Hard to pin down in translation (though the author manfully spends a chapter trying to explain the term in its fullest sense), "morbo" encapsulates the fierce rivalry across a club scene fragmented by history, language and politics. The bitter feeling between Barcelona and Real Madrid has, of course, been well-documented elsewhere. Here that famous rivalry is only one component of a landscape of antagonism. In particular, the Basque country in the north-west and Seville in the south both provide breeding grounds for a healthy portion of "morbo", and receive Ball's attention accordingly. The narrative captures the essence of that feeling perfectly, without failing to inform on a historical basis. A splendid chapter traces the ancestry of football in Spain back to the labourers in the English-owned copper mines in Huelva, Andalucia. While Spanish club football has always had its stars, from Di Stefano to Cruyff and Butragueno through to Raul and Luis Figo today, Ball shows that there is a greater force running in its lifeblood. Yet still there remains a paradox; he analyses the historical under-achievement of the Spanish national side in major international tournaments. The new millennium has seen excellent books focusing on football culture in Holland and France--namely Brilliant Orange and Le Foot. At a time when the stock of Spanish club football has perhaps not been higher since the heyday of Real Madrid in the late 50s and early 60s, Morbo, a triumph in the same vein, thankfully allows us to add Spain to the list. --Trevor Crowe

    The time has come, he concludes, to fly beneath the radar of big-league sports, to while away a season with the Johnnies. So, he moves his family to the middle of Minnesota to chronicle a season at St. John's, a Division III program that has reached unparalleled success under the unorthodox guidance of John "Gags" Gagliardi.The Sweet Season is an account of what happens when a family pulls up stakes and spends months in a strange and wonderful place. It is also, not incidentally, the story of the most incredible football program in the country, run by a smiling sage who has forgotten more about the game than most of his peers will ever know.

    In 1999, they won three Cups in eleven days. Manchester United are the biggest, richest and most successful football club in the world. Read about the sport, the team, the players and the fans. A must for all football fans.

    Though millions experienced the thrills of college and professional football firsthand during these years, many more encountered the game through their daily newspapers or the weekly Saturday Evening Post, on radio broadcasts, and in the newsreels and feature films shown at their local movie theaters. Asking what football meant to these millions who followed it either casually or passionately, Michael Oriard reconstructs a media-created world of football and explores its deep entanglements with a modernizing American society.Football, claims Oriard, served as an agent of Americanization for immigrant groups but resisted attempts at true integration and racial equality, while anxieties over the domestication and affluence of middle-class American life helped pave the way for the sport's rise in popularity during the Cold War. Underlying these threads is the story of how the print and broadcast media, in ways specific to each medium, were powerful forces in constructing the football culture we know today.[Oriard] captures the self-aggrandizing illogic of the game's cultural role in his absorbing study of early 20th-century culture.--New York TimesThis excellent book should be required reading on any American Studies course worth the name. . . . Oriard's detailed and well-written work shows us how the game has been constructed through notions of national, gendered and ethnic--and, as he insists, also class--identities.--Journal of American StudiesIn this landmark work exploring the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, Michael Oriard explores how the mass media shaped and were shaped by the exploding popularity of football. King Football is at once a sweeping cultural history of football, a provocative study of the power of print and broadcast media, and a compelling investigation of American attitudes about race, class, and gender and their relationship to sport.

    Most are unaware that this most popular American sport was created by the teams that now make up the Ivy League. From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869, these major schools of the northeast--Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale--shaped football as we now know it. Almost every facet of the game still bears their imprint: they created the All-America team, produced the first coaches, devised the basic rules, invented many of the strategies, developed much of the equipment, and even named the positions. Both the Heisman and Outland trophies are named for Ivy League players.Crowds of 80,000 no longer attend Ivy League games as they did seventy years ago, and Ivy teams are not the powerhouses they once were, but at times they can still be a step ahead of the rest of football, as in 1973 when Brown and Penn started the first black quarterbacks to face each other in major college history.In this rich history, Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. The college fight song is an Ivy League creation (Yale's was written by Cole Porter), as are the marching bands that play them. With their long winning streaks and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. But football was almost abolished early on because of violence in Ivy games, and it took President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate disagreements about rough play in order for football to remain a college sport. Gambling and ticket scalping were as commonplace then as now, as well as payoffs and recruiting abuses, fueled by the tremendous amount of money generated by the games, revenue that was oftentimes greater than that collected by the rest of the university. But the Ivy teams confronted those abuses, and in so doing helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life. Although Ivy League football and its ancient rivalries have disappeared from big-time sports by their own accord, their legacy remains with every snap of the ball.

    Using interviews with players involved, personal childhood recollections, and having studied hours of videotape, Jeff Dawson pieces together the events of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, inviting the reader to remember what it was like in England that glorious summer.

    This sports leadership bestseller from legendary Florida State University football coach Bowden is now available in paperback, including a new section that addresses his team's challenging 2001 season.

    It moves from football played with rolled-up old socks on the dusty veldt, to the glamour and passion of the English Premiership.

    This is the true story of courage, team loyalty and fortitude in the face of the most brutal oppression the world had ever seen. When Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, he caught the Soviet Union completely by surprise. At breathtaking speed his armies swept east, slaughtering the ill-prepared Soviet forces. His greatest military gains of the entire war were made in a few short months, and the largest single country that he conquered was the Ukraine, roughly the size of France. Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, was circled, assaulted and overrun, and among the city’s defenders who were captured and incarcerated were many of the members of the sparkling 1939 Dynamo Kiev football team, arguably the best in Europe before the war. Captured Kiev was a starving city whose population were deported in vast numbers as slave labour.However one man determined to save not just the surviving players from the Dynamo side but other athletes. He offered them work, shelter and, most valuable, bread, as workers in his bakery. Inspired by the charismatic goalkeeper Trusevich, the Dynamo side was re-formed as Start FC and a series of fixtures was arranged, all of which the team win handsomely, to such an extent that they inspired Kievan spirits. The final fixture against the Luftwaffe was agreed by the German authorities: a well-fed team from the Fatherland would vanquish the upstart Ukrainians, especially if the game was refereed by an SS officer. The match is an allegory of resistance; its consequences are brutal. Andy Dougan has discovered the truth behind a legendary encounter, sorting fact from fiction and restoring to the centre of World War II a moment of extraordinary poignancy and complex bravery, of which the cliché is demonstrably true: football is not a matter of life or death; it’s much more important than that.

    He discusses his former teammates, his training, and the soccer moments for which he is best remembered.

    The creation of the F.A. Premier League, the influx of television revenue, the commercialization of the game, and the growth in the numbers of foreign players have all left their mark. One area that has attracted increasing interest in the media and amongst the pages of football magazines is the issue of race and racism in football. But until now, the complexities of the situation have often been neglected in the midst of moral activism. Why has football become such an important arena for the expression of racist and xenophobic attitudes? How are racial and ethnic identities constructed and re-constructed in everyday social interactions and ritual gatherings?This highly readable and accessible book provides the first systematic and empirically grounded account of the role of race, nation and identity within contemporary football cultures. Focused around the four clubs on which the authors did their research, the book shows how different clubs understand and experience race in different ways. Looking at football at a national level, the authors trace the history of racism and its impact on the contemporary game. The emphasis throughout is on the changing role of racial and ethnic identity in football over the years.This book draws on research conducted at the height of campaigning activity within the game, as well as on contemporary scholarship about racism and sport. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in football, sport, race and ethnic studies.

    Drawing on primary sources and hundreds of hours of interviews with over forty original players and coaches, the work captures the sense of opportunity, adventure, and camaraderie that permeated that era of professional football.

    At the contest's end, the score was tied, nothing had been resolved, and about two thousand fans were on the field at Tuscaloosa, fighting.Since that day the Tennessee-Alabama game has developed into one of the premier football rivalries in the nation. To many of the faithful, it is much more than a game -- it is a crusade. The intensity with which these games have been waged makes victory as satisfying as the warm crimson and orange leaves that dance in Knoxville's cool Smoky Mountain breezes. Defeat, however, is more bitter than the choking smoke of Birmingham's steel mills.Beginning in 1928, the annual game has been played on the third Saturday in October, and the contest has produced enough heroes to fill several books. Third Saturday in October tells the story of each game. From Wallace Wade, Frank Thomas, Red" Drew, Paul "Bear" Bryant, Ray Perkins, Bill Curry, Gene Stallings, and Mike Dubose of Alabama, to Robert Neyland, Bowden Wyatt, Doug Dickey, Bill Battle, Johnny Majors, and Phil Fulmer of Tennessee, the game has been directed by legendary coaches and played by heroic young men who have risen to greatness on the third Saturday in October.Third Saturday in October is filled with memories and reflections of players, coaches, reporters, sportscasters, and fans. The people who were there, who made or failed to make the key plays, tell what happened in their own words. More than two hundred historic photographs illustrate the lively text. This second edition contains reports of the games from 1987 through 2000."

    Norbert's (Wisconsin) to Western Kentucky to Ohio State meet in front of crowds as small as several hundred and as large as 100,000. They are participants in an epic that began November 6, 1869, when the men of Princeton and Rutgers decided to test themselves on a field not yet called a gridiron. They are actors playing out their drama on a stage on which an unmatched cast of legendary performers has presented thrilling rivalries, glorious triumphs, and spectacular upsets. It is college football, a tapestry woven of memories as indestructible as they are colorful...threads that have encircled and captivated an audience measured in the millions, and have done so for generations. Welcome to "Rites of Autumn: The Story of College Football," the definitive history of college football, from Fielding Yost's "point-a-minute" Michigan Wolverines of 1901 to Bobby Bowden's undefeated 1999 Florida State Seminoles and everything in-between, before, and since. Here are Red Grange, Illinois's Galloping Ghost; Army's Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, and Pittsburgh's Tony Dorsett. Here is that day in 1957 when Bud Wilkinson's 47-game winning streak at Oklahoma was ended by Notre Dame and the Game of the Century when Bubba Smith's undefeated 1966 Michigan State team played also-undefeated Notre Dame to a 10-10 tie. With hundreds of vintage photographs, dozens of primary documents, and a vivid text, "Rites of Autumn" brings back to life Johnny Rodgers running back a punt for a Nebraska touchdown against Oklahoma in their 1971 Game of the Century; Cal's four-lateral kickoff return for a touchdown-- "The Play" -- that defeated John Elway's 1982 Stanford team; and Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass that beat Bernie Kosar's defending national champion Miami team 47-45 on the last play of the 1984 Thanksgiving Day game.In this extraordinary volume -- the companion to an equally extraordinary 10-hour prime-time television series -- are the stories of the first forward pass (1876; Yale vs. Princeton), the first huddle (Illinois, 1921), the invention of the flying wedge (Harvard, 1892), and the wishbone (Texas, 1968). Here, "outlined against a blue-gray October sky," are Notre Dame's Four Horsemen and George Gipp, the subject of Knute Rockne's most famous halftime speech, who once told his coach, "Aw, these pep talks are O.K., Rock, I guess, but I got two hundred bucks bet on this game and if you think I'm lying down out there, you're crazy." Here are USC tackle Marion Morrison before he became John Wayne, and the famous letter to Princeton coach Fritz Crisler written by a former student known, when he attended Old Nassau, as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. In "Rites of Autumn" prize-winning sportswriter Richard Whittingham brings the most spectacular regular-season games to vivid life, from Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indian School vs. Army in 1912 to USC's one-point victory over crosstown rival UCLA in 1967. Here are the great coaches, from Pop Warner to Knute Rockne to Eddie Robinson to Joe Paterno; the great African-American tradition, from schools like Southern and Grambling and from players like Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, and Jim Brown. And, of course, here are the great rivalries: Army-Navy, Texas-Oklahoma, Notre Dame-USC, and more. With sidebars on everything from Walter Camp's firstAll-America team to the history of the great Bowl games, conference and national championships, the Heisman and Outland Trophy winners, decade-by-decade all-star teams, and the greatest teams of all time -- all illustrated by an astonishing selection of more than 250 photographs -- "Rites of Autumn" is a spectacular achievement: the ultimate book for anyone who has ever spent an autumn Saturday following America's most passionately watched sport.

    Whittingham traces the club's beginnings in Boston as the Braves, through its successful move to our nation's capital, from the almost slapstick inept teams of the 1950s to George Allen's Over-the-Hill-Gang that began a resurgence that carried the Redskins to three Super Bowls under legendary coach Joe Gibbs. With more than 100 archival photos this is a "keeper" for Redskin fans of all ages.

    SAQ is a revolutionary training method which has proved that these skills can be developed in every player. This manual details drills, programmes and field tests that are guaranteed to improve speed, agility and acceleration in all directions and environments. Is it just for the elite? No. SAQ Soccer begins with the basics before moving on to soccer movement patterns and position-specific work. No coach or player can afford to be without it!