Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul
by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner
Published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson

Here’s an extract from this excellent book:

Modern Footballers

During his 1990s assault on celebrity culture, Paul Kaye creation Dennis Pennis battled his way to the front of the media scrum surrounding Some Like It Hot actor Tony Curtis, ageing gracefully on the arm of a pneumatic blonde, at a film premiere. ‘My name’s Dennis, man,’ he explained, having caught Curtis’ eye. ‘I specialise in making celebrities look ridiculous… but I don’t think I’ll bother this time.’ Immediately spinning on his heel, Pennis leaves the date stifling a giggle while Curtis struggles to fix a recovery stare on the middle distance.

Anyone for Pennis? A worrying number of modern footballers, their eyesight ruined by all those hours looking at the mirror, seem to need a heads up. In 2001, Newcastle forward Carl Cort was ejected from a supermarket after his former wife allegedly pulled the ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ trick while trying to jump the queue. (As it transpired, even Cort’s own manager, Sir Bobby Robson, didn’t know who he was. Asked what Robson called him, Cort’s teammate Shola Ameobi replied: ‘Carl Cort’.)

When the Köln goalkeeper Faryd Mondragón was dropped halfway through the 2010/11 season, he said, ‘I feel as if I have a knife in the back… Jesus was betrayed and deceived, too. ’ Then there’s El Hadji Diouf, a constant source of inadvertent entertainment. ‘You can’t talk about Senegal without talking about El Hadji Diouf,’ he said. And referring to himself in the third person isn’t the worst of it: ‘It’s like if you wanted to understand the history of France without speaking of Charles de Gaulle.’

Who hasn’t at some stage made the obvious connection between one of history’s most important figures and a bloke who had a half-decent World Cup before eventually playing for Bolton Wanderers and Blackburn Rovers?

Not that a bulging trophy cabinet does much for the modern footballer’s charm. More often than not, they exhibit the voluble self-satisfaction of self-made millionaires rather than people who took a lucky dip in the gene pool; Tony Soprano would clench his fists on sight of 99% of them.

Many modern footballers are winners; very few are heroes. And the saddest thing is that most of them wouldn’t know the difference. To contrast Mackay and his brethren with the majority of current footballers is to make chalk and cheese seem like siblings, twins even. After a goalless draw with Denmark in 2004, Italy’s players complained – wearing earnest expressions – that their socks had ruined everything. ‘The thread that these socks were made with is too rough,’ said Christian Panucci.

This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner, published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul
by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner
Published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson

Here’s an extract from this excellent book:

Cashing In

Before football became an ‘integrated leisure experience’ (thank you, FA Blueprint for the Future of Football), deciding to go to the game required nothing more than a pat of your pockets. Keys? Wallet? Right, I’m off.

For a start you could just turn up at the ground and buy your ticket, a forgotten joy for huge numbers of Premier League supporters whose clubs put up more and more hoops for them to jump through, their talk of the strength of demand lingering somewhere between boast and blackmail.

For £10, our sorry-looking Blue Manchester City member gets roughly the same benefits as a member of the Sooty fan club: a card and a badge. It’s an extra £15 for ticket priority. Tottenham fans have to pay £38 for ticket priority for 2011/12, rising to £44 if they don’t want to pay by direct debit.

Arsenal fan Pat Riddell has abandoned his £20, half-season Arsenal membership because it was ‘practically worthless. Despite the fact the club claim there are 3,500 tickets available for every Premier League game, it’s practically impossible to get hold of them.’

In the Bundesliga, clubs set tighter limits on what percentage of the ground can be given over to season ticket holders specifically to create more opportunities for people to turn up on the day and support the club. Maybe it’s not the perfect solution, but like the rest of the German league, it’s done in the name of fairness and affordable access; £30 paid, essentially, to get a login for the online ticketing system seems to be done in the name of making money out of even the thought of buying a ticket.

Much like season ticket waiting lists, for which several clubs now charge. This is, supposedly, to sort the determined fans from the vaguely interested and to ensure the whole thing is properly administered, but there are obvious bonuses for the clubs. Taking £15 from each of the 40,000+ supporters they list in it, Arsenal have banked at least £600,000 for an Excel file.

As well as the cash, clubs can launch fan-screwing charges by saying, glibly: ‘we have thousands of people paying to queue for a ticket.’ In reality, of course, the queues are long enough and the sums are set just low enough that the half-interested will still reach for their pocket. One Liverpool fan who paid £5 to be on the list joined it in 1999, and is still 3,000 places from the front. Another, who joined in 2001, is at No. 5,290. In the meantime the cost of season tickets at Anfield has gone up by as much as £340.

This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner , published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul
by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner
Published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson

Here’s an extract from this excellent book:

FA Cup’s Demise

Few developments in modern football have provoked such undiluted sadness as the demise of the FA Cup. If the spirit of English football could be encapsulated in one thing, it would be the FA Cup: a chance for anyone in the pyramid to have a go and see how fate was feeling. It mattered.

‘The FA Cup final is the greatest single match outside the World Cup final,’ Sir Bobby Robson once said, and time was you’d have been hard pushed to argue. In recent years, however, the FA Cup has lost so much of its lustre that it’s almost impossible to see how it can regain its former status.

In truth, the FA hasn’t always helped matters, increasingly happy for its showpiece to defer to questionable demands. The decision to allow Tottenham and Arsenal to play their 1991 FA Cup semi-final at Wembley was taken because it was felt that no neutral venue could properly accommodate the tie, but it stripped the final of its unique glamour.

In the following years the FA appeared to wrestle with its conscience, playing both semi-finals at Wembley in 1993 (the north London sides met again) and 1994, before switching back to neutral grounds – except for the 2000 semi-finals, which went back to the soon-to-be-demolished Wembley. Once the new stadium was under construction and over budget, the FA announced that all semi-finals would be held there once it was open; once-in-a-lifetime trips don’t pay the bills.

The FA has so far shown itself to be immune to supporters’ distaste at the watering down of a Wembley awayday (or the lunacy of forcing four teams down to London from the north, as happened in 2011), but it can be incredibly obliging, allowing Arsenal to play their UEFA Champions League ‘home’ games at Wembley in 1998 and 1999 so that UEFA’s oversized advertising hoardings didn’t eat into capacity (playing at Wembley virtually doubled it).

The cup itself suffered a symbolic blow in 1999/2000, when the FA pressured Manchester United into pulling out of the competition so that they could play, at the invitation of FIFA, in the inaugural World Club Championship in Brazil. The plan was to butter up Sepp and Co. while they were considering hosts for the 2006 World Cup, but this backfired spectacularly as Blatter later announced that the competition would have no impact on the bidding process. Germany, who didn’t send a team, got the gig.

This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner , published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul
by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner
Published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson

Here’s an extract from this excellent book:

Commercialisation

The old European system was almost perfect. The European Cup was the big one, the UEFA Cup was a kind of alternative prom, and just about the only thing wrong with the Cup Winners’ Cup was the fact that nobody knew where to put the apostrophe, or whether there needed to be one in the first place.

In recent years, however, UEFA have managed to make such a sorry mess of things that European football is a shadow of what it was. The Cup Winners’ Cup has gone, the UEFA Cup has been horribly compromised and the European Cup desecrated. If you haven’t spotted the theme yet, this has all been done in the pursuit of greater and greater revenue, naked commercialism having latterly transformed the last 16 (where did ‘round of 16’ come from?) from a single night of unadulterated Sports Report geekeryoverload into a month-long money-spinning television marathon, and obliterated 55 years of tradition with the move to Saturday-night Champions League finals.

Going by the familiar maxim, if it ain’t broke, slap it about a bit until some coins fall out, UEFA introduced a group stage in place of the quarter- and semi-finals in 1991/92. This would guarantee the big sides a certain number of games, and thus a certain level of revenue, per season, provided they could successfully negotiate the theoretically easy early rounds.

The tournament was then renamed the UEFA Champions League in 1993, with the same structure. A year later they restored the semi-finals but kept the group stage, then in 1994 they moved the group stages back – so that automatic qualifiers would be guaranteed six games, with the top two in each group going through to the quarter-finals.

The group stage is totally against the spirit of the European Cup as it was first conceived. It had been an unseeded knockout competition, which imbued the pre-Christmas matches with all sorts of drama – one false move, and you were done for. You could wait a decade to play in the European Cup and be out by the end of September. As Inter Milan were in 1989/90.

This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner, published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Jumpers for Goalposts: How Football Sold Its Soul
by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner
Published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson

Jumpers for Goalposts is a fascinating and funny reflection on why football has changed so much since the inception of the English Premier League in 1992, and why the old descriptions of “the beautiful game” and “the people’s game” no longer fit. An engaging study of how football has sold its soul – and, perhaps more importantly, whether it can get it back.

Smyth & Turner look at all the things that have stripped the charm and innocence from football, a list that includes grotesque wages and transfer fees, diving, 4-5-1, TV overkill, political correctness – and the lack of decent moustaches.

Here’s an extract from this excellent book:

False Idols

Dave Mackay is perhaps the best example of the strong, silent type so commonplace in football’s past. Mackay was the definitive man’s man, and definitely one of the good guys, an outstanding left-half who was at the heart of the most successful spells in Hearts’, Tottenham’s and Derby’s histories, and a truly honourable man.

He used his clout to put the hurt on opponents but never – never – to seriously hurt them. ‘Mackay was unquestionably the hardest man I ever played against,’ said George Best. ‘And certainly the bravest.’ After suffering a grotesque leg-break at Old Trafford in 1963, which would keep him out for almost two years, Mackay barely grimaced. As he was stretchered off he sat up leaning on his elbow, looking almost bored.

Mackay was a bona fide hero, the likes of which are increasingly rare in football. To some this will seem a piddling point, but it’s quite the opposite.

When American psychologist Abraham Maslow was working on his theory of human motivation in the 1940s (go with it, this almost works), he came up with a hierarchy of needs, at the tip of which was what he called ‘self-actualisation’. ‘What a man can be, he must be,’ Maslow wrote. ‘This need we may call self-actualisation… it refers to the desire for self-fulfilment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to… become everything that one is capable of becoming.’

Maslow didn’t mention heroes directly, but they’re an implicit part of the process: role models supply invaluable life lessons, idealise certain behaviours, and shape our ambitions – help to shape, that is, what we believe and hope we are capable of becoming.

For the sake of avoiding an embarrassing tête-à-tête with outraged psychologists in our local Wetherspoon’s, we should add that Maslow would probably expect the properly self-actualised person to eventually transcend these role models, and focus first and foremost on his/her own strengths and weaknesses. But you get the point: Bonnie Tyler isn’t the only one holding out for a hero.

This stuff doesn’t stop being important once you’ve solemnly removed the last page of SHOOT from your bedroom wall, put all your worldly possessions into the back of a Renault 5 and left home; fans of all ages invest a staggering amount of time and emotion in their team, the men they consider heroes.

When you consider how much bronze has gone into immortalising yesterday’s heroes – Johnny Haynes and Bobby Moore stand over sculpted footballs on opposite sides of London, Billy Wright looms large as life outside Molineux, Tom Finney lunges towards the ball in a Deepdale fountain; the list goes on – it’s nonsense to say that as adults and cynics we don’t care about the cut of a man’s jib.

When Blackpool unveiled a gigantic 9 ft statue of Jimmy Armfield in May 2011, manager Ian Holloway joked that ‘there can’t be any bronze left in the world’, but called it ‘a proud moment for everybody at the club’ and added: ‘I’ve given them some half-decent players who might in 40 years’ time be revered themselves.’

It’s not a complicated recipe – take a great and dedicated player, bake in the heat of fans’ adoration for a few decades, ready plinth – but Holloway’s appreciation for its essential ingredients is disappointingly rare in a world where Manchester United winger Nani reportedly hangs his medals on the life-size marble sculpture of himself that stands in the middle of his living room.

Just as words like ‘celebrity’ have rapidly depreciated thanks to giddy overuse, the currency of the football ‘hero’ has suffered the effects of quantitative easing – the modern habit of clubs celebrating any half-decent footballer as a hero, no matter how incongruous the label and his conduct.

This is an extract from Jumpers for Goalposts by Rob Smyth and Georgina Turner, published 1st December, £11.99 paperback original, Elliott & Thompson.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Title: We Ate All The Pies: How Football Swallowed Britain Whole
Author: John Nicholson
Publisher: Biteback (19th August 2010)
ISBN-10: 1849540675
ISBN-13: 978-1849540674
RRP: £9.99

Author John Nicholson has a problem – the kind of which, should it concern methamphetamine or alcohol, would probably have seen him forced to attend bi-weekly, court-ordered rehab sessions by now. It becomes quickly apparent whilst reading We Ate All The Pies that he is utterly, rabidly and cripplingly addicted to football along with all of it’s many facets and foibles.

Nicholson is the acerbic scribe responsible for the ‘Very Northern Mind’ column over on football365.com and, as anyone who is aware of his work will testify, he isn’t exactly backward in coming forward – although he does so with such an overt and coercive passion that I defy you not to find yourself reading the last few chapters aloud in a gruff Teesside vernacular, such is his compelling sway.

In We Ate All The Pies, Nicholson sets about trying to fathom why it is that Britain continues to endure such a deep-seated love affair with a game that is often ‘so boring it can make your eyes melt’, as well as also taking a look at the myriad of different roles it fulfils within our society at large – doing so by refracting his theories through his own experiences growing up, alongside football, in the straight-laced industrial sprawl of the north east of England during the 1970s.

As well as wryly covering some of the more manifest elements of football’s cultural sub-sphere (drinking, anger, identity, social class, media etc.), Nicholson also examines many oft-neglected aspects of the game’s minutiae, revelling as he extracts great reels of detailed insight from that which, without the application of a keen mind and an impressively vivid memory, could otherwise be construed as rather mundane or superfluous subjects.

Nicholson looks at how sticker collecting, gaudy replica shirts, over-priced matchday ‘cuisine’, football’s idiosyncratic lexicon and the role that Jimmy Hill‘s face played in the art of delaying orgasms during the early 70′s served to eternally bind him, and by-proxy us, with the beautiful game.

The accompanying press release proclaims Nicholson to be an exponent of the gonzo school of sports journalism although you get the impression that this may just be part of the usual bow wave of PR guff that accompanies any release, rather than any self-proclamation on the author’s part.

However, the book does read like an effortless, one-sided conversation and the stream-of-consciousness witticisms, tangential vignettes and the quintessentially British self-degradation amply serve to balance out all of the balls-to-the-wall theorising and conjecture.

If you’re looking for a book that is willing to simultaneously tackle head-on some of the foulest, most corrupt elements that are currently threatening to undermine the integrity of the modern game, as well as talk you through the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon of throwing up an undigested fried egg in rigorous detail – you could do much worse.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

In celebration of England’s passionate supporters, England ’Til I Die (compiled by David Lane) reveals the funny, the absurd, the emotional, the peculiar and unbelievable that is part and parcel of being a die-hard England fan.

Following England home and away has become a way of life for many people. Fans experience moments of elation and exhilaration, which become landmarks in their lives. But as we all know, there are also the low points of despair and disappointment [in England's case, the countless unsuccessful penalty shoot-outs] when it feels all hopes and dreams have been dashed.

Players and managers come and go, but it is the loyal fans who are always there, always supporting and waiting for the day that England bring the World Cup back.

With the World Cup taking place in South Africa this June, England ’Til I Die is perfectly timed as Football Fever will once again sweep the nation. There will be other football books brought to market, but none will be written by the fans, for the fans. England ’Til I Die really does set itself apart.

As readers will discover, some fans go to extraordinary lengths and sacrifices to follow the national side! A welcome break from distilled media analysis, here are the real England stories, told by real England fans.

England ‘Til I Die (£12.99) is out in stores now, and you can also buy it through Amazon. You can also follow England ‘Til I Die online.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Buy: “World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics” by Steven D. Stark and Harrison Stark
ISBN: 978-0-9819289-4-4

“It’s been said that Americans learn about world affairs and geography through wars; the rest of the world learns through soccer.”

Co-author Steven Stark as quoted in the Introduction. That sentence aptly summed up a book which was written for an American audience but will entertain and educate readers regardless of their nationality.

Comprehensive Guide to World Cup History

A father and son authoring team have provided a mini-encyclopedia of World Cup country profiles, facts, history, humor, politics, quotes, statistics and trivia. This book is extremely detailed, well-written and organized for fast reference as you watch the competition. The authors interject doses of humor to complement numerous quotes and eighty years of historical data. The sheer volume of research should satisfy the most fervent supporter.

Detailed Team Profiles

Individual chapters are dedicated to all 32 participating countries. The Starkes detail each team from strikers back to the keepers along with the managers. Two interesting features were small individual maps and country facts courtesy of the CIA Fact Book and other sources. If you thought that it would take a doctor to decipher the team selection of Diego Maradona, you will learn that Argentina has one psychologist or psychiatrist for every 1000 residents. Did you know that dueling was legal in Paraguay if both participants are registered blood donors? Italy and Paraguay will be dueling in Group F. Paolo Maldini came within one game from dueling against his father, Cesare, who was the Paraguayan manager, at World Cup 1998. You will also find an interesting quote about each team. My favorite came from Frenchman and former Manchester United legend, Eric Cantona:

“I think that Raymond Domenech is the worst coach in French football since Louis XVI.”

The worst or not, Mr. Domenech is one of the longest serving national team managers along with Ricki Herbert of New Zealand, Morten Olsen of Denmark and Otto Rehhagel of Greece.

Altitude and Winter Weather in South Africa

A concise two page section detailed all 10 stadium venues in South Africa and a chapter discussed climate and altitude in specific cities. Altitude has not been a factor since 1986 in Mexico and we haven’t experienced a Southern hemisphere (winter) World Cup since Argentina in 1978. Both of those facets were emphasized during an intriguing historical and present day analysis. One quote by the authors stood out:

“Players run far more in 90 minutes than they did in the past. More than 10 kilometers (or six miles) a game. It’s the equivalent of an NBA (National Basketball Association) player having to go up and down the floor 175 times without timeouts or substitutions. In Johannesburg where the oxygen level is about 20% less per breath than at sea level, that could make a huge difference.”

The authors quoted BBC Football expert, Tim Vickery, in this section. He noted that ball-possession sides such as Brazil and Spain would keep running to a minimum to deal with the rigors of altitude. According to the authors, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, Polokwane and Rustenberg will pose the most challenges in terms of altitude and weather. On 12 June, England meets the USA in Rustenberg at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium almost one mile above sea level.

Whether in front of your television, computer screen or in South Africa itself for the competition, “World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics,” will be a good companion and reference source.

“World Cup 2010: The Indispensable Guide to Soccer and Geopolitics” by Steven D. Stark and Harrison Stark

My Rating: *****

About the Authors

Steven D. Stark, a former world sports columnist for the Montreal Gazette and the author of three previous books and one e-book, has been a commentator for CNN, National Public Radio, and the Voice of America, where his role was to try to interpret American culture to the rest of the world.

Harrison Stark, currently a student at Brown University, has been a ball boy for Fulham FC, where his claim to fame was that he was once hit by a bottle thrown by an opposing fan.

Follow the build-up to the 2010 World Cup and the action as it happens on the book’s website: http://worldcupsoccervoice.blogspot.com/.

About the Reviewer

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He writes the World Football Commentaries blog. He has written for AC Cugini Scuola Calcio (Italian soccer school), Football Media, Keeper Skool and Soccerlens.

The publisher at Soccerlens and the reviewer were not compensated for this book review. We would like to thank Ginger Bock, Marketing Representative, at Cardinal Publishers Group for her kind assistance.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Buy: “Soccer Dribbling and Feinting” and “Soccer Passing and Ball Control” by Thomas Dooley and Christian Titz
ISBN: 978-184126-301-4 and 978-184126-300-7

Ruud Gullit during his brief management spell at the Los Angeles Galaxy made the following comment in an interview with the Times of London on April 27, 2008:

“In the United States they play soccer in the schools and then college and they are 20 or 21 years old and they are coming to me, having been coached straight out of a book. None of these coaches has played at any kind of high level.”

If Mr. Gullit read either of these books, he might have a much different opinion. Thomas Dooley was a former Bundesliga star who later featured for the US National team at the 1994 and 1998 World Cups. Mr. Dooley also played for two Major League Soccer sides. Christian Titz, also a native of Germany, has significant coaching experience both in Germany and the United States. Both men founded Dooley Soccer University and decided to share their knowledge and passion in written form with these highly instructional guides to dribbling, feinting, passing and ball control.

Detailed Diagrams

The authors provide extremely detailed diagrams against a green pitch background. These images are placed at the bottom right side pages with the corresponding instructions on left side pages. This format was organized and consistent to enable coaches to show their players a visual image one technique at a time. For example, “Dribbling Instep/Outstep and Laces.” Or “Passing Through Opponents.” Coaches could copy a technique to provide their players with homework. The visualization aspect will be beneficial to assist with physical muscle memory exercises. Especially with younger players who have grown up with the Internet and like to learn by imagery.

Training by Skill Levels

Information is provided in a concise, methodical and comprehensive manner. “Training Aspects” are provided for every technique. One area that I liked was specific age levels. This will help inexperienced coaches understand what works better for different age groups. The other interesting feature was time durations for each technique. The authors teach and simulate game conditions. For example, some techniques last for 5, 10 or 25 minutes. These techniques allow players to use the game itself as the teacher with the multitude of detailed practical situations.

Both of these books will make excellent additions to your soccer and world football library regardless of your coaching or playing level.

“Soccer Dribbling and Feinting” by Thomas Dooley and Christian Titz
“Soccer Passing and Ball Control” by Thomas Dooley and Christian Titz

My Rating: *****

About the Authors

Thomas Dooley, former captain of the US national team, is guaranteed to be highly competent in his sport. He has played with teams such as Columbus Crew and the New York Metro Stars. He led the US Team in the 1994 and 1998 World Championship. After his active career as a professional player, he founded a soccer academy in Orange County, CA called OC Kings and started the American Soccer Tennis Organization (ASTO).

The soccer teacher Christian Titz is responsible for management and implementation of sport goals at the Dooley Soccer University. He is always setting new heights in training or in games so the children can reach the highest level possible. In his position as player in clubs he has gained valuable experience and puts this to use as head coach of children’s teams in the US and Europe.

About the Reviewer

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He writes the World Football Commentaries blog. He has written for AC Cugini Scuola Calcio (Italian soccer school), Football Media, Keeper Skool and Soccerlens.

Credits

The publisher at Soccerlens and the reviewer were not compensated for this book review. We would like to thank Ginger Bock, Marketing Representative, at Cardinal Publishers Group for her kind assistance.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

Buy: “Food Guide for Soccer: Tips & Recipes from the Pros” by Gloria Averbuch and Nancy Clark, MS, RD
ISBN: 978-1-84126-288-8

“You are about to embark on one of the most wonderful aspects of your, or your child’s, soccer career. Understanding the principles of good sports nutrition (which is good nutrition for life), it is completely reasonable to expect a player and team to discover a whole new level of play, and of excellence.”

Authors Gloria Averbuch and Nancy Clark quoted in the Forward.

This extremely organized, entertaining, educational and practical book is themed around soccer nutrition for female athletes; however, readers from all backgrounds will benefit from its excellent dietary advice. Both authors have significant experience with health and nutrition at the amateur, university and professional level. If your knowledge about sports nutrition was limited before reading the book, you will receive a significant introduction about a vital topic.

Well-Organized with Quick References

This is a well-organized book that was compiled for easy future reference. There is a good blend of charts, images, quotes, text and website links. I liked how the authors color-coded dietary charts with a green background and food recipes in orange. They also provided separate sections for what to eat before and after practices, during travel and competitive games. Tips from professional players enhance the practical value of this guide.

Educational without Complications

The authors presented significant nutritional suggestions and standards; however, the information is displayed in easy-to-understand sections. They teach that eating healthfully doesn’t need to be expensive or time-consuming. For example, making the point that one banana and a glass of orange juice meet the daily U.S. recommended requirement for 2 cups of fruits. Or that the proper mineral-rich cereal can jump-start your day. Other interesting tips were how to eat a healthy lunch at fast food restaurants and the nutritional value of pasta sauces. Common sense examples such as these will be very helpful for parents, children and even professional athletes.

Knowledge of Professional Players

One area that stood out to me was the in-depth knowledge and appreciation of proper nutrition by the WPS players. Several were quoted in the book. For example, French international Sonia Bompastor of the Washington Freedom:

“I take iron because I’m anemic and I need that iron to perform on the field… A lot of soccer players need to take iron.”

Wide Variety of Recipes

The book contains over 40 recipes designed by WPS players from around the globe. From “Game Day Pancakes” by Karina LeBlanc of Canada to “Feijoada” by Rosana from Brazil and “Japanese-style Hamburgers” by Aya Miyama, you can experience the international flavor (no pun intended) of Women’s Professional Soccer.

My favorite? “Pasta with Chicken” by the all-time international caps leader, Kristine Lilly from the USA.

Photographs

A wide variety of high-quality images accompany each chapter. The pictures demonstrate the diversity of nutritional food groups and world-class players who compete in Women’s Professional Soccer.

For your next practice, game or road trip, pack the “Food Guide For Soccer: Tips & Recipes from the Pros.” It will provide you with the winning nutritional edge for increased athletic performance.

“Food Guide for Soccer: Tips & Recipes from the Pros” by Gloria Averbuch and Nancy Clark, MS, RD

My Rating: *****

Suggested Retail Prices

USA: $18.95
UK: £14.95
Europe: €18.95

About the Authors

Gloria Averbuch is an award-winning author of 12 previous books on sports, soccer, health and fitness. Averbuch is the Director of Public Relations/Marketing for Sky Blue FC, one of the seven founding franchises of Women’s Professional Soccer. Nancy Clark MS, RD, a trusted and internationally respected sports nutritionist, is a Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics, with a private practice at Healthworks in Chestnut Hill , MA. She is nutrition consultant for the Boston Breakers of Women’s Professional Soccer.

About the Reviewer

Steve Amoia is a freelance writer, editor and translator from Washington, D.C. He writes the World Football Commentaries blog. He has written for AC Cugini Scuola Calcio (Italian soccer school), Football Media, Keeper Skool and Soccerlens.

Credits

The publisher at Soccerlens and the reviewer were not compensated for this book review. We would like to thank Ginger Bock, Marketing Representative, at Cardinal Publishers Group for her kind assistance.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News