactical advice and DEFINITION to a football player.

Similarly a publishing company gives editorial advice (your editor is your manager: your Brian Clough, your Alex Ferguson, your Jose Mourinho, or - God forbid - your Diego Maradonna), a support staff that operates constantly in your favour to market, publicise, design and generally make it all happen like a coaching staff would. (How often do publishers use the term ‘positioning’?) And above it all is a chairman and maybe a director of football – a board of directors or editorial director of an imprint – who is looking after the business. In Barcelona’s case, fascinatingly, their members (or socios) technically own the club.

In a variation of a publishing rights deal, in a month’s time Barcelona will license Messi for a month, for free, to Argentina thanks to a nationality clause that lets him play for his country.

Does this metaphor extend? Are the other authors published by your company your team-mates? (Interestingly, all of Gerard Picqué’s Barcelona team-mates turned up to his book launch.) Is a solitary activity like writing really comparable to a team sport like football? Is there a publishing company comparable to Fulham who under Roy Hodgson made it to the Europa Cup final in a fashion that many describe as a ‘miracle’?

If Messi left Barcelona and went it alone he would be one of those slightly amusing guys who comes on at half-time and wows us with his keepy-uppy skills and makes it through the first round of Britain’s Got Talent. Likewise, breaking away from your team as a star author doesn’t work. That time, investment and coaching that a publishing company – and the support of an agent in that relationship – gives is an all-important, if not the all-important element of acquiring and then maintaining a readership.

Having said this, only a few authors really break out and make it big, like only a tiny minority of footballers make it to the upper echelons of their sport. For those who can’t secure that place they have every right to pursue whatever other option they can to get people reading and/or marvelling at their skills.

And it (almost) goes without saying that the foundations of all of this are the extraordinary talents of writers and footballers alike, without which there’s, well, nothing...

This obviously raises some vital questions for a Friday afternoon, such as: is the PA the equivalent of the FA? Are bookshops really just quiet football stadia? Are there literary WAGS? Which publishing companies most resemble which football teams? And of course, do England have a hope in hell of winning the World Cup this summer?