I want to buy a book as a Christmas gift for my footie-mad Mom. Is there a book that is the equivalent of "The Baseball Encyclopedia"? By that I mean a book that lists all the players in the game today as well as historically. What's your favorite soccer reference book?
I don't know of any book that covers NASL, MLS, and national team players in the manner of The Baseball Encyclopedia. Maybe in another 20 or 30 years there will be a big market for such a book but not today. If you can find it, I recommend The Encyclopedia of World Soccer, published in 1979. Probably the best general reference with coverage through the 1978 World Cup. Another good reference on UK and world soccer is Martin Tyler's The Story of Football, published in 1976. I don't know if there are more recent editions of either book but it would be nice if there were. Rothmans Football Yearbooks, published since about 1970, are the best annual references on soccer in the UK. The current book can be obtained through Amazon-UK. If your mother has a favorite club overseas then you can probably find a history without much trouble. Sometimes these books, which usually are in the "coffee table" style, are available through the club's website. For the other above mentioned books, both of which I expect are out of print, your only hope would be an internet seller like Abebooks.com or Ebay. I found Tyler's in a used bookstore a few years ago but that was a longshot.
Actually copies of both books are available at Amazon. Here's one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_1/102-2108359-4819301?v=glance&s=books
I don't know if this might be what you are looking for, but: Roger Allaway, Colin Jose and David Litterer came out with "The Encyclopedia of American Soccer History" published by the Scarecrow Press, Inc. in 2001. It has over 400 pages of AMERICAN soccer history, which is quite hard to find in any bookstore that one might perurse.
World Soccer Yearbook by David Goldblatt covers a lot of the little things. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0789496542/103-7763928-1561400?v=glance
I love the idea behind it, but just skimming through the Russian and Ukraine sections, I have found it wrought with mistakes. Dinamo Moscow is called a KGB-founded team (which is right), yet Dynamo Kyiv is called a utility-industry team (yeah, right!), a picture of a Russian match between Dinamo Moscow and Chernomorets Novorossiysk is labelled "Dynamo Kyiv vs. Chornomorets Odesa in the Ukrainian league," there are other errors in team histories and kit colors. I can only assume that other lesser-known leagues have the same issues.