Every Moment Matters (2019)
How the World's Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams
From Amazon:
How do the world’s most successful coaches get the best from their athletes? How do top coaches design practices, inspire their players, and build teams that sustain their excellence season after season? How do they instill high-performing behaviors? Do they coach men and women differently? What about coaching their own children? Most importantly, are these secrets available to the rest of us coaching youth, high school, and college teams? In Every Moment Matters, renowned coach educator John O'Sullivan has collected hundreds of interviews with top coaches, sport scientists, psychologists, and athletes and distilled them into a blueprint for becoming a more effective and inspiring leader. Great coaches realize something that others do not: every moment matters! You must be intentional about everything you do. Whether you are coaching your local youth soccer team, leading your high school football program, or competing for an NCAA championship, Every Moment Matters will give you the tools and strategies to become the coach you always wished you had, and the coach today's athletes are craving. Get ready to have your best season ever!
Catch Them Being Good (2003)
From Amazon:
This guide to coaching female athletes of all ages shows how to build a team and provides invaluable advice on the differences between coaching males and females. The authors include exercises that foster teamwork and develop essential skills. They also answer parents' most common questions, such as how to tell if the coach is doing a good job and what to do if a child wants to quit. Filled with stories about the Olympic and World Cup championship teams, this useful handbook is infused throughout with DiCicco's philosophy that at every level playing soccer (or any sport) is about "playing hard, playing fair, playing to win, and having fun."
Masters of Modern Soccer (2018)
Grant Wahl (NY Times Best Selling Author, Sports Illustrated, FOX Sports)
The book looks at the craft of soccer, position by position, and includes two years of in-depth interviews with a goalkeeper (Manuel Neuer), a defender (Vincent Kompany), a defensive midfielder (Xabi Alonso), an attacking midfielder (Christian Pulisic), a forward (Javier "Chicharito" Hernández), a head coach (Roberto Martínez) and a director of football (Michael Zorc).
Soccernomics (updated 2018)
Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
The 2018 World Cup edition of the international bestseller and "the most intelligent book ever written about soccer" (San Francisco Chronicle) is updated throughout and features new chapters on the FIFA scandal, why Iceland wins, and women's soccer.
The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines (2017)
Michael Cox (The Guardian, ESPN)
From Amazon - An absolutely essential book for every modern football fan, about the development of Premier League tactics, published to coincide with 25 years of the competition. The Mixer is the first book to delve deep into the tactical story of the Premier League, and take a long view of how the game has developed over the last quarter century. From Ferguson’s directness to Keegan’s relentlessly attacking Newcastle outfit, to Mourinho’s cagey, reactive Chelsea, all the way to Ranieri’s counter-attacking champions, The Mixer is one of the most entertaining, rich and knowledgeable football books ever written.
Inverting The Pyramid (2013)
Jonathan Wilson
(For Advanced fans) From Booklist, There are books about soccer teams and soccer men, soccer nations, the culture of soccer, the business of soccer, and fans of the game. But rarest of all are really cracking books that explore the way the game is played. (And, no, we’re not talking about manuals that show you how to kick the ball.) Wilson, a respected journalist with a half-dozen books to his name, has produced a landmark work that explains what happens on the field and why. Beginning with the earliest days of soccer, he charts first the adoption of rules, then tactics, and the evolution of tactics, with profiles and mentions of the geniuses (Viktor Maslov) and dunderheads (Wing Commander Charles Reep) who stamped their marks on the game. National character plays a role, of course, with chapters devoted to the blood-and-thunder English (“The English Pragmatism”), the defensive-minded Italians (“Catenaccio”), and the share-and-share-alike Dutch (“Total Football”). While a remarkable work of sports scholarship, this isn’t for casual fans, and those who don’t know their 4-4-2 from their 4-2-3-1 will definitely require a less challenging book. --Keir Graff