I have an 10-year-old cousin who is totally crazy about soccer. (Observing and discussing it, not playing it.) He wants to grow up to be a talent scout for the Costa Rican national team, or something like that.
So I’d like to get him two books for Hannukah:
(1) A massive in-depth collection of every conceivable piece of soccer statistic and trivia you could ever think of, covering World Cups and also things like the English Premiere League.
(2) A prose book of descriptions of great moments in soccer history… “10 greatest games ever played” or “20 greatest moments in soccer history” or something of that sort.
He’s quite bright for a 10-year-old, so books written for adults should be fine, although obviously not “the greatest sex scandals in soccer history”.
Any recommendations? (I’m assuming I may have to order from amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com to get a good selection.)
Thanks!
I don’t have one that exactly matches either of your categories, but in the absence of any other suggestions I do know that Inverting The Pyramid, a history of football tactics, has garnered very good reviews lately. I think it’s quite broad-ranging, too, so despite being written by an English footballer, it’s not narrowly focused on English tactics (it’d be more of a pamphlet were that the case).
Good thing I previewed before posting! Since you have already bought some books it makes my post redundant. I don’t think you’ve bought what you described in your OP though.
An in-depth collection of every statistic would take dozens of books. Back in the 50s I had a such a book, or to be more precise I had 8 books. Even then it was a bit sketchy on pre ww1football.
For example look at this book covering 2007 http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=440732&root=reviews&. Over a thousand pages for just one year.
If you do find yourself searching for something try using “football” as an alternative to “soccer” there’ll be more choice.
And by the way it’s the Premier League, none of that arty farty French stuff here.
Oops, sorry I meant to delete my original post and leave the first two lines.
I did like the look of the book in the link though.
Last time I bought football accoutrements for a younger relative (shinguards for my 11-year-old cousin), it turned out he’d been dropped from the school team two weeks previously. D’oh.
Yeah, but I think the two I got are a good mix. I’ve seen US publications which are phone-book-sized super-thin-page super-tiny-print things which are massive baseball stats collections. I’m sure such a thing exists for football, but couldn’t find it.
I did. Although, oddly, when I searched on amazon.co.uk for “Football” in books, one of the top hits I got was for a book about US College Football. Weird.
