I edit a newspaper. We handed this assignment off to a writer, who knocked it out of the park.

Here is Kaja Surborg's review:

This summer, France will host the eighth FIFA Women’s World Cup. Although historical record shows that women formally organized their own soccer games starting in the late 19th century, it took until 1991 for FIFA to establish a Women’s World Cup. To celebrate the trailblazers who have made women’s soccer everything that it is today, Gemma Clarke wrote Soccerwomen, her debut book, which will release in April.

At the beginning of her career as a sports journalist, Clarke covered men’s soccer. When she started reporting on women’s games, she often compared the players to the men that she had been reporting on. Referring to Kelly Smith as the female David Beckham and Karen Carney as the female Wayne Rooney placed the game in the only frame of reference that most of her readers were familiar with. Over time, Clarke realized that women’s soccer had plenty of stories, characters, and histories that had not yet been shared.

“It was always about finding a good story and finding somebody that I wanted to write about,” Clarke said in an interview with The McGill Tribune.

Soccerwomen takes the reader through the history of the most influential women in soccer from the 1890s to the present. It features the stories of the most prolific women in the history of the sport, including players and coaches from across the globe. While women’s soccer has been largely dominated by the United States since the mid-1990s, Clarke wanted to make sure that her book reflected the variety in women’s soccer.

“I […] think that there is a slight diversity issue in women’s soccer, certainly in the [United States],” Clarke said. “I really wanted to find out what was happening with other women around the world and to find out what their experience was, not only [with] soccer, but also what their life experience was. [I wanted to] use soccer as a channel to tell their stories.”

Clarke documents the current struggles of female soccer players throughout Soccerwomen, particularly with regard to the attempts to professionalize the sport. Despite the quick growth of women’s soccer since the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, multiple professional leagues have folded since 2000 due to financial troubles and a lack of corporate sponsorships. Conditions for professional players have improved slightly. In the United States, where the culture of women’s soccer is arguably the strongest, the National Women’s Soccer League begins its seventh season next month. In England, Barclays recently signed on as a Football Association Women’s Super League sponsor in a deal worth £10 million over the next three seasons.

Players, particularly younger ones, have also been able to attract lucrative brand deals in recent years. There are concerns, however, that these endorsements place players on pedestals, forcing them to act as role models in ways that their male counterparts do not. Furthermore, female players often rely on these sponsorships to make a living since clubs cannot guarantee living wages. Most male players, even if they are below the elite level, can still make comfortable salaries without huge brand deals.

“I see so much paid content [from the American women], and I understand that they have to do that because that’s how they make their living,” Clarke said. “It is interesting to look back at the [American] team of 1999 [….] Tiffeny Milbrett actually had more goals that tournament, but it was Mia Hamm [who] became the face of women’s soccer […], and it comes down to marketability [….] Tiffeny Milbrett was much more of a maverick in the way she wanted to play and be coached, and, at the time, that marked her out as difficult.”

There is still a long way for the sport to go in achieving any kind of equality on and off the field, but, since the first international matches in the 1960s, women’s soccer has come a long way.

“Even if it seems like there are some things that will never change, like the question of equal pay […], you can look at the game and say ‘look at what it was 20 years ago, and look at what it might be in [10] years,’ and it all points in a very positive direction,” Clarke said.

Soccerwomen comes out on April 16.

Soccerwomen is a comprehensive bio book of the major female soccer players and coaches of the last 40 years including up and coming players. This book is one of those ones that you give to a young girl for inspiration. What is interesting is that the whole book is a story of struggle. The first group fought to be able to play, the next set to be given the ability to be mothers and players, and now it is the mix of equality in the western world and the struggle between culture and playing for the eastern world. What some of these women have fought for should make anyone proud.

I’m a casual soccer fan. I always make it a point to watch the United States Women’s team play during international events but I’m not at all well versed in the history of the sport or it’s connection to the women’s rights movements throughout history. This book quickly brought me up to speed. It’s a comprehensive glance at the history of women’s soccer around the world, that highlights individual women from different backgrounds and across the decades who have impacted the sport and the way people view it. I enjoyed this book. I think it does a really good job of introducing people to women’s soccer. I loved that it focuses on and discusses how much women’s soccer has grown but also counteracts that with how much further women’s soccer has to go towards being recognized and appreciated on the same level of men’s soccer. Many of the names I recognized but there were plenty more that I had never heard of and I was glad to see those names and learn those stories as well. This is a book that I think many young women growing up, loving soccer or wanting to know more about soccer will love. It’s inspiring to see so many women excelling in this sport and working towards equality and change.

Soccerwomen by Gemma Clarke is a solid appetizer for both the novice and knowledgeable women’s soccer fan. One learns about the history of the women’s game and many of its finest players over the last three decades both in the United States and Internationally. The author does this in a brief vignette format (four to five pages at most) which has its positives and negatives as a style. On one hand, you don’t linger long on any one topic, but I personally ended up often wanting more. I would suggest that it is a good starter text for someone wanting to learn about women’s soccer from the ground up or if you’re someone who just wandered into a game and found yourself transfixed.

In SOCCERWOMEN: THE ICONS, REBELS, STARS AND TRAILBLAZERS WHO TRANSFORMED THE BEAUTIFUL GAME, Gemma Clarke – a sports journalist who has written about soccer for various European newspapers – profiles various players and coaches of the past, present, and future. All of the women featured have made an impact either within the sport or for women in general or in politics. Clarke gives a brief history of women’s soccer – starting around three hundred years ago when single women competed in soccer games against the married women in an interesting and competitive bid to attract the attention of the local single men. I really learned a lot about women’s soccer in the early 1900s – I had no idea that there was a women’s league in England and across Europe.

When read separately, all of the player and coach profiles in SOCCERWOMEN: THE ICONS, REBELS, STARS AND TRAILBLAZERS WHO TRANSFORMED THE BEAUTIFUL GAME interesting and inspirational. When read together, the book seemed to lack cohesion. Some of the profiles read like a biography while other profiles seemed more like stories or newspaper reports. Some of the profiles focused on the player’s or coach’s career and overall contribution to the sport. Other profiles focused on how the player made it to her national team, or on a specific section of her career, or what she has been doing since she retired. Some of the profiles included early biographical information; others did not. Personally, I enjoyed the sections that focused on the women who played on the United States’ Women’s National Team during the 1999 Women’s World Cup. I was eleven years old that summer. I attended two of the World Cup games, and I watched the rest on television. The women on the US team were my heroes. They are still my heroes. Seeing them – and their contributions to women’s soccer – acknowledged is always heartwarming.

As a “soccer mom” for over 25 years, with four kids and multiple teams full of kids I co spider like my own, soccer is life to our family. We have followed soccer in the US and abroad and love to learn about the players giving their all to this beautiful game. As three of my kids are girls, role models like the women in this book are exactly what they need. Hearing their stories personalizes them to readers and makes their fight, their game more important to those who know. I really enjoyed getting to know some of these players and coaches that I have only glimpsed on tv.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It gives a solid overview of the history of women's soccer (particularly in the west) and has a fairly diverse group of players and coaches represented. I did find that some of the profiles were much more shallow than others, and I also wished that it had ended with some sort of conclusion instead of just ending on a player profile. There also definitely needs to be some editing done, but hopefully that will happen between the ARC and the final published copy. In general, I would absolutely recommend this to any soccer fan.