The Soccer Book

Whether you want to bend it like Beckham or dribble like Ronaldinho, The Soccer Book is the ultimate visual guide to soccer skills, rules, tactics, and coaching, illustrating every aspect of every variant of the sport more clearly, and in more detail, than any other book has done before.

Learn to bend it like Rooney and dribble like Torres with this ultimate visual guide to planet football revised and updated in time for the World Cup 2010 Get in training for the 2010 World Cup. Experience the excitement, the passion and the glory of arguably the world's greatest sport - football. You'll relive the finest moments of the players, coaches and teams who have created football history and learn everything from match highlights to the inside stories on players, managers and fans. Discover all you need to know on the clubs, the rituals, the stats and the results. Plus find out about the laws, the tactics, the science, and the art of the beautiful game. Includes a fantastic pull-out chart on World Cup 2010 teams and groups.

This is the definitive manual for coaching America's fastest-growing sport for kids aged 8-19. Written for both beginning and seasoned coaches, The Complete Book of Coaching Youth Soccer shows you--in concise, easy-to-understand terms--how to organize, motivate, and lead your youth soccer team to success on the field. Included are: Step-by-step teaching points Rules and strategies of the game More than 100 illustrative diagrams More than 75 practice and competitive drills Complete 10-week season plans for each of three separate age groups Designed for easy, on-the-field reference, author Simon Whitehead's proven practice drills are designed progressively to develop maximum skills for both individual and team play. Simon Whitehead lives in Minneapolis and has coached high school and college soccer in England and in the United States for more than ten years. Using proven European teaching methods, he shows the soccer coach how to maximize each young player's enthusiasm, involvement, and personal success in soccer.

It is the basketball championship game and the reader's choices can mean the difference between a triumphant victory and a heartbreaking loss.

“An eccentric, fascinating exposé of a world most of us know nothing about. . . . Bristles with anecdotes that are almost impossible to believe.” —New York Times Book Review “Terrific. . . . A travelogue full of important insights into both cultural change and persistence. . . . Foer’s soccer odyssey lends weight to the argument that a humane world order is possible.” — Washington Post Book World A groundbreaking work—named one of the five most influential sports books of the decade by Sports Illustrated—How Soccer Explains the World is a unique and brilliantly illuminating look at soccer, the world’s most popular sport, as a lens through which to view the pressing issues of our age, from the clash of civilizations to the global economy. From Brazil to Bosnia, and Italy to Iran, this is an eye-opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can highlight the fault lines of a society, whether it’s terrorism, poverty, anti-Semitism, or radical Islam—issues that now have an impact on all of us. Filled with blazing intelligence, colorful characters, wry humor, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity, How Soccer Explains the World is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.

There are many amazing soccer players--but who are the greatest of all time? Readers will learn all about the sport, including its top stars, incredible statistics, and more, presented in an engaging top-ten format.

The Fix is the most explosive story of sports corruption in a generation. Intriguing, riveting, and compelling, it tells the story of an investigative journalist who sets out to examine the world of match-fixing in professional soccer. From the Introduction Understand how gambling fixers work to corrupt a soccer game and you will understand how they move into a basketball league, a cricket tournament, or a tennis match (all places, by the way, that criminal fixers have moved into). My views on soccer have changed. I still love the Saturday-morning game between amateurs: the camaraderie and the fresh smell of grass. But the professional game leaves me cold. I hope you will understand why after reading the book. I think you may never look at sport in the same way again.

Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . 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.