Now in its fourth edition, The World Cup: The Complete History, is the only book to give a truly encyclopedic guide to the greatest football show on earth. Fully revised and updated in time for the 2014 finals in Brazil, the book is renowned for its remarkable comprehensiveness. Featuring a separate chapter for every competition; every single result of every match; every single player in every team; all qualifying details; and a detailed round-up of the entire progress of each tournament, ...

'GREAT' Independent'TERRIFIC' Guardian'WONDERFUL' Time Out'QUALITY' Mail on Sunday'DEFINITIVE' FourFourTwoWinner of the William Hill Sports Book AwardFeatured in FourFourTwo's list of 'The 10 Best Football Books Ever'Featured in Esquire's 'Best Sports Bo...

THE DEFINITIVE, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BOOK ABOUT FOOTBALL'Football conquered the world with its capacity to astonish, and this is its definitive history' The IndependentThere may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is t...

One of Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time—a history of soccer that "stands out like Pelé on a field of second-stringers" ( The New Yorker).The beautiful game deserves a beautiful book, and Eduardo Galeano—one of Latin America's most acclaimed authors—has written it. From Aztec champions sacrificed to appease the gods, to the goals that were literally scored into wooden posts in Victorian England, to Spain's victory in th...

GOOOAAAAAL! Get ready for a front-row seat at the world's most-watched sporting event--the World Cup.Every four years, thirty-two of the best men's soccer teams from across the globe compete for the title of FIFA World Cup winner. Over one billion people tuned in worldwide to watch the final game of the 2014 competition, making the World Cup the most widely viewed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Summer Olympics! This book takes a look back at what h...

Soccer is much more than just the most popular game in the world. It is a matter of life and death for millions around the world, an international lingua franca. Simon Kuper traveled to twenty-two countries to discover the sometimes bizarre effect soccer can have on politics and culture. At the same time he tried to discover what makes different countries play a simple game so differently. Kuper meets a remarkable variety of fans along the way, from the East Berliner persecuted by the Stas...

What's wrong with Football today? In June 2011, Sepp Blatter was elected - uncontested - as president of Fifa once more. Despite attempts to halt the vote amidst allegations and accusations of corruption, the show went on.As How They Stole The Game, David Yallop's classic expose of the dark heart behind the beautiful game showed when it was first published, Football was rotten from the top down. In the book Yallop reveals the story of João Havelenge, Fifa President from 19...

In 'The World Cup, A Very Peculiar History', author David Arscott tackles the big subjects at the heart of the beautiful game, including how the tournament first kicked off, the dirty tactics used throughout the years and the most memorable managers in the history of football. Filled to the brim with quirky quotes, fantastic facts and surprising statistics, this is the perfect accompaniment to any post-match celebration (or commiseration!) during the season. At its heart 'The World Cup, A ...

As the world’s eyes turn to the World Cup every four years, Aleksandar Hemon's The Matters of Life, Death, and More reminds us of a sad fact: “an average life seldom contains more than twenty World Cups—our games are tragically numbered.”We need to pay attention, to absorb the joy, the skill, the agony, the triumph, the beauty—everything that soccer is. And soccer is, of course, everything.In these pages, Hemon revisits memories of his first World ...

The story of FC Barcelona, written by the author of the internationally acclaimed Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona and updated with a new preface'Burns' examination of the club's fates and fortunes always goes well beyond the game itself … Burns is a brilliant journalist … Unmissable' Total Football'Anyone who really wants to know Barcelona should read Burns. A cracker – part sports book, part travelogue'

An all-encompassing, chronological guide to football's World Cup, one of the world's few truly international events, in good time for the June 2018 kick-off in Russia. From its beginnings in 1930 to the modern all-singing, all-dancing self-styled 'greatest show on Earth', every tournament is covered with features on major stars and great games, as well as stories about some less celebrated names and quirky stats and intriguing essays.Holt's focus is very much on what takes place on...

Foreword by Arsene Wenger, Introduction by David BeckhamSoccer writer and bestselling author of My Side, Tom Watt, talked to the world's top soccer players about growing up and falling in love with the game: Argentina's Lionel Messi and Brazil's Gilberto Silva; England's David James and Scotland's Craig Gordon; Italy's Fabio Cannavaro, Spain's Iker Casillas, and France's Franck Ribéry; South Africa's Benni McCarthy and Nigeria's Nwankwo Kanu; USA's Landon Donovan and Japan's Shunsu...