Let’s flashback to your days in middle school. It’s Friday afternoon and your teacher has just assigned you 20 vocabulary words to do for homework. Homework on a Friday? Yes. So you dust off the old Merriam-Webster Dictionary and have some real fun. Wait, dictionaries aren’t supposed to be fun, right? Cover Art Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing Let’s fast forward to the present day and you crack open a different kind of dictionary, a cool one, to learn more about the
We have to say that we were a little skeptical when we saw that another “math book” involving soccer was coming out. That has been done before and quite well, but this time was an even better experience thanks to David Sumpter’s Soccermatics. Cover Art Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing Touted as a “mathematical adventure through the beautiful game,” this title certainly lives up to and exceeds expectations. The biggest positive for this book is that it is approachable, certainly much more than Soccernomics from Simon
Everyone can agree that the global game is not perfect. There are a lot of issues facing the sport at the current time with corruption, match-fixing, and spoiled millionaire superstars among the biggest. But no problem is more pressing than the trafficking and exploitation of young players. It’s a truly disturbing and sickening issue, one that hasn’t gotten the attention it truly deserves. Cover Art Courtesy of Bloomsbury The Lost Boys: Inside Football’s Slave Trade by Ed Hawkins is an absolutely
David Ager has been a qualified soccer referee for nearly 40 years in addition to being a FA Licensed Instructor and Assessor of Referees. Simply put, he is the perfect choice to write a referee’s manual and he did just that with The Soccer Referee’s Manual from Bloomsbury. Cover Art Courtesy of Bloomsbury Ager did a masterful job creating a reference for referees of all levels. This is great for the beginner who is officiating youth games, but it is also
I had been waiting quite some time to read Daniel Gray’s Hatters, Railwaymen, and Knitters: Travels through England’s Football Provinces. I have to say it was worth the wait and then some, considering it was one of our favorite books in recent memory. It is a unique title, one that is part travel journal and part football commentary. Think Anthony Bourdain meets Martin Tyler or the Travel Channel meets ESPN. You get your footballing fix with
Books about football managers are a dime a dozen these days. It seems like everyone has become an author or the subject of a book. Whether you coached 20 games or 20 years, there is probably a book out there. Cover Art Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing Mike Carson’s The Manager: Inside the Minds of Football’s Leaders is different and better than all the others for several reasons. First, you hear from dozens of elite managers from the EPL. You will
“Soccer and sportswriting at its best” Can the beautiful game survive in the murder capital of the world? Well Robert Andrew Powell transported his life to Juárez, Mexico to find out as he followed the city’s miracle team, the Indios. The club rose to the first division in one of the biggest surprises in Mexican soccer history. They would come to represent hope and goodwill in a place where the body count never seemed to stop. They gave the fans and citizens
