Tell me about your first Publication, Soccernomics, by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper.
I enjoy this book as it’s breezily written and the writers clearly exhibit a good mastery of their subject. The book discusses’football’, which naturally is the shortened Oxbridge term for establishment soccer emanating from the 1860s. In contrast to the frequent view in Britain and Europe this expression comprises prima facie evidence of another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the term is not an American invention whatsoever but British slang.
Soccernomics is the very insightful book about the globalisation of the sport and its existing state. Simon Kuper is a very accomplished journalist on a lot of subjects and writes for The Financial Times. What the novel picks up on is that England generally consistently fails in punishment shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany normally win in similar scenarios, apart from in 1976 when Uli Hoeness — into his everlasting shame — delivered his potentially game-deciding shot over the crossbar, thus making Germany the loser to Czechoslovakia from the European Nations’ Championship final in Yugoslavia.
I am less impressed with the authors’ trying to explain this — and similar — oddities of this match, but I am completely aware that they are not trying to do so in a critical fashion but rather choose to use these terrific tidbits to catch the reader’s attention to their larger project, which will be to explain why and how soccer has become far and away the world’s main game. The authors, in my opinion, rightly tie the match’s current worldwide status to its development at the latter half of the 19th century.
They also examine how other states that in the moment still seem peripheral to the match could very well become central to its potential. It is that they offer you a fine analysis of the standing in the United States of soccer. The writers are among a very few of European soccer experts who truly understand the game’s distinct gestalt in the usa. Moreover, they genuinely engage in American football on its own terms, which they do not deride as yet another American abomination or a deformation of a European cultural treasure, but appreciate fully as a various social construct and cultural expression of the match’s being in football-traditional areas like Europe and Latin America. The authors gained my respect and admiration for their considerate contrasting of American football to English or European football without allowing their normative orientation color their investigations.
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