The best-selling collection of soccer facts, stats and stories is back for another fully updated edition! World Soccer Records 2025 offers lively, fun and fascinating facts and stats from the world of international soccer. Focusing on all the major world and continental tournaments, national team records, exceptional matches and the stars who made it all possible, this exhaustively researched annual tells the stories of these key moments and the players and coaches behind them. This new edition includes updated stats and facts for all recent major tournaments, awards and international teams. You'll also find the latest record-breaking achievements of more than 35 featured nations from around the world, including a sidebar with key stats, as well as updates and records for most of the other 170+ FIFA members.

The Official History of the FIFA World Cup Book is an authoritative and comprehensive review of the 20 FIFA World Cups to have taken place since the inaugural tournament in 1930. Packed with stunning photography, exclusive interviews of the biggest stars of each edition, unique official documents and statistics, it is a must read for any football fan around the world. No other event in the sporting world can rival the glamour, impact, fervent following and universal appeal of the FIFA World Cup. This unique book tells the stories behind the scenes, as well as analyzing the most famous incidents. It features the biggest stars and many previously unknown ones too, all with a unique worldwide point of view.

FIFA World Soccer Records 2022 offers a unique presentation of facts and stats from the world of international soccer. Focusing simultaneously on all the major world and continental tournaments, national team records, exceptional matches and the stars who made it all possible, this exhaustively researched book tells the stories of these key moments and some of the tales behind them. Updated stats and facts for all recent major tournaments, awards and international teams. The latest record-breaking achievements of more than 35 featured nations from around the world, including a sidebar with key stats, as well as updates and records for most of the other 170+ FIFA members.

The Unofficial Football World Championships is probably the most exciting football competition on Earth. Its amazing story involves legendary teams and footballing minnows, classic finals and forgotten friendlies, celebrated players and unsung heroes. An alternative soccer history, Unofficial Football World Champions reveals international football's real champions and offers up a fresh perspective on the greatest game in the world. This fourth edition is fully updated for 2018.

This book examines the development of sport sponsorship and its impact on global public health. It argues that sport governing bodies should not continue to treat fans solely as consumers, and that a more ethical approach should be taken to sport sponsorship. Drawing on research from sport studies, marketing and public health, the book presents a brief history of advertising and marketing in sport, including the importance of tobacco in the development of sport sponsorship, before exploring key aspects of the contemporary relationship between sport and corporate sponsors, including mega-events, digital technologies and brand engagement. It offers an in-depth case study of sponsorship in the English Premier League – one of the world’s most successful sporting properties – before considering how sport might be better regulated, now and in the future, to better protect the interests of fans and other stakeholders from a health perspective. The book features a number of insightful images showcasing sport sponsorship in connection with tobacco, mega-events, alcohol, junk food and drink, and gambling over the years. Addressing a topical and hugely important issue, this is important reading for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in sport business and management, the ethics of sport, physical activity and health, event studies, marketing or public health.

Beach Soccer Histories is the first text to consider the sport as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon, to define its traditions, and present leading research on the development and significance of football played on sand. Following a period of expansive, rapid growth, beach soccer is an internationally governed professional sport, which has come a long way from its origins in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s. The sand-based variant is distinguished from football by a range of factors, including the dramatic impact of the playing surface. Yet, the game has undergone very little academic scrutiny. This research adopts and adapts qualitative methods related to oral history and football studies, including extensive archival research, semi-structured interviews, and textual and thematic analyses. As it looks beneath the game’s contemporary reach, it considers origins, organisations – including FIFA’s influence – and the beach cultures that underpin its sporting and historical development. This the most comprehensive exploration of beach soccer and a century of its existence. Beach Soccer Histories examines the game’s historical development, critical moments and movements in its progress, successes and contentions, and its contemporary state of play with a view to deepening and advancing our understanding of the game.

The FIFA World Cup is arguably the biggest sporting event on earth. This book is the first to focus on the business and management of the World Cup, taking the reader from the initial stages of bidding and hosting decisions, through planning and organisation, to the eventual legacies of the competition. The book introduces the global context in which the World Cup takes place, surveying the history and evolution of the tournament and the geopolitical background against which bidding and hosting decisions take place. It examines all the key issues and debates which surround the tournament, from governance and corruption to security and the media, and looks closely at the technical processes that create the event, from planning and finance to marketing and fan engagement. Analysis of the Women’s World Cup is also embedded in every chapter, and the book also considers the significance of World Cup tournaments at age-group level. No sport business or management course is complete without some discussion of the FIFA World Cup, so this book is essential reading for any student, researcher or sport business professional looking to fully understand global sport business today.

Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World charts the growth of the game in each major footballing country, from the very first kick to the first World Cup in 1930. Football's global spread from muddy playing fields to colossal, purpose-built stadiums is a story of class, race, gender and politics. Along the way, you'll meet the people who established football around the world and discover the challenges they faced. Featuring interviews with leading historians, journalists, club chairmen and descendants of club founders and players, Origin Stories tells the fascinating country-by-country tale of how football put down its roots around the world. The sport's early growth includes a cast of English aristocrats and 'Scotch professors', French tournament pioneers, international merchants, keen students, raucous rebels and more. Origin Stories shows that football's early development was a truly global team effort.

Calling all soccer buffs: you can't miss this one and only official guide to the world's biggest, most popular sports event Packed with photos, it offers expert analysis of each team, its star players, and its prospects in the finals, along with information on the stadiums and host cities. Fans can fill in the tournament progress chart as the games advance whether they're the lucky ones watching live in Brazil or following them at home."

This book explores football culture, organisation and development in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway. These countries represent an important case study in sport culture, policy and management, being shaped by unique traditions in their civil society and in social welfare and public policy. The first part of the book explores the development path of football in each country, looking at how football arrived in Scandinavia and how it has been transformed from a voluntary civic activity into a professional sport while becoming closely attached to the global football system. The second part highlights key issues – including historical, contemporary and critical aspects – across three themes: professionalisation and changing practices; equality and gender; and supporters, audiences and culture. Written by a team of authors with a blend of experience as academics and practitioners in football, the book traces the contours of the distinctive Nordic model that occupies a prominent position in the global football system. Shining fascinating new light on the relationship between football and wider society, this is invaluable reading for students and researchers interested in football, sport management, sport policy, or the history, culture or sociology of sport and for anyone involved in the game.