Tales from the Dugout: The Greatest True Baseball Stories Ever Told


Mike Shannon - 1997
    Tales from the Dugout brings together never-before-told stories from baseball personalities such as Roger Maris, Ken Griffey Jr., Pete Rose, Phil Rizzuto, and Gaylord Perry in this illustrated, one-of-a-kind compendium.

How to Win: Lessons from the Premier League


The Secret Footballer - 2016
    I saw men succeed and more men fail. I always wondered where the difference lay."What separates the good from the truly great players? How do football managers get the best out of their team? How do you come back from a crushing defeat to win?In an inspirational, funny and thought-provoking new book, The Secret Footballer teams up with The Secret Psychologist to crack the secrets of success and share with us the tricks and tips that keep the top players at the top of their game. Exploring the winning mindset from confidence to concentration, exposing the successes, the failures and the frauds, this book will shock and entertain. And while most of us will never dribble like Messi or strike like Suarez, we can learn to think like them.How To Win is the thinking fan's handbook for those who want to win. At football or at life.

Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos


Gavin Newsham - 2006
    In the summer of 1977, entrepreneurial Warner Brothers chairman Steve Ross assembled the best soccer players from across the globe to play for the Cosmos. Pele, the German superstar Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Neeskens, Giorgio Chinaglia, Brazil's 1970 World Cup-winning captain Carlos Alberto, Werner Roth, Roberto Cabanas, and many others all donned Cosmos jerseys and became instant celebrities in the process. The Cosmos quickly became the hottest ticket in town and the Cosmos players soon became enmeshed in a world of millionaires, gangsters, groupies, glamour, power struggles, alcoholic excess, drugs, and fistfights.Published to coincide with the World Cup in June 2006, Once in a Lifetime is the thrilling story of America's first flirtation with the world's most popular game.

Fearless: How Leicester City Shook the Premier League, and What it Means for Sport


Jonathan Northcroft - 2016
    Out on the pitch a lone brass player sounds the haunting Post Horn Gallop, for 80 years the home players' entrance tune. Spines tingle. Air is gulped into opposition lungs. Game time, time to begin the chase. Burning fox eyes peer down from between the decks of one of the stands. On the stadium's outside wall a royal blue LCD display says #Fearless.Welcome to Leicester City. They were always a club with a difference but in 2015-16 they created a story that in modern football stands unique. Who could believe it: from relegation certainties to champions of England? It was when, on behalf of every small club, dreams were hunted at the King Power, a season where the impossible became merely quarry.5,000-1 shots when the campaign started, Leicester's transformation has been remarkable. This is the most incredible cast of written-offs, grafters, misfits and journeymen, coming together in a special time and place to simultaneously have the season of their lives. Fearless will document Leicester's hunt of their impossible dream. It will tell the greatest football tale of the Premier League era, in loving detail, with the inside track. Now that Leicester have gone all the way and won the title, it is the best story in world sports - for years.Premier League champions. The side who'd been adrift at the bottom 12 months previously, who's started the season as relegation favourites, whose manager was favourite to be the first one sacked once the campaign got underway. A League One side only seven seasons previously. A squad of �500,000 and �1m men. Leicester. Ridiculous. Miraculous. Fearless.

Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America


Diane Roberts - 2015
    Same as many big time collegiate sports programs. Seems no matter how the team transgresses off the field, if they excel on the field, everyone forgives them. Writer, professor and conflicted Seminole Diane Roberts looks at the problems plaguing her campus in Tallahassee, examining them within the context of college football itself and its significance in American life, and explores how the game shapes our culture.

The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur


Julie Welch - 2012
    So, after a meeting under a lamp post about 100 yards from where White Hart Lane stands today, they formed Hotspur Football Club. Players paid sixpence to join up, and the club played its first match in a dark blue strip with a red 'H' badge. Now Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is one of the greatest names in the greatest games of all, with an illustrious history of footballing firsts including having become the first non-league team to win the FA Cup, the first team of the modern era to win the league and cup Double and the first British team to win a European trophy. Beyond that, the club has a proud tradition of ambition, excellence and of playing football the right way, 'the Spurs Way'. It is an unspoken but implicit prerequisite that the teams who pull on the famous lilywhite shirts will always endeavour to entertain and exhilarate the club's fans with fast, quick-passing, attacking football. "The game," as the great Spurs captain Danny Blanchflower so succinctly put it, "is about glory". In The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur, renowned author Julie Welch who has lilywhite and blue blood coursing through her veins brilliantly deconstructs the history of the club to get to the very heart and soul of Tottenham Hotspur. How did Spurs develop their unique and precious character? Who were the key individuals and what were the key events that shaped the modern Spurs?Packed with wonderful stories from the formation of the club to the present day, and the memories of numerous legendary players, managers, supporters and other key figures, The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur brings the rich and glorious history of Spurs to life from a new and fascinating perspective.

Mister: The Men Who Gave The World The Game


Rory Smith - 2016
    From its late-Victorian flowering in the mill towns of the northwest of England, football spread around the world with great speed. It was helped on its way by a series of missionaries who showed the rest of the planet the simple joys of the game. Even now, in many countries, the colloquial word for a football manager is not 'coach' or 'boss' but 'mister', as that is how the early teachers were known, because they had come from the home of the sport to help it develop in new territories.       In Rory Smith's stunning new book Mister, he looks at the stories of these pioneers of the game, men who left this country to take football across the globe. Sometimes, they had been spurned in their own land, as coaching was often frowned upon in England in those days, when players were starved of the ball during the week to make them hungry for it on matchday. So it was that the inspirations behind the 'Mighty Magyars' of the 1950s, the Dutch of the 1970s or top clubs such as Barcelona came from these shores.       England, without realising it, fired the very revolution that would remove its crown, changing football's history, thanks to a handful of men who sowed the seeds of the inversion of football's natural order. This is the story of the men who taught the world to play and shaped its destiny. This is the story of the Misters.

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy


Joe McGinniss - 1999
    But soon he finds himself embroiled with an absurd yet irresistible cast of characters, including the team's owner, described by the New York Times as "straight out of a Mario Puzo novel," and coach Osvaldo Jaconi, whose only English word is the one he uses to describe himself: "bulldozer."  As the riotous, edge-of-your-seat season unfolds, McGinniss develops a deepening bond with the team, their village and its people, and their country. Traveling with the miracle team, from the isolated mountain region where Castel di Sangro is located to gritty towns as well as grand cities, McGinniss introduces us to an Italy that no tourist guidebook has ever described, and comes away with a "sad, funny, desolating, and inspiring story--everything, in fact, a story should be" (Los Angeles Times).

Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football


Daniel Gray - 2017
    Sunday lunchtime kick-offs. Absurd ticket prices. Non-black boots. Football's menu of ills is long. Where has the joy gone? Why do we bother? Saturday, 3pm offers a glorious antidote. It is here to remind you that football can still sing to your heart.Warm, heartfelt and witty, here are fifty short essays of prose poetry dedicated to what is good in the game. These are not wallowing nostalgia; they are things that remain sweet and right: seeing a ground from the train, brackets on vidiprinters, ball hitting bar, Jimmy Armfield's voice, listening to the results in a traffic jam, football towns and autograph-hunters. This is fan culture at its finest, words to transport you somewhere else and identify with, words to hide away in a pub and luxuriate in.Saturday, 3pm is a book of love letters to football and a clarion call, helping us find the romance in the game all over again.

NFL: 100 Years


National Football League - 2019
    From its humble beginnings in Canton, Ohio, to its emergence as a sport cherished by millions, all the key moments and famous athletes are honored within the pages of this handsomely produced book. In addition to the lively text, and action and portrait photography, the story of the game and the context in which it grew are animated by original lists, charts, creative statistics, and infographics, along with beautiful photos of the evolving equipment and artifacts essential to the story of the sport. A perfect gift, NFL: 100 Years will be cherished by every football fan, new or old.

Eli Manning The Making of a Quarterback


Ralph Vacchiano - 2008
    But the drive, which also included a remarkable escape and pass completion to unheralded receiver David Tyree, was the culmination of years of promise and development. After all, champion quarterbacks aren't made overnight.With Manning, the Super Bowl MVP, as its focal point, New York Daily News Giants beat writer Ralph Vacchiano's 'Eli Manning The Making of a Quarterback' is a fascinating insider's look at the National Football League, how stars are made and crushed, and how fortunes are won and lost on the performance of one man: the quarterback. From the bold draft day trade that brought Manning to New York, through his dramatic ups and downs on and off the field, his first training camp to his last-minute heroics in Super Bowl XLII, Vacchiano takes a candid and revealing look at the people and events that made Manning's and his 2007 Giants' success one of the greatest stories in modern sports history. Complete with exclusive interviews with NFL stars, coaches, and executives and a foreword by former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, Vacchiano uses his unfettered access to the world champion Giants to present a true, behind-the scenes look at the quarterback and team that defied all of the experts and oddsmakers to pull off one of the most phenomenal upsets in pro football history.

Mensch: Beyond the Cones


Jonathan Harding - 2019
     From the practical aspects on the training ground to the collective strength of the coaching community, some of the smartest minds in the game take you closer to understanding the human aspects required to nurture young professionals. Germany’s model is not perfect and constantly evolving so there’s also a look at what should be the next step for Germany’s coaching after a disastrous 2018 World Cup. As English players look to Germany to further their own careers, Mensch looks at what the wider football world can learn from a country and a coaching culture so clearly in love with the beautiful game.

Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports


Mike McIntire - 2017
    In Champions Way, New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire chronicles the rise of this growing scandal through the experience of the Florida State Seminoles, one of the most successful teams in NCAA history.A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Times investigation of college sports, McIntire breaks new ground here, uncovering the workings of a system that enables athletes to violate academic standards and avoid criminal prosecution for actions ranging from shoplifting to drunk driving. At the heart of Champions Way is the untold story of a whistle-blower, Christie Suggs, and her wrenching struggle to hold a corrupt system to account. Together with shocking new details about prominent sports figures, including NFL quarterback Jameis Winston and former FSU coach Bobby Bowden, Champions Way shines a light on the ethical, moral, and legal compromises inherent in the making of a championship sports program.Beyond the story of Florida State, McIntire takes readers on a journey through the history of college football, from its origins as a roughneck pastime coached by nineteenth-century professors to its current incarnation as a gold-plated behemoth that long ago outgrew its scholastic environs. Illuminated in rich and disturbing detail is the hidden financial ecosystem that nourishes hundred-million-dollar teams, from the hustlers who recruit players for schools and the athletic departments controlled by rich boosters to the universities whose academic mission and moral authority have been undermined. More than pointing out flaws, McIntire examines their causes and offers hope to those who would reform college sports.

Rio: My Story


Rio Ferdinand - 2006
    It's heartfelt, it's raw, it's one hell of story.England's outstanding player in the 2006 World Cup tells it as it is, from the heart, no holds barred.This is his explosive story of the good, the bad and the beautiful Game.

Going Long: The Wild Ten-Year Saga of the Renegade American Football League in the Words of Those Who Lived


Jeff Miller - 2003
    Flavored with wild (and often ribald) anecdotes, inside stories, interviews, and never-before-told material, Going Long brings the incredible story of the maverick American Football League to life through the words of those who lived it.