Search: ' Freddy Adu'

Up Close with the Giants of the Modern Game
by Simon Kuper
Simon & Schuster, £16.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O'Brien
From WSC 295 September 2011

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Though it shares a near-identical title with John Giles's recent memoir, The Football Men is several galaxies removed from the pockmarked pitches, pitiful wage packets and gnarled enforcers of that book. The world upon which it gazes is one of big names, bigger contracts, jawdropping skill, lucrative endorsements, expensive sunglasses and public tantrums.

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The Success Story of Major League Soccer
by Beau Dure
Potomac, £22.00
Reviewed by David Wangerin
From WSC 285 November 2010

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It may not be saying that much, but Major League Soccer – now approaching the end of its 15th season – is the longest running coast-to-coast soccer league North America has ever had. And, as Beau Dure writes at the end of this book: "Whether MLS has ‘arrived' is a moot point. It's here. And it's healthy."

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The mob of Premiership clubs off on a Far East beano this summer has received unprecedented coverage in the newspapers. As ever, nobody really knows what to make of this kind of thing. Understandably enough, football hacks pitched into an utterly alien environment can sometimes find themselves a little out of their depth. The tone is usually pitched somewhere between eye-boggling visions of the wealth to be reaped from this parallel universe of crazed, barely coherent football junkies; and sex tourist-lite fascination with the sheer, naked, excitable strangeness of it all.

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When David Beckham starts playing for Los Angeles Galaxy, a surge in interest in US soccer is expected. Yet there is already a sizeable British presence in the game there and, as Gavin Willacy explains, it’s not just the MLS that is attracting attention among clubs from this side of the Atlantic

Crystal Palace have recovered from a dodgy start to climb to mid-table, poised for a play-off push. Sadly, only 257 turned up for a recent home win in their 30,000-seat stadium. Fortunately for Simon Jordan, they were rattling around in the Navy Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland, and we are talking Crystal Palace USA.

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David Beckham’s mission to explain his sport to Americans while making lots of money is going well. For a start, as Mike Woitalla writes, more of them have discovered that Los Angeles has a soccer team

On the second Friday of 2007, nearly every American newspaper reported the deal on its front page, next to news that made the man seem all the more appealing. On the Miami Herald’s page one, he celebrated a goal beneath photos of hooded protesters dressed as Guantánamo prison detainees and of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the New York Times he took a shot while, to his right, Rice argued ­emphatically for a troop increase in Iraq.

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