Passion. Flair. Instinct. Improvisation. As the World Cup advances to the knockout stage, you’ll hear these terms associated with the football styles of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico rather than those of Belgium and Germany.

Last weekend was the NFL Draft, the annual event when teams select college players who have shown the talent to advance to the professional ranks. Staged at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, broadcast live on two cable networks,

Imagine a boxing gym. What probably comes to mind is a large, run-down room on the upper floor of an old brick building, somewhere in a trash-strewn, depressed neighborhood. The room echoes with the thud of the heavy bag,

Does God care who wins the game? According to a recent survey, plenty of American fans think so. The Public Religion Research Institute found that a quarter of fans said that they had prayed to God for a favorable outcome to a game.

Twenty years ago, when I was studying abroad in Europe, the only way to keep track of my teams back in the US was to sneak looks in The International Herald Tribune at the newspaper kiosk (the price of the paper was beyond my meager budget).

Each year, following the end of the NFL season, there is a blizzard of activity as teams with disappointing records fire their head coaches and look for the new leader who will turn things around. This year,

The 22nd Winter Olympics are underway. It’s safe to say that the lead-up has not gone smoothly. Of course, there have been the obligatory cost overruns, crony contracts, displacement of locals, and environmental despoliation–all the problems we’ve seen...

This week’s episode features Sam Miller and Jason Wojciechowski, editors of the Baseball Prospectus’ 2014 (Wiley, 2014), a yearbook that both previews the upcoming baseball season and provides readers a look into the state of the art in baseball analys...

If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s.

It’s that time of year when the panels of experts on sports call-in shows shout opinions on the best and worst of the past twelve months. To finish the year, New Books in Sports offers its own panels of experts.

Kevin Kerrane‘s Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting (CreateSpace, 2013) represents the first major study of the history and practice of professional baseball scouting.  Based on Kerrane’s ethnographic research with the Philadelphi...

The Atlantic magazine recently asked its readers to name the greatest athlete of all time. The usual suspects were present among the nominees: Jesse Owens, Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Don Bradman. Given that these were readers of The Atlantic,

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage.

One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For instance, the past week has brought the release of new mem...

Many fans store a vast collection of sports images in their brains. With just a moment’s glance at a picture, even a slice of the picture, they can recognize the athletes, the season, the game, the particular play that the photographer captured.

In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though,

Throughout the centuries, in cultures around the world, people have played games. But it has only been in the modern age, in the last 250 years or so, that people have competed in and watched sports. Modern sports are distinct in practice and purpose f...

Two guys are watching Premier League highlights, when onto the TV screen comes Rory Delap, then with Stoke City, doing one of his renowned throw-ins from the touchline directly into the box. One guy, a native of the American Midwest who’d been raised o...

In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No.

Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism,

The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams,

What did you read as a young sports fan? Maybe the sports pages in the local newspaper, or a glossy illustrated magazine? Did your school’s library carry biographies of famous athletes written for children,

WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the w...

I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the...