This is the ultimate guide for any football fan who wants to know everything about the "beautiful game" - from World Cup winners to football skills and techniques. Whether you are a keen player, a lifelong supporter, or an armchair football manager, this book illustrates every aspect of the most popular sport in the world. The Football Book reveals the story behind the game - from the history of the sport to the results of the Qatar 2022 Men's World Cup, and the build-up to the 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Bold step-by-step artworks and jargon-free text profile the roles of players, equipment, team formations, strategies, and individual skills, while maps, quotes, and statistics give you all of the key facts on national teams, famous club sides, and iconic players, as well as the greatest competitions around the world.

If there is anything close to a universal game, it is association football, also known as soccer, football, fussball, fútbol, fitba, and futebol. The game has now moved from the physical to the digital - EA’s football simulation series FIFA - with profound impacts on the multibillion sports and digital game industries, their cultures and players. Throughout its development history, EA’s FIFA has managed to adapt to and adopt almost all video game industry trends, becoming an assemblage of game types and technologies that is in itself a multi-faceted probe of the medium’s culture, history, and technology. EA Sports FIFA: Feeling the Game is the first scholarly book to address the importance of EA’s FIFA. From looking at the cultures of fandom to analyzing the technical elements of the sports simulation, and covering the complicated relations that EA’s FIFA has with gender, embodiment, and masculinity, this collection provides a comprehensive understanding of a video game series that is changing the way the most popular sport in the world is experienced. In doing so, the book serves as a reference text for scholars in many disciplines, including game studies, sociology of sports, history of games, and sports research.

This volume deals with the competitive structure of football. It examines the relationship between sporting success and economic variables, the structure of European competitions, financial problems in football, their origins and options for reform, racial discrimination in English football, and the economic impact of the World Cup --Provided by publisher.

Manchester United is a football club like no other. The most popular sports club in history, it has an annual turnover of over pound]130 million and a stock market value that has topped pound]1 billion. Its triumph as an international commercial venture matches its success on the pitch in the UK's Premier League and in stadiums throughout Europe. At this time in late capitalism when the boundaries between cultural and commercial concerns have become increasingly invisible, Manchester United, the football club, provides us with a fascinating study in the evolution of sporting, social, cultural and economic change. In this, the first book to offer a rigorous, theoretically grounded treatment of the Manchester United phenomenon, leading academics from diverse backgrounds have written chapters, each interrogating a particular aspect of our central theme, Manchester United FC. The result is a unique contribution to our understanding of Manchester United in particular, and, perhaps more significantly, of contemporary sporting and popular culture in general.

This is the first book-length political sociology of the European Football Championships (Euros). The Euros are the third largest sporting mega-event in the world. Explores key themes and emerging trends in sport studies, including digitalisation, the politics of co-hosting, and environmental concerns.

Professional football is one of the most popular television 'genres' worldwide, attracting millions of fans, and the sponsorship of powerful companies. In A Game of Two Halves, Cornel Sandvoss considers football's relationship with television, its links with transnational capitalism, and the importance of football fandom in forming social and cultural identities around the globe presenting the phenomenon of football as a reflection of postmodern culture and globalization.Through a series of case studies, based on ethnographic audience research, Cornel Sandvoss explores the motivations and pleasures of football fans, the intense bond formed between supporters and their clubs, the implications of football consumption on political discourse and citizenship, football as a factor of cultural globalisation, and the pivotal role of football and television in a postmodern cultural order.

Women's soccer is one of the world's fastest-growing sports but has been subjected to little academic scrutiny. This collection considers women's football in a global context and analyses its progress, and the challenges and problems it has faced. It shows how women's football has made a significant contribution to the emancipation of women's football in many countries. It also traces the evolution of women's football in face of resistance, rejection and prejudice and describes women footballer's struggle for equal rights in a male dominated football world.
Published to coincide with the Women's World Cup in the USA, which begins in September 2003 in Atlanta, this is the first in-depth global study of women's football in 15 countries across the world.

Celebrate the stunning diversity of Britain's football landscape with this limited-edition postcard set of specially selected photos from Mike Bayly's best-selling book, British Football's Greatest Grounds. From grounds nestled in idyllic countryside to stadiums found amid big cities, these postcards transport you to some of the most scenic, historic and important football landmarks in Britain. From non-league to the Premier League, you'll see beautiful shots of the homes of Arthurlie, Ashton United, Aston Villa, Cambridge United, Great Yarmouth Town, Harwich & Parkeston, Hastings United, Luton Town, Maidenhead United, Mossley, QPR and Stourbridge. This outstanding collection of postcard photos, taken by acclaimed sports photographers, is sure to leave you planning a future football pilgrimage.

A Nation Again is the chaotic tale of the Scotland men's team's return to a major tournament after more than 20 years in the wilderness. Ten major tournaments had come and gone for Scotland since they reached France '98, but the birth of UEFA's Nations League offered a new route to glory. In early 2018, after a long search for Gordon Strachan's replacement, Alex McLeish became manager for a second time. But despite successfully navigating the Nations League group stage, it wasn't plain sailing, and his tenure ended after a shocking defeat at the start of Euro 2020 qualifying. With a play-off semi-final on the horizon, the Scottish FA turned to Steve Clarke, who took on the challenge of inspiring a team rooted in failure, creating a band-of-brothers mentality and figuring out how to organise this incredibly talented group of players. From a couple of the lowest lows came the highest high. With exclusive memories of those who were part of the journey, this is the story of how Scotland finally became a nation again.

Every football training session and match should begin with a warm-up in order to improve performance and reduce the risk of injuries. Warm-up in Football provides scientific evidence for the effect of warming up and describes how performance is closely related to muscle temperature. Furthermore, the book explains how the right warm-up prior to a match and at halftime improves the outcome in football. This book provides a basic understanding of the value of warming up and presents a significant number of warm-up programs that can be used whether you are training professional, amateur or youth players. The warm-up programs and exercises are tailored to different training and match situations both on and off the pitch. Highlights from the book include: * New, inspiring and effective ways of warm-up for training. * Warm-up programs before matches. * Warm-up programs to improve performance at the start of the second half. Warm-up in Football is critical reading for all who have an interest in the coaching and physiology of football.

Aims to describe and explain how organizations like football clubs operate, highlighting the best practices within profit driven corporations, which can be adopted by football clubs to operate in a better manner. What are the dynamics of different leagues and other contexts in which football can learn from business? What can business learn from football? And how can business implement these practices? This volume articulates a basic framework using the differences between football in Sweden and in England. It aims at presenting models which are easily applicable in the working place and defines playing styles on the pitch and thought styles in the board room. The author bases his text on his own experience from many years of teaching and consultancy work.

Mistrusted and derided, instrumentalised and adored - the story of football in Tsarist and early Soviet Russia is as wild and intriguing as that of the country itself. In many ways it is the same story... Football in the Land of the Soviets offers a fresh perspective on a momentous chapter in modern political history. Carles Vinas shows how the Russian game was transformed in just a few decades: from a minor emigre pastime, to a modernising driver of society, to a vanguard for Soviet diplomacy and internationalism, and finally, with the first championship of the Soviet League in 1936, into a truly mass phenomenon. So exactly how did a bourgeois game end up as the collective passion of the Soviet working class? And why does it matter? Football in the Land of the Soviets brings these questions to the fore in this thrilling, unorthodox account of the fall of an imperial dynasty and the rise of the world's first socialist state.

Is it possible for football matches or players to help forge a collective European identity? Pyta and Haverman seek to answer this question through a detailed analysis of how football is remembered across the continent. European Football and Collective Memory is the first book to deal with collective memory of football on a continental scale.

This examination of changes taking place in the world of football focuses on its growing commercialization. It covers such topics as fans being becoming shareholders, with a say in the running of the clubs, and the setting-up of a government-sponsored scheme to support shareholder trusts.

An absolutely essential book for every modern football fan, about the development of Premier League tactics, published to coincide with 25 years of the competition. Back in 1992, English football was stuck in the dark ages, emerging from a five-year ban from European competition. The game was physical, bruising and attritional, based on strength over speed, aggression over finesse. It was the era of the midfield general, reducers, big men up front and getting it in the mixer; 4-4-2 was the order of the day. Few teams experimented tactically. And then, almost overnight, it all changed. The creation of the Premier League coincided with one of the most seismic rule changes in football history: the abolition of the back-pass. Suddenly defenders had no-get-out-of-jail-free card, goalkeepers had to be able to field and play the ball and the pace of the game quickened immeasurably. Tactics evolved dramatically, helped by an increased foreign influence. The Mixer is the first book to delve deep into the tactical story of the Premier League, and take a long view of how the game has developed over the last quarter century. From Ferguson's directness to Keegan's relentlessly attacking Newcastle outfit, to Mourinho's cagey, reactive Chelsea, all the way to Ranieri's counter-attacking champions, The Mixer is one of the most entertaining, rich and knowledgeable football books ever written.

Millions watched the 2015 Women's World Cup as the England Lionesses roared in Canada, winning bronze. Their fighting spirit and fabulous skill captured the fascination of the entire country as their campaign unfolded in the small hours of the 2015 summer mornings. On the back of this success, attendances in the FA Women's Super League increased, as interest in women's football accelerated. Top stars talked enthusiastically about the dawn of a new era for women's football. Carrie Dunn spent a year following some of the most famous - and not so famous - female footballers in the country, to see what the future holds for women's football. Can the smaller, lower-profile teams ever compete with the big bucks and big names of the Women's Super League? How are grassroots clubs going to rise to the top when elite divisions of women's football depend on the award of licences? Can the women win a World Cup before the men do? And if they do, what reward and recognition will they get? Roar of the Lionesses tells the tale of an increasingly popular, yet still woefully underrepresented sport.

This book examines France's hosting of the soccer World Cup, held in ten cities in summer 1998. It covers the major socio-economic, political, cultural and sporting dimensions of this global sports event, including bidding for and organizing the Finals, the improvement of sporting and transport infrastructures, marketing, merchandzing and media coverage, policing and security during the month-long competition and building a national team. The analysis of France 98 is set within the sporting context of the recent history and organization of French football (the links between football, money and politics; the sporting public) and more broadly within the French tradition of using major cultural and sporting events to focus world attention of France as a leader in the international community. The book concludes with an evocation of the day-to-day impact of four weeks of sporting festivities, and the lessons to be drawn concerning sport and national identity in an era of increasing economic, political, cultural and sporting globalization.

This book presents an ethnographic description and sociological interpretation of the 'football gatherings' that evolved out of central Romania in the late twentieth century. In the 1980's, Romanian public television did not broadcast football mega-events for economic and political reasons. In response, masses of people would leave their homes and travel into the mountains to pick-up the TV broadcast from neighbouring countries. The phenomenon grew into a social institution with a penetrating force: it produced an alternative social space and a dissident public that pointed to a form of resistance taking place through football. Forbidden Football in Ceausescu's Romania provides an insight into the everyday life under the pressure of dictatorship and, through the special patterns of sports consumption, it tells a social history through small individual stories related to football.

While football has never been more popular, the rapidly-changing cultures of its supporters take an ever greater variety of forms, from the New Lad culture which produced "Three Lions" and "Fantasy Football" to the extremist "ultras" in Italy. Embracing studies of fandom across Europe, this text tackles questions of power, national and regional identities, race and racism, highlighting the changing role of fans in the game. From the "fast painters" of Denmark to the "Sonvolti" of Italy, the book puts Europe's fans centre stage. The opening section deals with issues of power at all levels in the game, from the floating of UK clubs on the Stock Exchange to supporters' demands for greater democracy. Focusing on the issue of racism in British and Italian football, the second section examines the take-over of Partick Thistle and offers a critical account of Euro '96, while the third examines the way national identities are represented in sports coverage. Later chapters focus on the idea of football as the British "national" sport and consider the particular national, religious and club identities of Scottish and Irish fans, while the final section examines the role of the law in regulat

Embracing studies of football fans across Europe, this book tackles questions of power, national and regional identities, and race and racism, highlighting the changing role of fans in the game. Combining new approaches to the study of fan culture with critical assessments of the commercialization of the game, this fascinating book offers a comprehensive and timely examination of the state of European football supporters culture as the game prepares itself for the next millennium.
The contributors, all leading figures in sports studies, consider:
* whether football remains the peoples game, or if it is now run entirely by and for club owners and directors who have overseen the flotation of clubs on the stock exchange, a new focus on merchandising and the escalation of players salaries
* the role of FIFA and UEFA in the struggle for control of world football
* manifestations of racism and extreme nationalism in football, from the English medias xenophobic coverage of Euro 96 to the demonisation of Eric Cantona
* media representations of national identity in football coverage in Germany, France and Spain * the interplay of national, religious and club identities among fans in England, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal and Scandinavia
* the role of the law in regulating football
* the future for supporters at a time when watching the match is more likely to mean turning on the television than going to a football ground.

Soccer is the world's most valuable sport, generating bigger revenues, as well as being watched and played by more people, than any other. It is virtually impossible to understand the business of sport without understanding the football industry. This book surveys contemporary football in unparalleled breadth and depth. Presenting critical insights from world-leading football scholars and introducing football's key organisations, leagues and emerging nations, it explores key themes from governance and law to strategy and finance, as well as cutting edge topics such as analytics, digital media and the women's game. This is essential reading for all students, researchers and practitioners working in football, sport business, sport management or mainstream business and management.

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2022 Craig Bromfield was just 13 years old when Brian Clough, on a whim, took him and his older brother Aaron in. They came from Southwick, a depressed area of Sunderland, where they lived with their abusive stepfather, and from where they longed to escape. After initially meeting Clough while out begging for money, Clough later invited the brothers to stay at his house. From there a relationship formed which would see Craig living with the Cloughs for nine years, where he was a first-hand witness to the many aspects of Clough's character - his gruffness, his humour, his big-heartedness. This is a beautiful, inspirational story, which has never before been told, about Clough's gentleness and capacity for generosity. Discover a very different side to this iconic man, one away from the cameras and the football, which shows him for the person he really was.