If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know by now that I'm a "Soccer Dad" - I coach my son's team of 10 and 11 year olds - as well as a huge fan of trying to generate genuine insights into the beautiful game by systematically exploiting evidence and fact. Why do I tell you? Well, it affects what I read for fun. So here are two book recommendations that deal with each of these passions of mine.
Rumor has it that the book is being turned into a movie (the rights, at least, have been sold). And that's great; but don't wait for the movie. St.John tells a compelling story; it's also beautifully and competently written, and the book is a kind of testament to the power of human compassion and the love children all over the world have for the game. It's also an interesting story about how an American town copes with foreigners and immigrants in its midst - an especially novel development in the United States over the past decade, where levels of immigration were higher than they had been for almost a hundred years (today, about 13% of all people living in the U.S. legally were born in a foreign country).
First, I just finished Outcasts United, a book that emerged from a series of stories Warren St. John wrote for the New York Times (here's an example). Here's the book's description from the publisher's website:
"Outcasts United is the story of a refugee soccer team, a remarkable woman coach and a small southern town turned upside down by the process of refugee resettlement. In the 1990s, that town, Clarkston, Georgia, became a resettlement center for refugees from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to help keep Clarkston’s boys off the streets. These boys named themselves the Fugees -- short for refugees. Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees, their families and their charismatic coach as they struggle to build new lives in a fading town overwhelmed by change. Theirs is a story about resilience, the power of one person to make a difference and the daunting challenge of creating community in a place where people seem to have little in common."
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| Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times |
A minor side note: the book is also an interesting read for what it tells us about youth soccer in the U.S., with its predominant pay to play set-up (where kids have to pay - often quite a bit of money - to play on a soccer team). This tends to have the unfortunate side effect of giving the sport a middle- and upper-middle class demographic profile (with the exception of Latino immigration, of course).
The second book I'd recommend also has something to say about pay to play, but in a very different way. It's Pay As You Play: The True Price of Success in the Premier League Era by Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley, and Gary Fulcher. For anyone interested in money and success in soccer, this is a great, great read. It's part data report - the authors did an amazing job collecting data on transfer prices for individual players during the Premier League era. But the book doesn't just tell us how much individual players have cost; instead, the authors find a way to make transfer costs equivalent across years to account for inflation through their Transfer Price Index. This allows us to compare the costs of players transferred in the 1990s to players in more recent years. Aside from reporting on the amazing data they have collected, the authors systematically look into the relationship between transfer spending and team success. Guess what?
Here's a quick summary from Paul Tomkins' Sports Illustrated column on the book:
"This led to a look at every top-flight team since 1992, and how much they cost to assemble in 2010 terms. The expenditure on the entire squad goes some way to predicting where it will finish, but the key factor was how much of a club's paid-for talent actually made it into the team (for whatever reason) over the course of a season. Big squads help a manager cope with injuries, but more often than not, the most expensive players tend to be the match-winners."
There's lots more in the book that's worth reading and knowing about; among the various nuggets is the (plausible) insight that coaching a top flight club with lots of expensive talent requires a very different set of skills from coaching a middling or bottom level club. But I don't want to give the entire story away - suffice it to say that it's truly soccer by the numbers!
"This led to a look at every top-flight team since 1992, and how much they cost to assemble in 2010 terms. The expenditure on the entire squad goes some way to predicting where it will finish, but the key factor was how much of a club's paid-for talent actually made it into the team (for whatever reason) over the course of a season. Big squads help a manager cope with injuries, but more often than not, the most expensive players tend to be the match-winners."There's lots more in the book that's worth reading and knowing about; among the various nuggets is the (plausible) insight that coaching a top flight club with lots of expensive talent requires a very different set of skills from coaching a middling or bottom level club. But I don't want to give the entire story away - suffice it to say that it's truly soccer by the numbers!
If you want to know more, there's also a nice review of the book by Zach Slaton of the A Beautiful Numbers Game blog, as we as various additional analyses of the data that you can read on the Transfer Price Index blogs as well as Zach's own blog.
Happy reading!
Happy reading!
