This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.

From the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame comes a sweeping and lively history of the National Football League, timed to coincide with the NFL’s 100th anniversary season. “I can think of no one better qualified—or more enthusiastic—to chronicle the National Football League’s century-long history than Joe Horrigan.”—Marv Levy, Hall of Fame NFL coach The NFL has come a long way from its founding in Canton, Ohio, in 1920. In the hundred years since that fateful day, football has become America’s most popular and lucrative professional sport. The former scrappy upstart league that struggled to stay afloat has survived a host of challenges—the Great Depression and World War II, controversies and scandals, battles over labor rights and competition from rival leagues—to produce American icons like Vince Lombardi, Joe Montana, and Tom Brady. It is an extraordinary and entertaining history that could be told only by Joe Horrigan, former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and perhaps the greatest living historian of the NFL, by drawing upon decades of NFL archives. Compelling, eye-opening, and authoritative, NFL Century is a must-read for NFL fans and anyone who loves the game of football. Advance praise for NFL Century “Joe Horrigan takes the reader on a delightful tour of the seminal moments of the NFL in the past one hundred years—the players, owners, coaches, executives, and historical events that made the game of football the most popular in America. It’s a wonderful walk down memory lane for any football fan, young or old.”—Michael Lombardi, author of Gridiron Genius “There is no one—and I mean no one—who knows more about the history of the NFL than Joe Horrigan, the heart and soul of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. As the gold standard of sports leagues celebrates its one hundredth season, it’s appropriate that the gold standard of sports historians has written NFL Century, an entertaining and educational journey.”—Gary Myers, New York Times bestselling author of Brady vs Manning

This book is a fascinating journey through a series of scholarly articles. The journey begins by tracing one of the most significant stories in the popularization of Association Football. In the next leg of the journey it charts the diverse and changing face of the modern British game. It then moves on to the global spread of the game from England and its domestication and appropriation in its new homes across the planet. It also investigates the exchanges which are increasingly taking place between these new homes of football. In the concluding pieces football’s global experience is compared with the attempts at globalizing baseball and drawing out the larger patterns that inform football’s global experience. This book was published as a special issue in Soccer and Society.

This book looks historically at the harm that has been inflicted in the practice of sport and at some of the issues, debates and controversies that have arisen as a result. Written by experts in history, sociology, sport journalism and public health, the book considers sport and injury in relation to matters of social class; gender; ethnicity and race; sexuality; political ideology and national identity; health and wellbeing; childhood; animal rights; and popular culture. These matters are, in turn, variously related to a range of sports, including ancient, pre- and early industrial sports; American football; boxing; wrestling and other combat sports; mountaineering; horseracing; cycling; motor racing; rugby football; cricket; association football; baseball; basketball; Crossfit; ice hockey; Olympic sports; Mixed Martial Arts; and sport in an imagined dystopian future.