Inform me about your Publication by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski.
I like this novel as it’s breezily written and the authors clearly exhibit a good mastery of the subject. The book discusses’football’, which of course is the shortened Oxbridge term for association football emanating from the 1860s. In contrast to the common view in Britain and Europe that this expression comprises prima facie proof of yet another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the term isn’t an American invention at all but British slang.
Soccernomics is really the most insightful book about the globalisation of the game and its existing condition. Simon Kuper is a really accomplished journalist on a lot of subjects, such as sports and writes for The Financial Times. What the novel picks up on is that England generally always fails in punishment shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany generally win in similar scenarios, besides once in 1976 when Uli Hoeness — to his everlasting shame — sent his possibly game-deciding shot over the crossbar, hence making Germany the loser to Czechoslovakia in the European Nations’ Championship final in Yugoslavia.
I’m less impressed with the writers’ trying to describe this — and similar — oddities of this match, but I am fully aware that they are not trying to do so in a critical fashion but rather decide to utilize these wonderful tidbits to catch the reader’s focus for their bigger project, which will be to explain why and how soccer has become far and away the world’s main game. The writers, in my view, rightly tie the match’s present global status to its emergence at the latter half of the 19th century.
They also analyze how other countries that at the moment still seem peripheral to the match could very well become central to its potential. It is that they offer you a nice analysis of the status in the USA of soccer. The writers are among a really few of European soccer experts who really understand the game’s different gestalt in the usa. Furthermore, they genuinely take part in American soccer on its own terms, which they don’t deride as yet another American abomination or a deformation of a European cultural treasure, but love fully as a different social construct and cultural expression of this game’s being in football-traditional places like Europe and Latin America. The writers gained my respect and respect for their thoughtful contrasting of American football to English or European football without allowing their normative orientation color their investigations.
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