English Football History

Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates.

In Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing the global history of tactics, from modern pioneers right back to the beginning when chaos reigned. Along the way, he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the sport and probes why the English, in particular, have 'proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract'.

In 1999, Manchester United completed a unique Treble, winning the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League - but more remarkable than that was how they did it and the stories behind the historic achievement. Matt Dickinson covered the whole story at the time and now in 99 compelling chapters brings it all vividly to life. 1999:The Treble and All That reveals the real stories behind the legend that was sealed with a last-minute scrambled goal from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to win the Champions League.

The 2016/17 season marked the 25th of the Premier League. This book recognises that fact in a way which is factually accurate yet dismissive of reputations and hype. It recognises the achievements of Swindon and Barnsley as much as Manchester United and Chelsea and sneaks in references to borg drones from Star Trek, Oscar Wilde, Nirvana and Red Dwarf alongside analysis of the songs and seasons. Notts County fan Billy Ivory's foreword sets a tone of bitter irony as the story (shocked back to life by Leicester City) is told in unconventional fashion.

The San Francisco 49ers shaped the NFL throughout the 1980s with their unique blend of precision, panache, and preparation. Three decades later, NFL teams are still copying the system and the methods that made the 49ers unlike any other organization in professional sports. Now fans of this dynamic franchise will relive all the action and thrills of 49ers football through the eyes of one of the greatest San Francisco legends of all time: Roger Craig.

Game of My Life: Dallas Cowboys takes you inside the most memorable game of 24 players and of head Coach Jimmy Johnson that earned each of them a place in the history and lore of America’s Team. Each chapter provides colorful detail on the player’s favorite game and its significance to the history of one of the world’s most recognized franchises. Learn how these men joined the Cowboys fraternity.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.

In his latest book, bestselling author Cass Pennant takes an engaging and unparalleled look at some of the most volatile and violent scenes of fans following their football clubs to have unfolded over the past five decades, and examines the lengths to which many will go to put one over their local rivals. Here is history that also examines everything from the changing face of football violence, to who gets involved—and why.

Even in their worst of seasons, the Philadelphia Eagles maintained their tradition of toughness, thanks to great players - from legends like Chuck Bednarik and Steve Van Buren to modern-day heroes. In Tales from the Philadelphia Eagles Sideline, veteran football writer Gordon Forbes profiles the individuals who have thrilled Philadelphia fans since the team’s inception in 1933 through Andy Reid’s last championship contenders during his 14 years as head coach.

No single element has the power to absolutely define the lasting enchantment of Oklahoma football. Decades of great successes and occasional heartbreak have spawned generations of faithful disciples, who treat fall Saturdays like sacred holidays dedicated to their heroes donning the crimson and cream. Tales from the Oklahoma Sooner Sideline provides a glimpse, with a behind-the-scenes perspective, into the traditions surrounding Oklahoma football.

An inside look at the Seattle Seahawks—newly updated! From the hilarious to the surreal, from inside the huddle to inside the broadcast booth, twenty-eight-year Seattle Seahawks veteran Steve Raible takes fans to places they never knew existed. In this newly revised edition of Tales from the Seattle Seahawks Sideline, fans are offered an inside look at life in the locker room and on the sidelines of one of the NFL’s most beloved franchises.

Journeying from Abu Dhabi to Newcastle, and onto London, Paris, Moscow and New York in search of the answers, Miguel Delaney follows the threads that surround the allegations of sportswashing and misconduct in the beautiful game. The result is an exploration of how European football clubs have been bought by some of the world's wealthiest businessmen and state-backed corporations. Drawing on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to key stakeholders, Miguel has produced an all-encompassing exposé of modern footballs highest echelons.

Want to know what really happened? Stan Isaacs knows. He was there! "The Shot Heard Round the World," in 1951. "The Fight of the Century," in 1971. The horror of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Secretariat's legendary win at the 1973 Belmont Stakes. Stan Isaacs saw them all live. Isaacs covered thousands of sports stories in his more than fifty years as a journalist. But ten moments stand out in his memory. Ten Moments That Shook the Sports World offers Isaacs' eyewitness accounts of the events that changed sports history.

MBS is the untold story of how one man fought his way to the summit of power in Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest country in the Middle East and a key ally of the United States. Even in his youth as an obscure prince among the vast Saudi royal family, Mohammed bin Salman nurtured sweeping ambitions to accumulate power and reshape his staunchly conservative kingdom and its interactions with the world.

Catching up with the greatest Aggies players - newly updated! Since the beginning of A & M football, in 1894, the Aggies have produced some of the greatest athletes to ever come out of Texas. Legendary players have plowed their way to greatness while carving their names into the heart of Texas fans under the Aggies banner. But what happened to these juggernauts after the final score was tallied and the game was over? The answer can only be found in this newly updated edition of Texas A & M Where Have You Gone?

From the wounds left by the civil war to the teams’ recent global domination, historian and expert on Spanish football, Sid Lowe lifts the lid on sport’s greatest rivalry. Lowe has spoken to the biggest names and the forgotten heroes who defined their clubs. Men like Alfredo Di Stéfano and Johan Cruyff as well as the only survivor of the most politically charged game in history, the Barcelona striker who knocked Madrid out of the European Cup for the first time ever, and the president who celebrated his club’s defining moment by taking a midnight dip in the Thames.

In the 1970s, Joe DeLamielleure led a Buffalo Bills offensive line affectionately called the Electric Company, because they turned the power up. A starter from the first game of his rookie season in 1973, DeLamielleure led the way to the first 2,000-yard season in NFL history.

The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.

In between Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan there was Joe Namath, one of the very few sports heroes who transcended their game. The son of a Hungarian immigrant, Namath left the steel country of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, for the Deep South, where he played quarterback for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama. Almost four years later, he signed a $427,000 contract with the New York Jets that changed football forever, transforming a crude, violent game into show business.

The pro football season of 1963 was dominated by the unexpected. In April, months prior to the beginning of play, it was revealed that two All-Star players, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, were gambling on the sport and would be suspended from play for at least a year. Even worse, in May, one of the league’s bigger-than-life personalities, Big Daddy Lipscomb, was found dead, with police saying he perished from a heroin overdose, something those who knew him best still dispute.