Goal! covers the history of the beautiful game from its origins in English public schools in the early 19th century to its current role as a crucial element of a globalized entertainment industry. The authors explain how football transformed from a sport at elite boarding schools in England to become a pastime popular with the working classes, enabling factories such as the Thames Iron Works and the Woolwich Arsenal to give birth to the teams that would become the Premier League mainstays known as West Ham United and Arsenal. They also explore how the age of amateur soccer ended and, with the advent of professionalism, how football became a sport dominated by big clubs with big money and with an international audience. There are intense rivalries in soccer, such as that in Glasgow, Scotland, between (Catholic) Celtic and (Protestant) Rangers, and the authors examine closely the social causes that make for such passionate fans. The book also discusses the use of soccer for political purposes, such as in Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain. And - given the long-standing association of soccer as a man's sport and the rise of women's soccer, especially in the United States - the authors look at the gendered history of the world's most popular sport. This book, which will appeal to all connoisseurs of soccer, provides a lens through which to view the social and cultural history of modern Europe. The book is published by The Catholic University of America Press.

The study is a result of a collaborative research project addressing "The Implementation of the New Insolvency Regulation - Improving Cooperation and Mutual Trust". The project was undertaken by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law, the University of Vienna and the University of Milan, and co-funded by the European Union as part of the Commission's Action Grants 2013 for Civil Justice. The focus of the study concerns specific issues of cross-border insolvencies under the recast of the Insolvency Regulation which already has been prepared by a large part of the contributing authors in the Heidelberg-Vienna-Luxembourg Report. The study is comprised of three major topics: 1.The Regulation's extended scope of application, including pre-insolvency and hybrid proceedings, the relationship between Article 1(1) of the Regulation and its Annex A, as well as the interplay between the Insolvency Regulation and the Brussels Ibis Regulation; 2.the cooperation between main and secondary insolvency proceedings, the new instruments, such as "synthetic proceedings", destined to avoid or postpone the opening of secondary proceedings, further the cooperation between administrators and courts of different proceedings as well as protocols to enhance cooperation; 3.insolvencies of groups of companies, with a particular focus on jurisdiction, COMI-migration, "group coordination proceedings" and other instruments of coordination.