The World Cup

Whether you call it football, fútbol, footy, or soccer, the FIFA World Cup unites fans together to watch one of the world's most popular sports. Check out titles selected by RCL subject editors on the globalization of soccer and World Cup history, along with how science, statistics, sociology, and cultural studies help us better understand the sport. Resources for College Libraries (RCL) features 90,000+ core titles for academic libraries, curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists and available at rclweb.net.

Updated April 1, 2026
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The ball is round : a global history of soccer
Goldblatt, David
Paper Book
The definitive book about soccer, from the author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can...
FIFA and the contest for world football : who rules the peoples' game?
Sugden, John Peter.
Paper Book
In FIFA and the Contest for World Football Sugden and Tomlinson provide the first full-length study of FIFA (the Federation Internationale de Football Association) and its role in framing and controlling world football. Interviewing more than seventy influential leaders world-wide and...
Soccer empire the World Cup and the future of France
Dubois, Laurent
Paper Book
When France both hosted and won the World Cup in 1998, the face of its star player, Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. During the 2006 World Cup finals, Zidane stunned the country by ending his spectacular career with an assault on an...
Beautiful game theory : how soccer can help economics
Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio
Paper Book
The first book to use the world's most popular sport to test economic theories and document novel human behavior A wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology,...
Science and soccer
Reilly, Thomas
Paper Book
Science and Soccer provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the physiology, biomechanics and psychology behind the world's most popular sport, and offers important guidance on how science translates into practice. Fully revised and updated to include new scientific research and...

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