It is a perfect window into the cross-currents of today's world, with all its joys and its sorrows. In this remarkably insightful, wide-ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shining a spotlight on the clash of civilizations, the international economy, and just about everything in between. How Soccer Explains the World is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.

    He knew the highlights of his father's career by heart. But when his dad died he realised they were all he knew. He began to realise, too, that he'd lost the passion for football that his father had passed down to him. In this book he faces his growing alienation from the game he was born into, as he revisits key periods in his father's career to build up a picture of his football life - and through him a whole era.‘The most emotionally charged and moving sports book I've ever read’ Daily Mail

    Work absenteeism skyrockets. Political campaigns grind to a halt. Fans mortgage their houses to buy tickets. And teams employ every means possible—even consulting witch doctors and astrologers—in their quest for national glory. Veteran soccer commentator Jamie Trecker traveled to Germany for FIFA World Cup 2006. Here, reported from the restaurants, trains, bars, town squares, hostels, press boxes, and brothels, is his unvarnished account of the games and parties, great plays and fistfights, gossip and tacky souvenirs that turn the largest sporting event on earth into a true world bazaar. With equal measures insight and irreverence, Trecker captures the passion, politics, controversies, and economics that make soccer a reflection of the world.

    From the ill-received takeover of Manchester United by the Glazer family to Paris Saint Germain's current shopping spree for the best footballers on the planet, soccer finance has become an increasingly important part of the game. Barely a summer goes by now without a cherished club going into administration or a wealthy businessman funding a mid table team's ascension to Champions League competitor. Meanwhile, the twice-annual multi-million dollar merry-go-round of transfer season sees players (and now managers) signed for sums thought impossible just a decade ago. Understanding soccer finance has become essential for comprehending the beautiful game. But for many fans, soccer finance remains, frustratingly, a world that is opaque and difficult to grasp. Stefan Szymanski, co-author of the bestselling Soccernomics, tackles every soccer fan's burning questions in Money and Soccer: A Soccernomics Guide. From the abolition of the maximum wage in the 1960s, through to the impact of TV money both at home and abroad in the 1990s and 2000s, Szymanski explains how money, or lack of, affects your favorite club. Drawing on extensive research into financial records dating back to the 1970s, Szymanski provides clear analysis of the way that clubs have transformed in the modern era. This book isn't limited to European clubs. Szymanski, a renowned expert on sports management and economics, looks at what we can learn from comparing the ascension of Europe's biggest clubs to their lofty perches and with new financial models across the world. Through careful research and informative stories drawn from around the globe, Szymanski provides an accessible guide to the world of soccer finance.

    Along with the likes of Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and Patrick Vieira, he provided an inspirational cutting edge to the Gunners' play and set them on the way to becoming one of the most formidable sides in the world, winning trophy after trophy. In 2003-04, Arsenal were quite literally unbeatable in the league. Now, with unique insight and eloquent recall, Bergkamp reveals how it was done and explains his footballing philosophy - a way of playing that has been handed down from Cruyff and the era of Dutch 'Total Football' via Arsene Wenger and on today to Pep Guardiola. But, now at Ajax, he is part of a team that is working to create a way of playing football that could take the game on to a whole new level. Whether you want to relive the glories of his past, or share his vision of the future, once you have read this book you will never see Bergkamp or football in the same way again.

    Now, he turns his eye to the most popular sport on the planet: soccer. It's a journey that begins with the first game John saw, in 1960s-era Ireland, through soccer in the 21st century - the World Cups in 02, 06, and 10, the European Championships in 04 and 08. In between the drunken fans, crazed taxi drivers, leprechauns and lederhosen, Doyle muses on the evolution of soccer as a global phenomenon. He shows a sport where for 90 minutes on the pitch anything seems possible. A game where colonized nations can tackle the power of their colonizers; where oppressed immigrant groups can thoroughly trounce their host countries. This book examines soccer from a new angle. John Doyle offers a compelling social history of the ultimate sport, each country and team competing in the historic 2010 World Cup, and how the game has kept pace as the global village has sprung up around the playing field.From the Hardcover edition.

    This definitive, magisterial study of football and society profiles includes interviews with all-time greats like Bobby Charlton, George Best, Alf Ramsay, Stanley Matthews, Matt Busby and Nat Lofthouse. It is a snapshot of a pivotal era in sporting history; changes and decisions were made in the sixties that would create the game we know today.

    It is played, watched, written about and talked to death by millions virtually every day of the year. But how do the characteristics of England and Italy affect the game in these two footballing nations? Do the national stereotypes of Italians as passionate, stylish lotharios and the English as cold-hearted eccentrics still hold true when they kick a ball around? In The Italian Job, for the first time, a footballer of the first rank, Gianluca Vialli, in conjunction with sportswriter and broadcaster Gabriele Marcotti, tackles this debate head on. Uniquely positioned across both the English and the Italian games, they provide a fascinating and highly controversial commentary on where football is now and where it's headed. And they have invited some of the biggest names in the sport to join in their discussion. Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Sven Goran Eriksson, Fabio Capello and Marcello Lippi, amongst others, add their not inconsiderable weight to the highest-profile symposium on football ever convened.Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti explore every aspect of football, be it tactical and technical or cultural and sociological. Stuffed full of controversial opinions and gripping revelations, The Italian Job takes you on a journey to the very heart of two of the world's great footballing cultures.

    In The Numbers Game, Chris Anderson, a former professional goalkeeper turned soccer statistics guru, teams up with behavioral analyst David Sally to uncover the numbers that really matter when it comes to predicting a winner. Investigating basic but profound questions—How valuable are corners? Which goal matters most? Is possession really nine-tenths of the law? How should a player’s value be judged?—they deliver an incisive, revolutionary new way of watching and understanding soccer.

    

    Such was the power of the ‘Busby Babes’ that they seemed invincible. The average age of the side which won the Championship in 1955-56 was just 22, the youngest ever to achieve such a feat. A year later, when they were Champions again, nothing, it seemed, would prevent this gifted young team from reigning for the next decade.But then came 6 February 1958, the day that eight Manchester United players died on a German airfield in the 'Munich Air Disaster' – a date to be forever etched in the annals of sporting tragedy.Duncan Edwards, Eddie Colman, Tommy Taylor, Roger Byrne…the names were already enshrined in legend before the air crash, but Munich in many ways earned them immortality. They have never grown old.Jeff Connor traces the rise of the greatest Manchester United side of all time, alongside a vibrant portrait of England in the 1950s, but he also paints a dark picture of a club that enriched itself on the myth of Munich while neglecting the families of the dead and the surviving players. The repercussions and the toll the disaster took on so many linger to the present day.Drawing on extensive interviews with the Munich victims and players of that era, The Lost Babes is the definitive account of British football's golden age, a poignant story of the protracted effects of loss and a remorseless dissection of the how the richest football club in the world turned its back on its own players and their families.

    From its early beginnings when the first soccer on the shores of Bilbao and Buenos Aires was played by British sailors and engineers, through to the influx of South American stars, and similarly inspirational Italians, Dutchman and Scandinavians, Burns show how the engagement of foreigners with home-grown Spanish talent overcame political adversity and produced football of sublime skill and passion that intoxicates fans around the world.The book takes us on a journey through some of the extraordinary characters, classic matches, and brutal controversies that have defined Spanish football from the early days when a few enthusiasts developed their talent kicking a ball on a piece of industrial waste ground, to the emergence of rival giants, FC Barcelona and Real Madrid- the most powerful and successful football clubs in the world- to the Franco regime (that propped up the Madrid team) and democracy (where Barca has ruled), to and a national team that, encompassing all, became the world's champion.

    An outstanding, thought-provoking study of the state of modern professional football.

    Once you could ignore football, avoid the back pages, turn the telly over, leave the pub. Now that's not possible because on 4 July 1990 in Turin's Stadium of the Alps gazza cried, England lost and football changed forever. Pete Davies witnessed all of this first hand. The players, the hooligans, the agents, the journalists, the fans - the full cast of football's rowdy circus. For nine month he had access to the England squad and their manager, Bobby Robson, talking to them freely about their hopes, their fears, their methods and their lives. So this is the real story, the unedited verdion. All Played Out - the first and last book to give the inside story of the greatest show on Earth. 'Pete Davies is incapable of writing a dull sentence. . . one of the most outrageously entertaining books of the year' Daily Post.

    The Hillsborough disaster was broadcast live on the BBC; it left millions of people traumatised, and English football in ruins.And the Sun Shines Now is not a book about Hillsborough. It is a book about what arrived in the wake of unquestionably the most controversial tragedy in the post-war era of Britain's history. The Taylor Report. Italia 90. Gazza's tears. All seater stadia. Murdoch. Sky. Nick Hornby. The Premier League. The transformation of a game that once connected club to community to individual into a global business so rapacious the true fans have been forgotten, disenfranchised.In powerful polemical prose, against a backbone of rigorous research and interviews, Adrian Tempany deconstructs the past quarter century of English football and examines its place in the world. How did Hillsborough and the death of 96 Liverpool fans come to change the national game beyond recognition? And is there any hope that clubs can reconnect with a new generation of fans when you consider the startling statistic that the average age of season ticket holder here is 41, compared to Germany's 21?Perhaps the most honest account of the relationship between the football and the state yet written, And the Sun Shines Now is a brutal assessment of the modern game.