Get an inside look at training for the world’s most popular sport. Soccer Anatomy, Second Edition, shows you what it takes to run faster, resist challenges from opponents, be stronger in the tackle, jump higher, delay fatigue, and prevent injury. In this second edition, elite-level soccer coach Adam Sayers joins Donald Kirkendall—one of the most recognized experts in soccer training and injury prevention—to bring you more than 85 soccer-specific exercises designed to help build and strengthen the athlete. Full-color anatomical illustrations take you inside each exercise to show you which muscles are involved and how they are fundamentally linked to soccer performance. Strength-building exercises are arranged anatomically: by core, back and hips, legs, shoulders and neck, chest, arms, and legs. Each exercise includes clear step-by-step descriptions. Variations allow you to target specific areas or to modify the exercise based on your age, experience, and training goals. You’ll also find exercises and advice to help minimize common soccer-related injuries to the head, knees, hips, groin, and thigh and calf muscles, along with exercises taken from FIFA’s warm-up program. Developed by FIFA’s Medical Assessment and Research Centre, the program “The 11+” is proven to reduce the most common injuries. For coaches and players looking to improve skill and build strength and endurance on the pitch, let the authoritative advice and expert instruction in Soccer Anatomy be your go-to training tool!

"This collection explores soccer's development in the United States as waves of immigrants arrived and America's cities began to industrialize and become major cultural hubs in the late-nineteenth century. While America is largely known today as one of the few countries in which soccer is not its primary sport, this collection aims to shed light on the US's little-known soccer history by focusing on immigration and immigrant stories playing out in major American cities"--

Rediscovering soccer's long history in the U.S. Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the beautiful game's transformation into a truly international sport. A multilayered look at one game’s place in American life, From Football to Soccer refutes the notion of the U.S. as a land outside of football history.

Now in a fully revised and updated fourth edition, Science and Soccer is still the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to the physiology, biomechanics and psychology behind the world's most popular sport. Offering important guidance on how science translates into practice, the book examines every key facet of the sport, with a particular focus on the development of expert performers. The topics covered include: • anatomy, physiology, psychology; sociology and biomechanics; • principles of training; • nutrition; • physical and mental preparation; • playing surfaces and equipment; injury • decision-making and skill acquisition; • coaching and coach education; • performance analysis; • talent identification and youth development. Science and Soccer: Developing Elite Performers is a unique resource for students and academics working in sports science. It is essential reading for all professional support staff working in the game, including coaches at all levels, physiotherapists, conditioning specialists, performance analysts, club doctors and sport psychologists.

This book focuses on the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to Major League Baseball (MLB). DEA is a nonparametric linear programming model that is used across academic disciplines. In sports economics, authors have applied the technique primarily to assess team and/or managerial efficiency. The basis for performance analysis is economic production theory, where it is assumed that baseball can be viewed as a production process whereby inputs (player quality measures) are transformed into outputs (wins, attendance). The primary advantage that DEA has over more traditional regression based approaches is the ability to handle multiple inputs and multiple outputs. Further, the approach is nonparametric and hence, does not require a priori specification of the production function. The book develops the theory of DEA in the context of a production environment. A focal point is the assessment of technical and cost efficiency of MLB teams. It is shown that previous frontier applications that measure efficiency provide biased results given that the outcome of a game is zero-sum. If a team loses a game due to inefficiency, another team wins a lost game. A corrected frontier is presented to overcome this problem. Free agent salary arbitration is analyzed using a dual DEA model. Each free agent's contract zone is identified. The upper and lower bounds, representing the player's and team's perspective of value, respectively, are estimated. Player performance is estimated using a modified DEA model to rank order players based on multiple attributes. This model will be used to evaluate current Hall of Fame players. We provide arguments for other players who are deserving of membership. We also use our measure of performance and evaluate age-performance profilers for many ball players. Regression analysis is used to identify the age of peak performance. The method is used to evaluate some of the all-time greats. We also use the method to analyze admitted and implicated steroid users. The results clearly show that performance was enhanced. This book will provide appropriate theoretical models with methodological considerations and interesting empirical analyses and is intended to serve academics and practitioners interested in applying DEA to baseball as well as other sports or production processes. >

"American sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for progressive cultural, social, and political possibility within the United States. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sport largely avoids any political stance in other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer-a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity even as it struggles to establish major league status-a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality. As a rhetorician who engages with both critical theory and culture, John Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, class, and the logic of neoliberal values. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility, and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how these cultural, social, and political possibilities are closed off or constrained can provide valuable insights into American culture and values. In Soccer's Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent case studies: the equal pay dispute between the US women's national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as "underdogs" despite the nation's quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. While there is a growing bookshelf of titles on soccer and a growing number on American soccer, Soccer's Neoliberal Pitch is the first and only book-length analysis of soccer through a rhetorical lens. This book is a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms. It is, independent of its bona fides, an engaging and enjoyable read for the soccer fan and the soccer-curious"--

Talent development pathways in youth soccer provide opportunities for young players to realise their potential. Such programmes have become increasingly popular throughout governing bodies, professional clubs, and independent organisations. This has coincided with a rapid rise in sport science literature focused specifically on optimising player development towards expertise. However, the decreasing age of recruitment, biases in selection, inconsistencies in the language used, underrepresented populations, and large dropout rates from pathways have magnified the potential flaws of existing organisational structures and settings. Moreover, despite both the professionalisation of talent development pathways and growing research attention, we still know little about the characteristics that facilitate accurate recruitment strategies into pathways and long-term development outcomes. Talent Identification and Development in Youth Soccer provides an all-encompassing guide for both researchers and practitioners by gathering the existing literature to help better understand the current context of this discipline. Chapters are contributed by a team of leading and emerging international experts, examining topics such as technical, tactical, physical, psychological, social, activities and trajectories, career transitions, relative age effects, creativity, and genetics, with each chapter offering important considerations for both researchers and practitioners. With a dual emphasis on both theory and practice, this book is an important text for any student, researcher, coach, or practitioner with an interest in talent identification, talent development, youth soccer, soccer coaching, or expertise and skill acquisition.

In this book, over 40 of the world’s leading practitioners working in elite soccer— over 6 continents—share advanced knowledge of the environment as well as a scientific understanding of the game and players. This book explores those traits at an intricate level through shared experiences of some of the best performance coaches working in elite soccer. The content in this book is derived from practical and evidence-based concepts that have been applied at the elite level. Uncovering the coaching strategies as well as contemporary issues in elite soccer, this comprehensive textbook illustrates what it takes to thrive as a performance coach at the top level. Collaborating with the industry leaders in soccer, the chapters address a myriad of topics such as: • the multiple roles and responsibilities; • youth development; • strength and conditioning application; • nutrition and recovery strategies; • tracking and monitoring fitness and fatigue; • powerful communication methods and staff cohesion; and • return to play and injury prevention strategies Peak Performance for Soccer is essential reading for all coaches and practitioners, at any level, who work in soccer. Alex Calder is the head of sports science with the Houston Dynamo, competing in Major League Soccer (MLS). He is an accredited level 3 elite coach with the Australian Strength and Conditioning Association (ASCA), as well as holding accreditations through the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association (CSCCa). Adam Centofanti is currently the head of fitness for the Seattle Sounders FC, having previously served as the head of academy strength and conditioning for Houston Dynamo FC. Formally with Melbourne City FC, Adam held various roles with the club including conditioning coach/sports scientist in the academy sector as well as overseeing the women’s performance program, achieving multiple championships.