[.ca] Magnum Soccer (ISBN 0714842362)

From Amazon.co.uk:
What Pele once called "the beautiful game" is captured in all its global diversity in Magnum Football, a wonderful collection of nearly 200 photographs of people playing football all over the world. Trawling its archives since its launch in the 1940s, the world-famous Magnum photographic agency realised that many of its great photographers had often incidentally taken stunning photos of ordinary people absorbed in the pursuit of the great game. The result is this beautifully packaged Phaidon book. Abbas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Guy Le Querrec, Peter Marlow and James Nachtwey are just some of the great photographers gathered together in the collection. The pictures are wonderful: crippled Italian children playing soccer in the aftermath of the war in 1948, Marilyn Monroe kicking off a game in 1959, naked football in Brazil, blue-haired female Japanese fans all confirm that, as Simon Kuper points out, "the game is the same whether you are playing in the mud of Maharashtra, the Tuileries Gardens in Paris or a refugee camp". Football brings people together, but it's also the perfect photographic medium for capturing that "decisive moment" of the great goal, the extraordinary save, or the dejection of defeat. As these photos reveals, "a photographer is like a playmaker in football, a number 10, who sees angles nobody else does". In Magnum Football, even in a game of two halves, everybody wins. --Jerry Brotton

A Beautiful Homage To the Beautiful Game!:
An absolutely beautiful collection of about 200 black and white and color photographs celebrating the global sport known as football. Since its founding by a collective of photojournalists in the '40s Magnum has been one of the world's premier photo agencies, so it's not surprising that their archives have yielded such an array of compelling photos of the beautiful game. Few of the photos are of the high level world or professional ranks, rather they are of regular players and fans in the grimy cities, dusty villages, and muddy pitches of the world. Some are action shots, some are posed, some are impressionistic-but all are a tribute to the simplest of sports. Sure to delight devotees of either football or photography, it's an attractive and inexpensive collection that deserves wide readership.