In 1990 a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulleted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport their country loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game.

The Sisterhood is the story of the first and second generations of national team players, known as the 99ers, who were the driving force behind the rise of U.S. women’s soccer and who built the foundation for the team’s enduring success. Rob Goldman takes the reader onto the pitch and into the minds of the players and coaches for the team’s greatest victories and most heartbreaking defeats.

In Fulboy Patrick T. Ridge argues that soccer and associated cultural production in Argentina and Brazil have historically embedded masculinist ideology. As a counterpoint, Ridge offers new insight into how in recent years feminist and queer perspectives have helped to reimagine the game and society on a more level playing field.

Sports fandom—often more than religious, political, or regional affiliation—determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays.

The world’s most popular sport, soccer, is also one of the planet’s prevalent cultural expressions, celebrated and debated as an art form, observed with ritual and passion. Thus it has inspired literary efforts of every sort, from every corner of the globe. The writings gathered in this volume reflect the universal and infinitely varied ways in which soccer connects with human experience.

For those obsessed with Premier League soccer, following your favorite team is a true collective experience, where it is easy to feel as one with thousands of others. Red Letters provides a different way to examine the culture of a worldwide sport and development of a soccer season—game by game, in real time, with hopes and expectations tested and altered as the season progresses to Liverpool’s Premier League championship, with insight from two avid supporters.

Although soccer had long been the world’s game when Michael J. Agovino first encountered it in 1982, here it was just a poor cousin to American football. But as Agovino himself passionately pursued soccer, Americans got wise and turned it into one of the most popular sports in the country. Agovino’s love affair with soccer is a portrait of the game’s culture and an intimate history of the sport’s coming of age in the United States.

In Game On David Bockino, a former marketing and advertising manager at ESPN turned professor of communications and sport management, provides the first overview of the evolution of the sports media industry. Written at a time of great uncertainty and rapid change and told through the fascinating stories of the most important innovations, matchups, events, and personalities over the last hundred years, Game On explores how sports media both affects and reflects our society.

This book offers the perfect opportunity to catch up on soccer’s rich history. Taking readers as far afield as the Faeroe Islands, Thailand, Madagascar, Belarus, Bhutan, and the North Pole, the selections in Soccer Stories range from the strange (Brazilian players paid in cattle by their cash-strapped club) to the wild (the Mexican prison warden who threw open all the cell doors in celebration of a World Cup victory) to the comical (the referee who ejected himself).

As an expansion Major League Soccer team, the Orlando City Soccer Club marked the return of professional soccer to Florida for the first time since 2001, selling out the sixty-thousand-seat Citrus Bowl for its home opener and going on to have the second‑highest home attendance for the 2015 and 2016 seasons. It was the successful culmination of a nine-year process orchestrated by the team’s owner, Phil Rawlins, who sold his successful sales consultancy company for a shot at sports ownership and a chance to tap into America’s growing interest in pro soccer.