English Football History

This is the story of Ohio State's undefeated run to the 1968 national championship. For Ohio State football loyalists, there hasn't been a time like the 1968 season. In '68, OSU completed a 10-0-0 sweep, won the Rose Bowl over O.J. Simpson and Southern Cal, and finished as the national champion. It was a team of household names for Ohio State fans: Kern, Brockington, Otis, Tatum, Hayden, Stillwagon, Gillian, Provost, Polaski, Foley, Worden, Adams, White, Whitfield, Jankowski, Long, Maciejowski, and Zelina.

It was the end of an era in professional football. After years of competing against each other, the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) merged to form one football powerhouse in 1970. After the merger, the league split into two conferences: the AFC and the NFC. In the year 1970, 13 teams would battle in each conference to meet in Super Bowl V. After a history of tough losses in big games, two teams rose to the top—the Dallas Cowboys and the Baltimore Colts.

The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: "Mean" Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth.

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.

A riveting ride down the Vikings sideline - newly updated!Take a journey from the infant stages of football in Minnesota up through the Vikings four Super Bowl appearances in Bill Williamson and Eric Thompson’s Tales from the Minnesota Vikings Sideline. For more than 50 years the Vikings have been established as one of the premier teams in all of sports. Perhaps the most successful team to never win a Super Bowl, the Vikings have nevertheless harbored a rich tradition of winning football. Now fans of this Midwest powerhouse will relive all the history, all the passion, and all the tantalizingly close glory of Vikings football.

Endzone tells the story of how college football's most successful and respected program nearly lost it all in less than a decade and entirely of its own doing. It is a story of hubris, greed, and betrayal, a tale more suited to Wall Street than the world's top public university.

In this fascinating and exhaustively researched book, the first of its kind in the English language, Tom Williams brings to life French football’s chequered coming of age over the last 40 years. Featuring exclusive interviews with great figures of the French game such as Alain Giresse, Jean-Pierre Papin, Emmanuel Petit and Blaise Matuidi, and with a cast of characters that also includes Michel Platini, Thierry Henry, Karim Benzema, Chris Waddle and Lionel Messi, it's a book no football fan will want to miss.

What if Babe Ruth had not been sold to the Yankees in 1920 and instead played his entire career in Boston? What if Muhammad Ali had lost or quit in his first fight against Sonny Liston? What if the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had never moved to the West Coast? What if Vince Lombardi had become head coach of his hometown Giants instead of heading to Green Bay? How would sports history, and our perception of it, be different today?

The last time Canada qualified for a men's World Cup was in 1986. For a generation afterwards, the Canadian national men's soccer team struggled in obscurity, an afterthought in a country that was not yet soccer-mad. The twenty-first century brought a wave of soccer passion and expertise to this frozen country—and a crop of new superstar players who lifted the forgotten team into the international spotlight.

John Eisenberg's That First Season is the seldom-studied prequel to a phenomenal football career for Vince Lombardi and the Packers, drawing on exhaustive new research and interviews to tell an incredible ensemble tale of a team, a town, and their leader. The once-vaunted Green Bay Packers were a laughingstock by the late 1950s. They hadn't fielded a winning team in more than a decade and were close to losing their franchise to another city. They were in desperate need of a savior, and he arrived in a wood-paneled station wagon in the dead of winter from New York City.

By 2002, The Streak - a historic 13-year run of consecutive wins by the Spartans, a high-school football team from Concord, California, that couldn't be beat - was still going strong. In this revised edition of When the Game Stands Tall, author Neil Hayes, who had unrestricted access to the De La Salle team, writes from the inside about the games, the players, and their visionary coach, Bob Ladouceur, who managed to amass the highest winning percentage in football history (.995) through standing for something greater than winning.

In this revealing, in-depth look at the NFL's greatest quarterback controversy, Adam Lazarus takes listeners into the locker room and inside the huddle to deliver the real story behind the rivalry - when Joe Montana and Steve Young battled on and off the field and forged one of the finest football dynasties of all time. From 1987 to 1994, the two future Hall of Famers spurred each other on to remarkable heights, including three Super Bowl wins and four MVP awards, setting new standards for quarterback excellence.

In A Giant Win, Coach Tom Coughlin reveals the intricacies of football, sharing details only a coach would know. He also details relationships with some of the most iconic players from the Giants, including Eli Manning and Michael Strahan. A Giant Win provides a frame for Coach Coughlin to discuss his life in football—including his years with the Giants as an assistant coach in the late 1980s and 1990, when he helped win a Super Bowl working under Hall of Fame Head Coach Bill Parcells and alongside the coach he’d oppose in Super Bowl XLII: Bill Belichick.

It's a scandal that began in a place called Happy Valley. But it's not as happy as it once was, as the child-sex-abuse charges against a longtime coach and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the allegations have rocked America and Division 1 college sports. In Game Over, journalists Bill Moushey and Bob Dvorchak investigate claims of a startling cover-up within the Penn State hierarchy that attempted to protect its football legacy, quite possibly at the expense of disenfranchised children.

In 2015, FIFA - the multibillion dollar governing body of the world's most-loved sport - was brought down by allegations of industrial-scale bribes, kickbacks, money laundering, racketeering, and tax evasion. Beginning with early morning raids in Zurich and the indictment of 27 executives by the US Department of Justice, the rottenness at the core of FIFA seemed to extend throughout all of soccer, from the decision to send the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar to lesser known cases of embezzlement from Trinidad to South Africa.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war – the invasion of Okinawa—their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled.

The US Women’s National Soccer Team has won three World Cups and four Olympic gold medals, set record TV ratings, drawn massive crowds, earned huge revenues for FIFA and US Soccer, and helped to redefine the place of women in sports. But despite their dominance, and their rosters of superstar players, they’ve endured striking inequality: low pay, poor playing conditions, and limited opportunities to play in professional leagues.

As the coach during professional football’s most storied era, Tom Landry transformed the gridiron from a no-holds-barred battlefield to the highly-technical chess match it is today. With his trademark fedora and stoic facade, he was a man of faith and few words, for twenty-nine years guiding “America’s Team” from laughingstock to well-oiled machine, with an unprecedented twenty consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles.

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.

Celebrated sports commentator Dan Patrick and comedy writer Joel H. Cohen team up with some of America’s greatest comedy writers to tell you everything and nothing about America’s sport.