Almanack of World Football 2009 (Almanack of World Football)

The Almanack of World Football 2009 is another edition in the almanack series by Guy Oliver. Essentially, it is a record of all international fixtures, as well as the domestic professional (and semi-professional) leagues in every country that has a football association. It also records the major cup and champion leagues competitions. Firstly, the FIFA tournaments of the year are dealt with - the 2008 Men's Olympics Football Tournament (essentially an U-23 Championship) and the 2008 Women's Olympics Football Tournament were both held in Beijing, the Futsal World Championship, the U-17 Women's World Cup in New Zealand, and U-20 Women's World Cup. Each tournament gets its own text summary, as well as match by match results (including line-ups) The next section discusses each country, both domestically and internationally. Each country gets a paragraph or two as a summary of their international and domestic events. The statistical data includes FIFA world rankings, results of recent international matches played by the country, not just for 2008, but for a few years prior to 2008. There are also tables of results for the major leagues, which extends to matches (including goals scored) by the top three clubs in the league as well as the knockout phases of major cup competitions. Champions and runnerups in both league and cup competitions for a number of previous seasons are also listed. For the minor countries, there is simply a league or cup final standings table. The final section of the Almanack goes into the major tournaments and fixtures of the various regional confederations. For example, for the Asian Football Confederation, after a brief summary of the major tournaments of the AFC, results are provided for the AFC Asian Cup, both qualifiers and finals (including team lineups), the AFC Champions League and so on. Of course, in the UEFA section this year is the results of probably the biggest football event in 2008, Euro 2008. The Almanack of World Football 2009 really is a comprehensive overview of world football. The text is pretty small, and there are no illustrations - this is purely a reference book. Football fans and anoraks (the statisticians amongst us!) will find this extremely useful, if only to dip into the book in order to find out how their favorite obscure club fared last season.