Women’s Football in a Global, Professional Era is an important addition to discussions on sport as work for women, and an essential reference point for students, researchers and sports professionals interested in the debates around the professionalisation of women’s football internationally.

The global increase in viewership of and participation in women’s football means that, to continue with this growth, we need to appreciate the specific scientific and health issues that determine successful performance for women. Women’s Football provides a thorough, yet straightforward and accessible, analysis of the key physiological, biomechanical and social-psychological issues that can be applied to achieve women’s footballing development. This cutting-edge text puts developing elite women footballers at the front and centre of its core aim, through the delivery of evidence-based, scientific information focusing on best practice. As such, each chapter is co-written, where possible, by a scholar and a practitioner or player (e.g., coach, footballer), meaning the scientific principles and research presented within are translated clearly into practice. Women’s Football is essential reading for anyone who is involved with the game, including footballers themselves, as well as strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, medics, nutritionists, sport psychologists, sports scientists, coaches, coach developers, technical directors, general managers, governing body personnel and club owners, from grassroots to elite level. The book is also invaluable to students and academics in sport and exercise, who are studying this topic.

A complete history of women’s football in Great Britain, from its Victorian games beginning in 1881 to 2022 and planning for the Euro Finals. In The History of Women’s Football, author Jean Williams demonstrates how women’s football began as a professional sport, and has only recently returned to these professional roots in the UK. This is because there was a fifty-year Football Association ‘ban’ on women playing on pitches affiliated to the governing body in England. The other British associations followed suit. Why was women’s football banned in 1921? Why did it take until 1969 for a Women’s Football Association to form? Why did it take until 1995 for England to qualify for a Women’s World Cup? Answers to these key questions are supplemented across the chapters by personal accounts of the players who defied the ban, at home and abroad, along with the personal costs, and rewards, of being footballing pioneers. Praise for The History of Women’s Football “This book was very informed, detailed and a very good read. As a football fan, I was staggered by how much I didn’t know and how if football had been better supported at the beginning of the century there is a good chance women’s football would be on a par with the men’s game now . . . this was a very interesting read and I would happily recommend this book to fellow football fans.” —UK Historian

The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport draws upon the expertise of a range of scholars from the fields of sport sociology, sport history, sport economics to critically discuss the complex and often fragmented histories of women’s involvement in professional sport.

The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport draws upon the expertise of a range of scholars from the fields of sport sociology, sport history, sport economics to critically discuss the complex and often fragmented histories of women’s involvement in professional sport.

A lively investigation into the boundaries between popular culture and early-modern science. Until the 17th century, all members of society dreaded comets as heaven-sent portents of disaster. This book leads to the conclusion that long-held views of comets as divine signs were not over-turned by astronomical discoveries, but became the foundation on which modern cosmology was built. 53 photos.

The first women’s football book on Latin America centring the perspectives of players brings rare interview material that cuts through the clichés to uncover the lived reality of women footballers. It includes the first large-scale survey of South American women footballers’ views into dialogue with institutional and media perspectives. The early chapters consider the backdrop Latin American women footballers operate in, a media and institutional panorama that privileges a heteronormative athletic femininity whilst ensuring women’s football is never portrayed as anything other than an inferior version of the hegemonic (men’s) game. Following this, drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in which 33 semi-structured interviews were carried out with players and institutional figures, this pioneering book foregrounds the lived reality of women’s football in three strategic locations. Firstly, three months were spent in the Amazon region of Brazil where Esporte Clube Iranduba provides a fascinating alternative model for the growth of women’s football. This is contrasted with Santos FC, where women’s football tends to be constantly overshadowed by the presence of banal patriarchy, and finally with another fleeting glimpse of how another model is possible at Atlético Huila of Colombia, the surprise winner of the women’s Copa Libertadores in 2018.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

The groundbreaking story of the National Women’s Football League, and the players whose spirit, rivalries, and tenacity changed the legacy of women’s sports forever. In 1967, a Cleveland promoter recruited a group of women to compete as a traveling football troupe. It was conceived as a gimmick—in the vein of the Harlem Globetrotters—but the women who signed up really wanted to play. And they were determined to win. Hail Mary chronicles the highs and lows of the National Women’s Football League, which took root in nineteen cities across the US over the course of two decades. Drawing on new interviews with former players from the Detroit Demons, the Toledo Troopers, the LA Dandelions, and more, Hail Mary brings us into the stadiums where they broke records, the small-town lesbian bars where they were recruited, and the backrooms where the league was formed, championed, and eventually shuttered. In an era of vibrant second wave feminism and Title IX activism, the athletes of the National Women’s Football League were boisterous pioneers on and off the field: you’ll be rooting for them from start to finish.