Drawing on his work with some of the top teams in professional sports, noted sport psychology consultant Gary Mack shares with you the same techniques and exercises he uses to help elite athletes build mental "muscle." These 40 accessible lessons and inspirational anecdotes will help you gain the "head edge" over the competition.

From receiving a yellow card at age eight to scoring an own goal to snubbing an internationally renowned goalkeeper, this collection of short stories, poems and pictures will have you laughing until the final whistle.

The extraordinary tale of a refugee youth soccer team and the transformation of a small American townClarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world’s war zones—from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston’s streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to unify Clarkston’s refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees.Set against the backdrop of an American town that without its consent had become a vast social experiment, Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals. At the center of the story is fiery Coach Luma, who relentlessly drives her players to success on the soccer field while holding together their lives—and the lives of their families—in the face of a series of daunting challenges.This fast-paced chronicle of a single season is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community—and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world.

Why do England lose? Why does Scotland suck? Why doesn’t America dominate the sport internationally...and why do the Germans play with such an efficient but robotic style?These are questions every soccer aficionado has asked. Soccernomics answers them.Using insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business to cast a new and entertaining light on how the game works, Soccernomics reveals the often surprisingly counterintuitive truths about soccer. An essential guide for the 2010 World Cup, Soccernomics is a new way of looking at the world’s most popular game.

Whether it's Terry Venables keeping his wife up late at night with diagrams on scraps of paper spread over the eiderdown, or the classic TV sitcom of moving the salt&pepper around the table top in the transport cafe, football tactics are now part of the fabric of everyday life. Steve McLaren's recent switch to an untried 3-5-2 against Croatia will probably go down as the moment he lost his slim credibility gained from dropping David Beckham; Jose Mourinho, meanwhile, is often brought to task for trying to smuggle the long ball game back into English football (his defence being his need to 'break the lines' of banks of defenders and midfielders). Jonathan Wilson is an erudite and detailed writer, but never loses a sense of the grand narrative sweep, and here he pulls apart the modern game, traces the world history of tactics back from modern pioneers such as Rinus Michels and Valeriy Lobanovskyi, the Swiss origins of Catenaccio and Herbert Chapman, right back to beginning where chaos reigned. Along the way he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the game, and probes why the English, in particular, have 'proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract'. This is a modern classic of football writing to rank with David Winner's 'Brilliant Orange' and Simon Kuper's 'Football Against the Enemy'.

Simon Kuper’s New York Times bestseller Soccernomics pioneered a new way of looking at soccer through meticulous empirical analysis and incisive—and witty— commentary. Kuper now leaves the numbers and data behind to explore the heart and soul of the world’s most popular sport in the new, extraordinarily revealing Soccer Men. Soccer Men goes behind the scenes with soccer’s greatest players and coaches. Inquiring into the genius and hubris of the modern game, Kuper details the lives of giants such as Arsène Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Jorge Valdano, Lionel Messi, Kaká, and Didier Drogba, describing their upbringings, the soccer cultures they grew up in, the way they play, and the baggage they bring to their relationships at work. From one of the great sportswriters of our time, Soccer Men is a penetrating and surprising anatomy of the figures that define modern soccer.

They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.

"Fever Pitch" is the bitter-sweet autobiography which vividly accounts the elation and utter despair of a love affair with a particular football team. A phenomenal bestseller and William Hill Sports Book of the Year, this captures the truth and absurdities of the obsessed Arsenal fan's mind, and whether you are interested in football or not, this is a sophisticated study of masculinity, class, identity, growing up, loyalty, depression and joy.

Lionel Messi is widely regarded as the greatest soccer player in the world. Sports journalist and best-selling author Luca Caioli draws on the exceptional testimonies of Messi's parents, his coaches from his boyhood and during his time as an international star in Argentina, leading figures from Barcelona . . . and Leo Messi himself.