Soccer Dark Arts provides detailed knowledge about crafty, deceitful and outrageous gamesmanship that is unnecessary but sometimes helps teams win matches. From the perspective of an experienced referee, this book outlines 80 soccer tricks, traps and tips used by less sporting players. These 'dark arts' help give ultracompetitive managers and street-smart players an unfair competitive edge that prevents their opponents from performing at their optimal level. Masters of the dark arts know how to bend the rules, to deceive, to con and ultimately to negatively affect their opponents. This book highlights the ugly, unpleasant and unsporting aspects of the Beautiful Game so that you won't be deceived by them. Whether you are a player, coach, match official, fan, commentator, journalist or club director, this book is your defence against the dark arts!

Football Dark Arts provides detailed knowledge about crafty, deceitful and outrageous gamesmanship that is unnecessary but sometimes helps teams win matches. From the perspective of an experienced referee, this book outlines 80 football tricks, traps and tips used by less sporting players. These 'dark arts' help give ultracompetitive managers and street-smart players an unfair competitive edge that prevents their opponents from performing at their optimal level. Masters of the dark arts know how to bend the rules, to deceive, to con and ultimately to negatively affect their opponents. This book highlights the ugly, unpleasant and unsporting aspects of the Beautiful Game so that you won't be deceived by them. Whether you are a player, coach, match official, fan, commentator, journalist or club director, this book is your defence against the dark arts!

How winners in football really win at football. Football Dark Arts provides detailed knowledge about crafty, deceitful and outrageous gamesmanship that will help you and your team win matches. For the first time anywhere, 80 tricks, traps and tips in soccer are collected together and presented in this book. These dark arts help give ultra-competitive managers and street-smart players a competitive edge that prevent their opponents from performing at their optimal level. Masters of the dark arts know how to bend the rules, to deceive, to con, and ultimately to negatively affect their opponents. This book highlights the ugly, unpleasant and unsporting aspects of "The Beautiful Game". Whether you are a player, coach, match official, fan, commentator, journalist, medical doctor or club director, your best option is to read this book and understand the dark arts! Proceeds from this book will go to the Common Goal fund to support football charities around the world.

'Foul Play' offers an inside track on the dark arts employed in sport to gain an unfair advantage - on the football or rugby field, on the tennis or squash court, on the athletics track and the golf course, even on the bowling green or the Subbuteo table.

NOMINATED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2022 'Superbly insightful' - FourFourTwo 'Hugely enjoyable.' - Henry Winter, Chief Football writer, The Times 'A brilliant read.' - Jamie Carragher ------ Complex, overlooked and misunderstood, football's centre-halves rarely take centre-stage. Leo Moynihan's long overdue celebration of this much-maligned position explores the unique mindset and last-ditch, bone-crunching tackles of the traditionally bruising hard man, hell-bent on destroying glory. Football is often romanticised as 'The Beautiful Game'. If that's true, then the game's centre-half might be considered the unsightly pimple on the end of its otherwise perfectly formed nose. The stopper is the last line of defence, the big man with small ideas, the lump who lumps it. Thou Shall Not Pass (from a command England captain Terry Butcher shouted before every match) celebrates the football position where brutal characters are loved for their hard-hitting tackles and bruising mentality, and yet laughed at for their apparent lack of skill. Covering the long and illustrious history of the centre-half, Thou Shall Not Pass takes the reader into the muddy penalty area frequented by our protagonists, into their domain. The places they head the ball, the places where they tackle, the places in which they will stop at nothing to stop a forward. What makes a defender approach the game the way they do? What makes them different from those whose sole purpose is flair? Featuring exclusive interviews – including those with Virgil van Dijk, Jamie Carragher, Terry Butcher, Mark Lawrenson, Darren Moore, Steph Houghton, Tony Adams, Frank Leboeuf and Dion Dublin – and packed with rich and highly entertaining anecdotes, the book explores all aspects of the position and investigates the mentality of those who ply their trade there.

'The dream was football . . .' John Giles had a gift. At the age of three, he could kick a ball the way it was supposed to be kicked. And he knew that every hour that passed without kicking a ball was an hour wasted. 'It was the same dream that most of the kids had at that time . . .' In A Football Man, Giles tells the story of a dream pursued and realised beyond his wildest imaginings, from his humble beginnings in Ormond Square in 1940s' Dublin,counting down the minutes to his next game of football, to that unforgettable moment when the original football man - his dad, 'Dickie' - announced that his young son, at just fourteen, was on his way to Manchester United. 'What I didn't realise was that my dream would come true.' Full of anecdote, insight and wry humour, Giles recounts his rise through the ranks at Manchester United, before and after the Munich Disaster; the great players he knew, the good and the bad times under Matt Busby; his sensational debut for Ireland which he served as player and manager; his starring role in the brilliant, controversial Leeds United of the '60s and '70s; and his challenge to the portrayal of himself and Brian Clough in The Damned United. He also describes his enduring friendship with the 'kid from across Dublin's Tolka Park', Eamon Dunphy, and his career on RTÉ2's football panel, where Giles' intelligent and insightful analysis have made him an even more well-loved and respected national figure.

This book examines how since its arrival in 1867 with British immigrants, football has become the key cultural signifier of national identity in Argentina over the long twentieth century. With the international exploits of players such as Luis Monti, Alfredo Di Stéfano and Diego Maradona, the sport has projected Argentina onto the global consciousness not seen in any other way. In this book, Mark Orton challenges existing myths surrounding the nativisation of football in Argentina away from British influence, as he shows how the game provided a conduit for the assimilation of millions of European immigrants in the early decades of the century into a new Argentine ‘race’. The book also examines how football gave some of the ‘voiceless others’ such as women, Afro-Argentines, indigenous people and those in the interior an arena to project themselves in an Argentine society that was masculine, white and Buenos Aires-dominated.