New book by PFRA member Massimo Foglio
Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2015 11:15 am
Touchdown in Europe: How American Football Came to the Old Continent, has just been released.
http://www.amazon.com/Touchdown-Europe- ... 150889812X
It's a translation and an update of Massimo's 2012 book on the subject, and it's a great addition to anyone's football library. Long before NFL Europe, there were organized football leagues playing in Europe, in 1919 after World War One, during the fall 1944 in England while Americans prepared for the Normandy invasion, and in West Germany for more than 40 years during the Cold War. Massimo preserved all of the team names, which have never been in a book before, and there are game accounts and scores. There are a lot of anecdotes about the various misadventures of touring of American teams, about the hostility of the local press to the game itself, and about the struggle to make football a game that was played by and watched by the European public. It finally paid off when high school and college students decided that they wanted to form their own teams, and the final chapters are about those pioneers in Norway, Austria, Germany and Italy (you'll be surprised to learn that the very first all-European football teams played at a POW camp in Stockton, California in January 1946). Reasonably priced, and guaranteed to tell you something that you didn't already know about!
http://www.amazon.com/Touchdown-Europe- ... 150889812X
It's a translation and an update of Massimo's 2012 book on the subject, and it's a great addition to anyone's football library. Long before NFL Europe, there were organized football leagues playing in Europe, in 1919 after World War One, during the fall 1944 in England while Americans prepared for the Normandy invasion, and in West Germany for more than 40 years during the Cold War. Massimo preserved all of the team names, which have never been in a book before, and there are game accounts and scores. There are a lot of anecdotes about the various misadventures of touring of American teams, about the hostility of the local press to the game itself, and about the struggle to make football a game that was played by and watched by the European public. It finally paid off when high school and college students decided that they wanted to form their own teams, and the final chapters are about those pioneers in Norway, Austria, Germany and Italy (you'll be surprised to learn that the very first all-European football teams played at a POW camp in Stockton, California in January 1946). Reasonably priced, and guaranteed to tell you something that you didn't already know about!