Tell me about your Publication, Soccernomics, by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper.
I like this book as it is breezily written and the authors clearly display a good mastery of the subject. The book discusses’soccer’, which is the shortened Oxbridge expression for establishment soccer emanating from the 1860s. In contrast to the frequent view in Britain and Europe this term comprises prima facie proof of yet another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the expression isn’t an American invention at all but British slang.
Soccernomics is the most insightful book about the globalisation of the game and its current condition. Simon Kuper writes for The Financial Times and is a really accomplished journalist on a lot of subjects. What the novel picks up on is that England generally consistently fails in punishment shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany generally win in similar scenarios, apart from once in 1976 when Uli Hoeness — to his everlasting shame — sent his possibly game-deciding shot over the crossbar, hence making Germany the failure 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 the game, but I am completely aware that they are not trying to do so in a critical fashion but instead choose to utilize these wonderful tidbits to catch the reader’s attention to their larger project, which is to explain why and how football has become far and away the world’s main sport. The writers, in my opinion, rightly tie the match’s present worldwide status to its emergence in the latter half of the 19th century.
They also analyze how other countries that at the moment still seem peripheral to the game might well become central to its future. It is in this context that they offer a fine analysis of soccer’s standing in the United States. The authors are among a really few of European football experts who really understand the game’s distinct gestalt in the usa. 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 cultural and cultural manifestation of this match’s being in football-traditional areas like Europe and Latin America. The authors gained my respect and admiration for their thoughtful contrasting of American soccer to English or European football without allowing their normative orientation color their analyses.
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