The Republic Of Football

Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties. Packed with never-before-told anecdotes, as well as fresh takes on the games everyone remembers, The Republic of Football is a must-read for all fans of Friday night lights.

Rowan Simons has lived (and played football) in China for over twenty years and Bamboo Goalposts is his amusing and insightful account of what it’s like to live, work and play there. He presents and works with Beijing TV and runs his own media company, but his real passion is getting China to embrace the social and health benefits of amateur football. Which isn’t easy in a country where for decades it was illegal for more than ten people to congregate for the purposes of a recreational sporting activity. Rowan built a football pitch and clubhouse and now heads Club Football - http://www.clubfootball.com.cn – whose growing membership has given him genuine hope that by the time the Beijing Olympics begin in 2008 he might be getting somewhere. No other book communicates more clearly, more humourously and more affectionately what contemporary China is like when viewed through Western eyes. Rowan speaks fluent Chinese and his love of the country and its people shines off every page. He has lived there for so long that he understands what it takes to get ahead, but at the same time he is still very much a down-to-earth English football fan who just wants to share his passion for the beautiful game. Bamboo Goalposts is a personal odyssey inspired by the selfless pioneers of amateur football who took the game around the world in centuries past, but somehow missed China.

The state's presence in professional football has been ad hoc and inconsistent. Football has been largely exempt from the development of the regulatory state and has been left to govern itself. However, new media have raised the profile of the game and globalization has created new pressures as clubs become pawns in the ambitions of states and wealthy individuals. Clubs offer an important sense of identity for fans, but the impersonality and distance of ownership can set up new tensions. Corruption in the international governing body has been a significant problem and the sport's symbiotic relationship with gambling is a concern. There are no off-the-shelf solutions for regulation, but clearly, the complexities of the beautiful game and its economic size require more attention from government.