Inform me about your first Publication, Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski.
I enjoy this book because it’s breezily written and the authors clearly display a solid mastery of their subject. The publication discusses’soccer’, which is that the shortened Oxbridge term for establishment soccer emanating from the 1860s. Contrary to the common view in Britain and Europe this expression comprises prima facie proof of yet another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the expression is not an American invention at all but British slang.
Soccernomics is the very insightful book about the globalisation of the game and its current state. Simon Kuper writes for The Financial Times and is a really accomplished journalist on a lot of subjects, such as sports. What the book picks up on is that England generally always fails in punishment shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany normally triumph in similar scenarios, besides once in 1976 when Uli Hoeness — into his everlasting shame — delivered his potentially 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 authors’ attempting to describe this — and similar — oddities of this game, but I am completely aware that they’re not trying to do this in a serious fashion but rather decide to utilize these terrific tidbits to grab the reader’s focus to their larger project, which will be to describe why and how football has become far and away the world’s most important game. The writers, in my view, rightly tie the game’s present worldwide status to its emergence at the latter half of the 19th century.
They also examine how other countries that at the moment still seem peripheral to the match might well become central to its future. It is that they offer you a nice analysis of the standing in the USA of soccer. The authors are among a really small number of European soccer experts who really understand the game’s different gestalt in America. Moreover, they genuinely engage in American soccer on its own terms, which they don’t deride as yet another American abomination and/or a deformation of a European cultural treasure, but love fully as a various 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 considerate contrasting of American football to English or European soccer without allowing their normative orientation color their investigations.
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