Anywhere football is played, Texas is the force to reckon with. Its powerhouse programs produce the best football players in America. In The Republic of Football, Chad S. Conine vividly captures Texas’s impact on the game with action-filled stories about legendary high school players, coaches, and teams from around the state and across seven decades. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Conine offers rare glimpses of the early days of some of football’s biggest stars. He reveals that some players took time to achieve greatness—LaDainian Tomlinson wasn’t even the featured running back on his high school team until a breakthrough game in his senior season vaulted him to the highest level of the sport—while others, like Colt McCoy, showed their first flashes of brilliance in middle school. In telling these and many other stories of players and coaches, including Hayden Fry, Spike Dykes, Bob McQueen, Lovie Smith, Art Briles, Lawrence Elkins, Warren McVea, Ray Rhodes, Dat Nguyen, Zach Thomas, Drew Brees, and Adrian Peterson, Conine spotlights the decisive moments when players caught fire and teams such as Celina, Southlake Carroll, and Converse Judson turned into Texas dynasties. Packed with never-before-told anecdotes, as well as fresh takes on the games everyone remembers, The Republic of Football is a must-read for all fans of Friday night lights.

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for 2018 Even before Tito's Communist Party established control over the war-ravaged territories which became socialist Yugoslavia, his partisan forces were using football as a revolutionary tool. In 1944 a team representing the incipient state was dispatched to play matches around the liberated Mediterranean. This consummated a deep relationship between football and communism that endured until this complex multi-ethnic polity tore itself apart in the 1990s. Starting with an exploration of the game in the short-lived interwar Kingdom, this book traces that liaison for the first time. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it ventures across the former Yugoslavia to illustrate the myriad ways football was harnessed by an array of political forces. Communists purposefully re-engineered Yugoslavia's most popular sport in the tumult of the 1940s, using it to integrate diverse territories and populations. Subsequently, the game advanced Tito's distinct brand of communism, with its Cold War-era policy of non-alignment and experimentation with self-management. Yet, even under tight control, football was racked by corruption, match-fixing and violence. Alternative political and national visions were expressed in the stadiums of both Yugoslavias, and clubs, players and supporters ultimately became perpetrators and victims in the countries' violent demise. In Richard Mills' hands, the former Yugoslavia's stadiums become vehicles to explore the relationship between sport and the state, society, nationalism, state-building, inter-ethnic tensions and war. The book is the first in-depth study of the Yugoslav game and offers a revealing new way to approach the complex history of Yugoslavia.

Bundle containing: The Rookie The Starter The All-Pro The MVP The Champion

This Handbook offers an analysis of the relation between football and politics, based on over 30 case studies covering five continents. It provides a detailed picture of this relation in a wide number of European, American, African, and Asian states, as well as a comparative assessment of football in a global perspective, thus combining the general and the local. It examines themes such as the political origins of football in the studied country, the historical club rivalries, the political aspects of football as a sports spectacle, and the contemporary issues linked to the political use of football. By following the same structure with each study, the volume allows for the comparison between largely investigated cases and cases that have seldom been addressed. The Handbook will be of use particularly to students and scholars in the fields of sport studies, political science and sociology, as well as cultural studies, anthropology and leisure studies.

This book delves into how playwrights, whether canonical or less frequently discussed in the academic sphere, have critically and creatively engaged with the Anglo-Irish War, the Irish Civil War, the Easter Rising, the Northern Ireland Troubles and other conflicts. It not only approaches their plays—some of which have not been subject to much study—in relevant historical contexts, but also explores how Irish dramatists have observed humanity and resilience in war and given their insights into republican, unionist and denominational divides. It also reveals the dynamic mechanism connecting playwrights, performing venues, critics and audience members. As a whole, this book will be of interest to Irish studies scholars, theatre practitioners and historians, and people who would like to have a systematic understanding of twentieth-century Irish drama focusing on nation formation, war, revolution and humanity.

Choo Seng Quee is arguably Singapore's greatest football coach. He brought Singapore football to great heights, especially during the 1970s. This larger-than-life footballing icon had already made a name for himself as a no-nonsense defender during the 1930s helping Singapore win the Malaya Cup on two occasions.World War II disrupted his promising playing career, and after the war, he switched to coaching. In a coaching career spanning almost 30 years, he had several spells as coach of the Singapore national team (in addition to also coaching the Malaysian and Indonesian teams). Though his coaching methods were 'old school', based on hard work and discipline, success followed him wherever he went.His brash manner, unfortunately, did not endear well with the powers who ran the Singapore Amateur Football Association (SAFA), a predecessor of the Football Association of Singapore (FAS). This led him being thrown into football wilderness on several occasions. But that did not stop him from progressing in his coaching career. The football administrators from Malaysia and Indonesia took advantage of these moments of 'unemployment' by offering him financially attractive contracts to coach their respective teams, leading to years of success while Choo Seng Quee was at the helm.This is the incredible story of this legend known to many as simply 'Uncle Choo' who instilled a sense of patriotism in his players. To him, wearing the Singapore jersey was a badge of honour.

THE STARTER is the sequel to THE ROOKIE, a hard-hitting, bone-crunching YA sports/scifi novel described as "Any Given Sunday" meets "The Godfather" meets "Star Wars." It's high-stakes, win-or-die football action in the far future, as aliens and humans fill positions based on physiology and leave their blood, sweat and tears on gridirons across the galaxy. Last season, 19-year-old rookie quarterback Quentin Barnes overcame his racism and unified his team. He led the Ionath Krakens to a lower-tier championship, a championship that earns them promotion into the meat grinder known as "Tier One." Now, he and the Krakens have to compete against the greatest football teams ever assembled and do far more than just survive each game. As he rebuilds the team in his own image, Quentin's quest for a Tier One championship begins in THE STARTER.

Football is an incredibly powerful case study of globalization and an extremely useful lens through which to study and understand contemporary processes of international migration. This is the first book to focus on the increasingly complex series of migratory processes that contour the contemporary game, drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches from sociology, history, geography and anthropology to explore migration in football in established, emerging and transitional contexts. The book examines shifting migration patterns over time and across space, and analyses the sociological dynamics that drive and influence those patterns. It presents in-depth case studies of migration in elite men’s football, exploring the role of established leagues in Europe and South America as well as important emerging leagues on football's frontier in North America and Asia. The final section of the book analyses the movement of groups who have rarely been the focus of migration research before, including female professional players, elite youth players, amateur players and players’ families, drawing on important new research in Ghana, England, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Few other sports have such a global reach and therefore few other sports are such an important location for cross-cultural research and insight across the social sciences. This book is engaging reading for any student or scholar with an interest in sport, sociology, human geography, migration, international labour flows, globalization, development or post-colonial studies.

Sport: Law and Practice, Fourth Edition is the leading legal title covering sports law and practice in the UK, and at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. It serves both as a comprehensive statement of applicable law and precedent, and as a very practical guide to circumnavigating a complex sector. The new edition retains and updates all of the key chapters from previous editions, including the extended sections on challenges to the actions of sports governing bodies, and on anti-doping regulation and enforcement (with an introduction to the new 2021 World Anti-Doping Code). There are important updates to the chapters on Regulating Financial Fair Play, Misconduct, Safeguarding in Sport, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and Media Rights and Sport. The Fourth Edition also adds brand new chapters dealing with: -Effective sports regulation (including the first ever comprehensive discussions of the 'general principles of law' applied by CAS panels in determining challenges to sports regulations, as well as of the principles of interpretation of sports regulations). -Best practice in sports governance (describing developments such as the strengthening of the competence and independence of boards and the emergence of independent integrity units). -Data protection law and sport (including discussion of the provisions of the Data Protection Act 2018 that facilitate the sharing of personal data by sports bodies for integrity-related purposes). -Exploiting commercially valuable sports data (explaining how sports rights-holders can fashion commercial agreements to meet the demand for sports data from the betting industry and others). -ESports (the first comprehensive treatment of the legal and practical principles underlying the regulation and commercial exploitation of the increasingly important ESports sector). Readers will also benefit from practice tips, precedent clauses, detailed explanations of key practical issues, and step-by-step analysis. This is an essential title for all sports law practitioners (solicitors and barristers, common law and civil lawyers), sports governing bodies, event organisers, clubs, participants, sports agencies and commercial partners, arbitrators, universities, and students.