Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Football (Soccer)

From the post room to the board room, everyone thinks they can be the manager. But how do you manage outrageous talent? What do you do to inspire loyalty from your players? How do you turn around a team in crisis? What’s the best way to build long-term success? How can you lead calmly under pressure? The issues are the same whether you’re managing a Premier League soccer team or an FTSE 100 company.

In a tiny, decaying aluminum smelting town in southern Tajikistan, a short drive from a raging war zone, Afghanistan take on Palestine in the first Asian qualifier for 2014's World Cup in Brazil. Every player on both teams is risking something by playing: Their careers, their families, even their lives. Thirty-One Nil is the story of how footballers from all corners of the globe begin their journey chasing a place at the World Cup Finals.

Once upon a time football was run by modest local businessmen. Today it is the plaything of billionaire oligarchs, staggeringly wealthy from oil and gas, from royalty, or from murkier sources. But who are these new masters of the universe? Where did all their money come from? And what do they want with our beautiful game? In The Billionaires Club James Montague delves deeper than anyone else has dared, to tell this story for the first time.

Whether it is a manager being sacked, the signing of a new star player, television rights negotiations, player misconduct or multi-million-pound club takeovers, lawyers remain at the heart of all football business dealings. Written by leading Premier League lawyer Daniel Geey, who has dealt with all these incidents first hand, this highly accessible book explores the issues - from pitch to boardroom - that shape the modern game and how these impact leagues, clubs, players and fans.

Professional football in the modern era is played every bit as much in the mind as on the pitch. More and more it's becoming clear that natural talent is nowhere near enough to sustain a career in the modern game. Players need to be smart; not academically but in terms of their thinking. The ones who are dedicated, with mental resilience and a winner's psychology are prospering and will continue to do so as the game evolves. The stupid footballer is dead.

Daniel Gray is about to turn 30. Like any sane person, his response is to travel to Luton, Crewe, and Hinckley. After a decade's exile in Scotland, he sets out to reacquaint himself with England via what he considers its greatest asset: football. Watching teams from the Championship (or Division Two, as any right-minded person calls it) to the South West Peninsula Premier, and aimlessly walking around towns from Carlisle to Newquay, Gray paints a curious landscape forgotten by many.

In the summer of 1966, Peter Chapman was a naive 18-year-old from the Angel in North London. He was just about to enter the world of work, having flunked his A Levels and recently discovered that he would not be fulfilling his dream of becoming a professional footballer at Leyton Orient. As a young man on the brink of adulthood, he found himself in a country also on the brink of huge change - and about to have one of the most significant sporting successes in its history.

In The Title, Scott Murray delivers a lively, cherry-picked history of the country's football narrative through the prism of the old First Division. Rich with humour yet underpinned with solid research, this is a glorious ramble across English football's varied terrain. With as much about Preston, Burnley, Wolves, Portsmouth and West Brom as the likes of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, we learn the less well-known stories the sport has to tell, such as the plight of Glossop - the smallest club to ever play top-flight football.

Growing up Jewish in London with a difficult home life, Jonathan Wilson had plenty of reasons to feel he didn't belong, and one reason to feel certain he did: football. Wilson discovered his love for the game as a young boy; through his adolescence and adulthood and well into his later years it remained an important part of his life.

The Denmark side of the 1980s was one of the last truly iconic international football teams. Although they did not win a trophy, they claimed something much more important and enduring: glory, and in industrial quantities. They were a bewitching fusion of futuristic attacking football, effortless Scandinavian cool, and laid-back living. They played like angels and lived like you and I, and they were everyone’s second team in the mid-1980s.

Barcelona and Real Madrid: two of the most powerful and popular clubs in world football, and one of the world's most bitter sporting rivalries. Going far beyond the boundaries of just sport alone, this is a rivalry at the heart of Spanish life, taking in politics and culture and splitting a country in two. El Clasico gets to the heart of that rivalry, investigating the intrigue, the larger-than-life characters, the key flashpoints and their consequences.

As Mexico has descended into a feudal narco-state - one where cartels, death squads, the army, and local police all fight over billions of dollars in profits from drug and human trafficking - the border city of Jurez has been hit hardest of all. And yet, more than a million people still live there. They even love their impoverished city, proudly repeating its mantra: "Amor por Jurez." Nothing exemplifies the spirit and hope of Juarenses more than the Indios, the city's beloved but hard-luck soccer team.