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Books : Sports : Soccer
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By the author of the bestselling Moneyball: in football, as in life, the value we place on people changes with the rules of the games they play.
The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school—such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football.
What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy, whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.
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Drawing on his work with some of the top teams in professional sports, noted sport psychology consultant Gary Mack shares with you the same techniques and exercises he uses to help elite athletes build mental "muscle." These 40 accessible lessons and inspirational anecdotes will help you gain the "head edge" over the competition.
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The definitive book about soccer. With a new foreword for the American edition.
There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final.
In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.Questions for David Goldblatt
Amazon.com: There's a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pelé had scored nearly a goal a game in over 1,300 professional matches--the sort of stat that would be on every page in a history of one of the major American sports but that is very rare in this one--you write, "This of course tells us nothing about all the goals he made." What stories do football fans tell about their sport and their stars? Goldblatt: Well, in America not only would you be banging on about Pele's goal to game ratio but you would have been collecting statistics in a rational organized manner about his assists--a concept that had only entered soccer statistics in the last few years. The state of Brazilian football statistics during Pelé's career would not pass muster in Cooperstown in can tell you. Bill James would have a nervous breakdown with hopeless state of the data base. Soccer fans tell a lot the same stories that Americans tell themselves, sagas, epics, heroic tasks, near misses, dramatic comebacks, tales of curious individualists and unshakeable teams, but they are told in a the idioms, genres, vocabulary, and head space of hundreds of different cultures.
Amazon.com: I have to ask the inevitable question: why hasn't football--rather, soccer--ever taken hold in the United States (despite generations now who grow up playing it)? (And does the rest of the world care if it ever does?) I was fascinated by your comment in the American foreword that you recovered from finishing the book by ignoring soccer for half a year and only watching American sports. What did you notice?
Goldblatt: Contrary to the received wisdom I would say that soccer has taken hold in the US, if we look at participation figures amongst women and the young, and while MLS isn't about to challenge the premiership or Serie A for money or glamour it looks like it is now established on a firm footing. If the game can just tap into the rising Latino communities of America it could be pushing hockey for fourth sport.
That said it would still be just number 4. Baseball, football, and basketball have now had over a century's head start on soccer and between them created a wider sports culture--of expectations, tastes, and pleasures--that I think sometimes finds soccer incomprehensible ( what's with the draws?) or distasteful (all that diving). Soccer had its chance in the USA in the 1920s and 30s when East Coast professional leagues were drawing big crowds but a combination of bureaucratic infighting, the Wall Street crash, and the lingering ethnic associations of the game killed it for two generations.
My time with American sports, which I should add is far from over, wasn't planned. After the 2006 World Cup I just couldn't watch any more soccer and there was an awfully big space in my brain where that used to go on. Moneyball by Michael Lewis came into the void and that took me to Jules Tygiel and the great tradition of baseball histories, Ken Burns's long documentary which enchanted me (watched the whole thing in two days) and by the time I had read Roger Angell and stopped laughing, discovered Jackie Robinson, DiMaggio's Streak, and the Shot Heard Round the World it was time to subscribe to NASN and watch the last two months of the 2006 season. If you like the places where culture, society, sport, and history intersect then you're going to like baseball. I'm still working on hockey, in fact I'm still working on seeing the puck, and I'm trying hard to understand football--but I'm finding the helmets, amongst other things, a problem.
What did I notice? Where do I begin? After barely thinking about the United States for three and half years the whole modern history of America opened up before me. That's a work in progress.
Amazon.com: It's hard to underestimate the density and breadth of knowledge that went into this book: politics, culture, and of course football, across the entire football-playing world (which is to say, the entire world). How did you research your vast topic?
Goldblatt: The Ball Is Round was, in retrospect, 20 years in the making. I had wanted to write a world history since I knew that such things existed. In a former life I spent a long time working on globalization and global history and then I made a global atlas of football, so I had plenty of background.
After that, I followed Phillip Pullman's advice, "Read like a butterfly, write like a bee." I read a lot, followed my nose and other's advice, scoured journals, libraries and old magazines, studied web sites, visited museums, stadia, and shrines, made contacts in a lot of countries, and begged, bought, and traded information and opinion--oh and I watched an awful lot of football.
There were trips to Scotland, Sweden, Serbia, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Greece, Tunisia, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina not to mention a lot of old games on video and DVD.
How did I write it? Fast.
Amazon.com: There is nearly as much politics in your history as football--among Argentines, for instance, Peron has nearly as many index entries as Maradona. Why did you not want to write a history only of the players and the games? What relationship do you see between football and politics?
Goldblatt: How could anyone write a history of just players and games and be true to the meaning of soccer? Milan Kundera defended the role of the literary critic by arguing "Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten." I would say the same of same of social history and sport. All sports trade on their histories, but tend to offer us at best the anodyne accounts of their own development and meanings at worst they are scurrilous cover-ups and concocted myth. Sport and its audience deserve better.
The relationship between football and politics takes many forms--it has been entwined with every conceivable political ideology and movement, every geographical unit and social division, and it has served authoritarian and democratic visions. In the end, football will take on and express the politics determined by our collective choices and struggles, the point for me is to remember that one has choices; to some extent we get the soccer we deserve.
Amazon.com: Has modern football become too big for itself, between the tycoons and the multinationals, the giant audiences and transfer fees, the corruption and the endless media coverage? Is there still space for the game?
Goldblatt: I went to see Manchester United last year in the Champions league--a 70th birthday present for my Mancunian father-in-law--and here at the epicenter of the global branding revolution and the foreign takeover and the rest of it I was privileged to see Carlos Tevez take the game by the scruff of the neck and force 21 players and 70,000 people to track his every move--electric.
Come to Bristol, England's most underperforming soccer city (half a million people, two clubs, no titles) and tell me there's no space for the game. No one is going to Bristol Rovers to be part of giant audience or a world shaped by tycoons and multinationals. But go they do, and to Bristol City too, teetering on the edge of the premiership and there I find a game that makes me laugh--soccer does pantomime and farce here--but surprises, thrills, and reminds me as part of a living crowd the one thing that writing a world history really drives home--"we are all just a drop in the ocean."
Amazon.com: And lastly: who's your favorite for Euro 2008?Goldblatt: It feels really open--so I'm going with an outsider (like Greece at 2004)--Croatia.
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Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer.
After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”
Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place.
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A journalist who spent six years travelling with and gathering information on Britain's notorious soccer hooligans chronicles his extraordinary experiences with these dangerous, violent, and fiercely loyal fans.
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Written by soccer great and championship Stanford coach Bobby Clark, COACHING YOUTH SOCCER: THE BAFFLED PARENT'S GUIDE tells you how, starting at point zero, an uninitiated coach can meld kids into a team and help them enjoy one of the most rewarding experiences of their youth. (In the end, you may be the one who reaps the biggest reward, as you watch kids learn and grow in an experience they'll treasure for a lifetime.)
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In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."
Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger
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Jamie Carragher is one of the most charismatic footballers of his generation. Adored by the fans, he was recently voted the most popular player in the entire Liverpool squad. Yet the young Carra came to Liverpool as an Everton fan, from an Everton family, and with Everton friends. Packed with great anecdotes, controversial opinions and large helpings of his trademark humor, this is his story. Born in January 1978 in Bootle, Merseyside, Carragher signed professional terms with Liverpool in 1996, having served a successful apprenticeship, won the FA Youth Cup and played for England Under-21s. He scored a goal in his first full game for the senior team—pretty good for a defender and very unusual for him—and his versatility was to ensure a permanent place in the starting line up before long and he is now vice Captain. In fact he is so integral to the Liverpool squad, the Kop now chants "we all dream of a team of Carraghers" to the tune of "Yellow Submarine." Raw, funny, and down-to-earth, his book is an antidote to the anodyne sports autobiography. It takes you behind the scenes of all of Liverpool and England's greatest triumphs and disasters in the company of a player who never fails to be intelligent, controversial, or just downright hilarious.
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For soccer fans, following, discussing, and arguing about the tactics a manager puts into play are part of what makes the sport so appealing. This fascinating study traces the history of soccer tactics back from such modern pioneers as Rinus Michels, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Catenaccio, and Herbert Chapman. Along the way, author Jonathan Wilson, an erudite and detailed writer who never loses a sense of the grand narrative sweep, takes a look at the lives of the great players and thinkers who shaped the game, and discovers why the English in particular have proved themselves so “unwilling to grapple with the abstract”. This will be a modern classic of soccer writing that followers of the game will dip into again and again.
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A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
A games-based alternative to tedious rote exercises, guaranteed to keep practices fun, engaging, and productive
Great Soccer Drills provides soccer coaches with a great way to make every soccer practice active, fun, and productive. Coaches get 125 games guaranteed to keep kids moving and excited while teaching them basic skills, sharpening their reflexes, and building their confidence and decision-making ability. Written by two of North America's foremost names in youth soccer coaching, it also includes guidelines on how to create just the right blend of drills to hold the attention of six- to twelve-year-old players.
Great Soccer Drills can be used in conjunction with the bestselling Coaching Youth Soccer: A Baffled Parent's Guide or as an excellent stand-alone resource for spicing up any practice.
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"This book will change the way you think about professional football--in much the same way that Bill James revolutionized the analysis of Major League Baseball. The research is impeccable. The approach is irreverent. You will be 'blindsided' by what you think you know about the NFL, but don't. Warning to fantasy football lovers: You won't be able to put this book down."
—Sal Paolantonio, ESPN reporter and author of The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History"KC Joyner's theories will completely revolutionize football, cure baldness, save the whales, and bring total peace and harmony to all nations. That's why you must read Blindsided!"
—Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN's Tuesday Morning Quarterback"Too much of football literature is just tedious hagiography, but Blindsided is a book for those of us who enjoy the complex game on the field and football conversation that goes past 'my team rules.' "
—Aaron Schatz, lead author and editor of Pro Football ProspectusPro football’s statistical iconoclast, K.C. Joyner, challenges conventional wisdom with fact-based and film-based responses in Blindsided: Why the Left Tackle is Overrated and Other Contrarian Football Thoughts. If you love sports statistics or find excitement in fantasy football, you will enjoy the detailed insights and carefully researched information in this book. Scrap the typical media hype and hoopla for the real, straight-from-the-fields-and-films scoop, including information on free agents, parity, NFL business practice, Hall of Fame standards, coaching practices, historical iconoclasm, and a thorough statistical review.
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"Wetherell is a passionate writer who has a sharp, fresh eye."—The New York Times
Writing with the same descriptive flair that has won his novels so much praise, W. D. Wetherell tells the true story of his high-school-age son's winning soccer season. Soccer Dad is simultaneously the candid reflections of a devoted father and the enthusiastic observations of a diehard soccer fan.
When Matt enters his senior year of high school, it is not without myriad parenting concerns on the part of his father, author W. D. Wetherell. What is his role in shaping his son's future? What will life be like when Matt is away at college? And what of Matt's soccer season?—Is Matt's success in soccer just setting him up for disappointment later in life? With the pensive eye of an artist, Wetherell follows his son's team from field to field and win to win and ruminates on topics ranging from soccer's esoteric appeal in America to the conflicting emotions of a parent sending his youngest child out into the world. Reflecting on his own experiences both as a participant and a spectator, Wetherell offers a paean to the sport of soccer and the joys of parenthood.
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Steven Gerrard is a hero to millions, not only as the inspirational captain of Liverpool FC, but as a key member of the England team. Here, for the first time, he tells the story of his lifelong obsession with football, in an honest and revealing book which captures the extraordinary camaraderie, the soul-destroying tensions and the high-octane thrills of the modern game as never before. He speaks for the first time about the torturous will-he-won't-he Chelsea rumours and his undying passion for Liverpool. We experience first-hand the highs of winning in Istanbul and elsewhere, as well as the occasional lows of being parted from his much-loved family and friends. And of course, the book contains a full blow-by-blow account of England's world cup campaign in Germany 2006.
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Legendary soccer coach Anson Dorrance has coached 17 of the last 21 NCAA women's championship soccer teams. Enough said. "The Vision of a Champion" is just that, as Dorrance distills his vision in this mandatory guide for young athletes and coaches who want to inspire and train them.
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With Skills and Strategies for Coaching Soccer, you have access to 120 drills for teaching skills to players at all levels--from beginning to intermediate to advanced. And for each skill, you'll find drills for players at different levels of development.Some of the basic skills presented include collecting and controlling, passing, dribbling, kicking, heading, goalkeeping, and the throw in. You'll also find
• offensive moves and countering defensive moves;
• 120 drills for beginning, intermediate, and advanced players;
• coaching points for each drill;
• a fitness program for soccer;
• sample game situations and how to coach in those situations;
• 246 high-quality illustrations of field diagrams and skill execution; and
• methods of coaching that are appropriate for individuals or groups.
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The Ultimate Guide to Weight Training for Football is the most comprehensive and up-to-date football-specific training guide in the world today. It contains descriptions and photographs of over 80 of the most effective weight training, flexibility, and abdominal exercises used by athletes worldwide. This book features year-round football-specific weight-training programs guaranteed to improve your performance and get you results.No other Football book to date has been so well designed, so easy to use, and so committed to weight training. This book will have players of all positions and skill levels increasing strength, agility, and power dramatically resulting in more touchdowns, crisper and harder tackles, and the flat-out domination of opponents all over the field.
Both beginners and advanced athletes and weight trainers can follow this book and utilize its programs. From recreational to professional, thousands of athletes all over the world are already benefiting from this book and its techniques, and now you can too!
As an added bonus, this book also contains links to free record keeping charts which normally sell separately for $20.
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Aimed primarily at intermediate and advanced coaches, this book examines the principle formations used in modern soccer and the need to fully understand them all of one is to adapt to game situations using counter-active tactics. The author discusses such offensive topics as support, width, penetration, mobility and improvisation. Defensively, Chapters include: Three Man Defense, Four Man Defense, One Forward System, Two Forward System, and Three Forward System. Well organized and clearly written, this is an outstanding coaching book.
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Once considered to be a solely European sport, soccer has now surpassed baseball in popularity among American schoolchildren. Geared toward kids aged seven to twelve, this easy-to-understand book includes such topics as the history of the game, the basics of how to play, suggestions on how to become a better player, and fun soccer trivia.