It was a feat unequalled in modern football. But for Arsene Wenger's 'Invincibles', a team including legends Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp, it was a challenge that went far beyond sport. Based on exclusive players interviews, this definitive book relives the pivotal games and moments, and allows the Invincibles to tell their own story. It takes readers inside the locker room, to reveal the teamwork, the psychology and the struggle behind one of the greatest teams in history.

    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 is a modern classic of soccer writing that followers of the game will dip into again and again.

    

    Throughout his playing career, he was synonymous with Total Football, a style of play in which every player could play in any position on the pitch. Today, his philosophy lives on in teams across Europe, from Barcelona to Bayern Munich and players from Lionel Messi to Cesc Fabregas. My Turn tells the story of Cruyff's life starting at Ajax, where he won eight national titles and three European Cups before moving to Barcelona where he won La Liga in his first season, in 1973, and was named European Footballer of the Year. He won the Ballon d'Or three times, and led the Dutch national team to the final of the 1974 World Cup, famously losing to West Germany, and receiving the Golden Ball as the player of the tournament. While on the field Cruyff was in total control, off the field his life was more turbulent with a kidnapping attempt and bankruptcy. After retiring in 1984, he became a hugely successful manager of Ajax and then Barcelona when he won the Champions league with a young Pep Guardiola in his team. In 1999 Cruyff was voted European Player of the Century, and came second behind Pele in the World Player of the Century poll. In March 2016 Cruyff died after a short battle with lung cancer bringing world football to a standstill in an outpouring of emotions. A brilliant teacher and analyst of the game he love, My Turn is Johan Cruyff's legacy.

    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.

    Title: Tor! Binding: Paperback Author: Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger Publisher: Gardners Books Ltd

    Team line-ups and statistical summaries are included.

    Author Hunter Davies was allowed unparalleled access to the inner sanctum of a top professional soccer team, the Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs), and his pen spared nothing and no one. This 30th-anniversary edition will appeal to new and enthusiastic audiences.

    By drawing on the recollections of everyone from players and managers to fans and backroom staff, enough new material as been unearthed to interest fans and casual supporters.

    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 process, he has marked himself out as one of the best young managers in the world, more than holding his own against the Premier League's established heavyweights. He has done so by promoting an attacking, pressing style of football and by nurturing home-grown talent, fully endearing himself to the Spurs faithful along the way.Guillem Balagué was granted unprecedented access to Pochettino and his backroom staff for the duration of the 2016-17 season, and he has therefore been able to draw on extensive interview material with Pochettino, his family, his closest assistants, players such as Dele Alli and Harry Kane, and even a very rare conversation with Daniel Levy to tell the manager's story in his own words. From Pochettino's early years as a player and coach to his transformation of Tottenham into one of the best teams in England, the book uniquely reveals the inner workings of the man and of his footballing philosophy. It also lays bare what it takes to run a modern-day football team competing at the highest level over the course of a single campaign. The result is the most comprehensive and compelling portrait of a manager and of a club in the Premier League era.

    They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.

    From the attacking flair of Real Madrid of the 50s to the defensive brilliance of the Italians in the 60s and onto the total football of the Dutch in the 70s, the European leagues have been where the game has most evolved and taken its biggest steps forward. And over the last three decades, since the rebranding of the Champions League in 1992, that pattern has continued unabated, with each major European footballing nation playing its part in how the game’s tactics have developed.From the intelligent use of space displayed by the phenomenal Ajax team of the early 90s, to the dominance of the highly strategic Italian league in the late 90s and onto the technical wizardry of Barcelona’s tiki-taka, the European game continues to reinvent the tactical dimension of the game, creating blueprints which both club and national teams around the world strive to follow.In Zonal Marking, Michael Cox brilliantly investigates and analyses the major leagues around Europe over specific time periods and demonstrates the impact each has made on how the game is now played. Highly entertaining and packed full of wonderful anecdotes, this is the first book of its kind to take an overview of modern European football, and lays bare just how much the international language of football can be shaped by a nation’s unique identity.

    But whoever he is - and whoever he plays for - he is always honest, always fearless and always opinionated.Now, for the first time, he reveals everything you need to know about the hidden world of professional football - the extraordinary highs, the desperate lows....and what it's really like to do a job most of us can only dream of.

    . . 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.