Kyle Rote, Jr.'s Complete Book of Soccer

"Internationally, the game of soccer is without dispute the world's most popular team sport. Not even the Olympic Games are followed by sports fanatics all over the globe with the passionate intensity that soccer's World Cup commands. but here in the United States, where American baseball and football have for a hundred years been the big sports, soccer has always taken a back seat in capturing the public's imagination and support. Until Now. Over the past season, at the very time that attendance was dropping, sometimes catastrophically, at college and professional football games, soccer has come into its own in this country. The game is booming in our schools and colleges, and the crowds that try to make their way into stadiums of the North American Soccer League to see the professional games are ten times what they were a few short years ago: over 75,000 people were jammed into every corner of the New Jersey areana to see the New York Cosmos win their way into the championship game. " This excerpt is from inside the dust jacket. It continues to talk about the history of the sport, how to play the game, skills, techniques, strategies, with diagrams and pictures. It also talks about what the future of American soccer looks like.