My latest book has just been released and it’s dedicated to football. It’s not a sports psychology manual, but rather a story told through four themes: training, champions, coaches, and the number 10 – the magical jersey of football.
It’s a book designed not only for football professionals but for all football enthusiasts, offering insights into why the coach is called “mister” or “manager” and how the myth of the number 10 was born, starting with Pelé. It also presents the psychological profiles of some great coaches to understand how different personalities can still produce top-level professionals. And it explores who the first professional footballers were and those who revolutionized the game – from Cruyff to many other football innovators.
From Maurizio Crosetti’s introduction: “Alberto Cei has been a sports psychologist his whole life – a life certainly well spent. His latest work focuses on football, training, motivation, and concentration. These are sacred words, unfortunately somewhat forgotten today, as the football vocabulary seems increasingly filled with terms like ‘inverted full-backs’, ‘building from the back’, and ‘wing-backs’…
This book, on the other hand, starts from scratch – it’s an ABC of core ideas. Because it’s easy to talk about training: but who trains the trainers? Who teaches the teachers?
Team spirit, the true meaning of being a team, and constant improvement as real objectives: these are the matches that must be won. And you don’t get there by just lining up a series of drills – that’s what machines do, not people. On the surface, Alberto Cei has written an accessible essay on psychology applied to football. In reality, it’s a treatise on education, learning, and the harmonious development of the human being. Motivation and concentration therefore become two of the most important words in this book – and in the life, not just the sporting life, that it portrays.”
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