The story of football, told as it should be told.

Three thousand years ago, courtiers in the Han Dynasty palace kicked a feather-stuffed ball through a silk net. Five hundred years ago, English kings tried, and failed, to ban the game from their streets. One hundred years ago, fifty-three thousand people packed Goodison Park to watch a women's match, and then the men who ran the game banned women's football for the next fifty years.

And in 2026, the largest sporting event in human history arrives: forty-eight national teams, sixteen cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and an estimated television audience of more than five billion people. Soccer Tales is the story of how we got here.

This is not a statistics manual or a tactics handbook. It is a richly illustrated journey through the great stories that built the beautiful game, the founders and the rivals, the legends and the cheats, the heroes, the underdogs and the absurdities, written to be read for pleasure and kept on the shelf.

Inside this volume:

• The ancient origins, from Chinese cuju to the deadly Mesoamerican ballgame
• The medieval mob-football riots kings could not stamp out
• The legends: Pelé, Garrincha, Cruyff, Maradona, Zidane, Messi, Ronaldo
• Marta, Mia Hamm and the queens of the women's game
• The managers in the dugout, from Busby's Babes to Brian Clough
• The forgotten, banned, and resurrected history of women's football
• Fans, anthems, rivalries and the cathedrals of the game
• The 1914 Christmas truce, the scorpion kick, and a final chapter on why 2026 is a tournament like no other

Generously illustrated and written with warmth and wit, every chapter stands on its own, the kind of book you open at random and lose an hour in.

Perfect for:

• The football lover who wants the history, the heroes and the heart in one volume
• Anyone following the 2026 World Cup in the host nations
• A keepsake gift for fans of every generation, whether they have watched for fifty years or fifty days
• Coffee tables, club houses, and grandparents' shelves

From the author of Olympic Tales. Whatever you call it, football or soccer, the beautiful game has never had a better storyteller. Enjoy the game.